(On the other hand, the chat window off the other feed is interesting to read.)

Angola Prison was evacuated last week, thank gods.

Love, C.

I think these Landsat satellite images are even more dramatic.

(It's not as though we don't have the spots to put it, either - there's lots of wetlands and salt lakes which could cope nicely with having themselves topped up once the dams are full. Then we can start in on figuring out how to top up the aquifers. All these floods are just a waste!)

Conversation with my Louisiana peeps has opined that if Texas wants water they know where it is and are welcome to come get it.

(Natural disasters don't trump interstate rivalries, at least not at this stage of the process.)

* by develop I mean "change to non-grass agriculture, industry or whatever")

This was written yesterday, before the Corps opened the Morganza Spillway, but updates are promised.

My mom lives in a market town -- where the people with money settled, and where all the surrounding farming families brought their crops to market. It is also on the highest available ground. All the farmland (mostly dairy, nowadays; historically some grain and veggies, before we started trucking food all over) is on the actual floodplain, and is generally very flat.

All the farmhouses are on little earth berms, their front doorsills usually between 2-6 feet higher than the surrounding area. Inside, most of the original houses have big eye-hooks in the ceiling -- so that when a flood threatens, residents can pile their couches, etc, onto a big rug, run ropes under it and up to the eye-bolts, cinch tight, and leave their furniture hugging their ten-foot ceilings (with all portables carried to the second floor) before they evacuate To Town to stay with friends for the duration.

A flood bad enough to evacuate half the farmhouses happens about every four years. A flood bad enough to evacuate ALL of them happens once a decade, or a little less often. A flood bad enough to very nearly flood the town happens about once every hundred years -- one did, a few years ago, and my mom went around taking photos documenting how very well the original settlers had taken frequent bad flooding *into account* in their development plan. USGS pegged that flood as one of the worst since statistics were being kept, and it stopped short about 5 feet from the "Welcome To Our Town" sign on the main road in -- the high ground was fine. Some of the farmhouses' ceilinged furniture was soaked, but their upper floors were for the most part ok.

In her neck of the woods, everyone listens to the radio in the spring for the 'flood stage' numbers. Everyone knows the 'magic number' for their house -- the number, when measured at the datum near the river, that means they're probably going to get wet.

It's a refreshingly different mindset than the very leveed Mississippi verge here in Illinois, or even (especially?) the suburbanites who live in houses on lots backing up to the Des Plaines and Fox Rivers and their tributaries, who in dry years adore the 'picturesque creek' at the end of their backyard, but in wet years scream and yell for Federal relief in the face of 'unprecedented,' 'catastropic' flooding.

I think this applies to pretty much all rivers.

Well, many of them are sensible. But pretty much all of them are no-nonsense.

(Why, yes, there are a number of stories in there. And I think they'll stay in there, if you know what I mean.)

#17
Ditto for my part of the world in Kansas. All of the original houses were built outside the normal range of flooding. The 100 and 500 year floods would get the lower lying ones though. Growing up, it was not unusual to have at least one flood a year on the small creek that ran by the house.

The 2nd, and 3rd generation urbanites who move in after the developers got done with the low lying farm land and/or marshes in the flood plains really have no clue about what nature can do.

Also, a lot of people really are ignorant about topography and geography and such things. Many people spend very little time around rivers and streams, and have very little feel for terrain in different sorts of weather. If you've lived most of your life in carefully-managed subdivisions, in mid-American suburbs, where the impact of weather events isn't very substantial (and children don't notice these things in the same ways an adult might), and have very little experience of the natural world without substantial mediation from technology, it's easy to be entirely without a clue in these matters. They don't much teach geography in the schools anymore, so a lot of people have no room in their head for these sorts of concepts to live, if they weren't put firmly in place by someone at a fairly early age.

I work in an office built on a floodplain, in a bend of the Cumberland River. I can walk (at a slow pace) to the levee in about ten minutes or so(no sidewalk most of the way). I am one of the few people in my office to check and see if we'd be affected if there was a failure of the Wolf Creek Dam. I had co-workers who couldn't understand why our office was closed for four days last May during the flood, when the levee that's just a short walk from here was leaking, and the anonymous creek down the block was flooded across the road.

Developers can sell these things because too many people have nothing at all that resembles a clue.

(Thurber wrote a story about this area called "The Day the Dam Broke.")

* Sort of the way I've "just always known" a lot about the care and feeding of horses even though I've never owned one, because I was horse-crazy as a kid and read extensively on the topic. And occasionally I forget, because I've had this stuff in my head forever, that not everybody does.

I live down in south Lousiana; been watching this thing the last few weeks. Army Corps of Engineers put out some very scary maps of "how deep it will flood if the spillways AREN'T opened and the levee fails"; I'm convinced those maps are the reason people hereabouts were demanding to know why they were so slow about opening the spillway, rather than protesting the opening as I half expected.

Maybe this time we won't have lawsuits from the oyster lease holders crying about their oyster beds being ruined by the freshwater diversion into Lake Ponchatrain. After Katrina, popular opinion around here is we'd rather you get fresh water in your oysters instead of us getting fresh water in our bedrooms--AGAIN.

It's hard for the poor people living in the spillway--one of the things about being poor is you can only afford to live in the undesirable places. If they were desirable places to live, they'd cost more. In the city, 'undesirable' usually means 'high-crime' or near heavy industry; in rural areas, it means 'no local employers' or 'wasteland' or 'swamp/floodplain'. I don't think they get flood insurance, either--you have to sign a waiver if you have property in the spillway.

At least it's not flooding as fast on the spillway as expected; the drought this spring dried things up so much that the dry ground is just absorbing a lot of the water.

As Berry describes, the great flood was not a single year phenomenon, any more than the dust bowl was.

It also tells us how the lower 9 in New Orleans believes every time that they are sacrificed even when the dynamite didn't go off, as it did not from the flooding post Katrina. But then, there's fast dynamite and slow dynamite, and we are all living with slow dynamite disasters now.

Love, C.