I'm fine, and we're basically okay here
The slow-motion flooding of New England has been rather surreal, partly because everyone's taking it in such a blase fashion. Which is partly because most of the historic houses here have always had basements flooded in "mud season" and partly because of the collective memory of The Great Hurricane of '38, which killed hundreds of people on the east coast, and left millions of dollars damage in '30s dollars, I don't know how much by current exchange rates, picking up buildings and dumping them in the road, or leaving nothing but a chimney standing. (NOAA archive photos here.)
Every adult who's lived here since they were a kid has seen pictures of the Merrimack when it jumped its banks and destroyed the bridge whose piers stand like stone Polaris conning towers a little down from the present crossing. You literally can't go a week without being reminded of what Nature can do to human affairs, just like that. And then, more recently, not just Katrina, but all over the country in the past years, we've all seen or heard about flooding elsewhere in the Midwest and Southeast, and so there's a sense of perspective, I think: it's bad, but it isn't that bad, really. It could be so much worse.
And, truthfully, it's one of the most exciting things to happen around here in a long, long time. This is a town where three guys patching a hole in the road downtown draws a crowd of onlookers. The last time something like this happened was back in, I guess maybe it was '96, I think, when some pipe-laying across the river resulted in the crane and dumptrucks on an artificial peninsula-turned-island falling over into the river. The public boat-dock was mobbed with sightseers. Not schadenfreud so much as beached-whale awe or volcano-watching.
It's just freaky to see the surface of the river where you never see it, and tree trunks entirely covered, and familiar rocks completely gone, and boat landings and steps to the waterfront totally inundated.
Yesterday, people from all walks of life and age groups were just ducking under the police tape along the riverfront with their umbrellas and taking pictures anyway. (One teenage guy suggested to his buddy that with the crowd, it might be a good place to pick up chicks.) There were some security guards posted at a few points, but people just went down to where they weren't and went around. (We're very law-abiding, for a given value of law-abiding.) There was almost a sort of morbid pride in it: look what a mess our river can make! Did you see that two-ton dumpster floating in the parking-lot of K-Mart's? That's got to be at least 5' above the dam there - and so on.
And since the highways and most roads are passable, and it isn't freezing, and the power and phones are still up in most places, in terms of disasters we've had worse in ice-storms. The dangers are not like the flash floods last year - Alstead was essentially taken out by a freak accident akin to a tornado, and while that could happen somewhere again of course, that a culvert get blocked by a big dead tree and form a temporary impromptu dam, all the regular dams are being monitored and none of the ones at risk are very large (there was a small one breached) and downstream areas are long evacuated.
The short-term danger is as always to those people who think because they've got a big truck they can ignore the road closures and drive on through.
From the pictures on the local TV station's website, you can see exactly why that rhymed couplet, Turn around/Don't Drown[ed] (that's how people say it here, with the extra D regardless of tense) is important. That's because of a "disposable road" attitude, towards everything except big highways - since they get beat up in the winter anyway, and the tar is recyclable, the feeling is that it's more efficient to just roll down 3" of asphault over a bed of sand and gravel, (usually where the old dirt cart-tracks were 200 years ago) patch it up until it can't be patched any more, and then scoop it up, melt it down, and start over again.
This means that most of the time you have a fairly poor driving experience, especially thru poorer districts, between the frost heaves and the patch seams and the edges falling off and the road crews all summer, but I don't know how much more it would cost to put in Roman-quality roads and how well they'd hold up under the intense freeze-thaw-freeze cycles we have here. (You'd have to get someone with experience from a similar climate system in a different country and knowledge of engineering to comment on that - how are roads handled in Canada, eg.?)
Generally it's adequate - it's just that it doesn't hold up well to unprecedented, or nearly-unprecedented, rainfalls that speed up erosion to the nth-degree.
The geology and geography we have is a stroke of luck, too. Although there's a lot of lowlying coastal plain which is getting badly drenched, much of the area is sand from when it was a prehistoric ocean, so water tends to soak away fairly quickly; and the hills here are so old and eroded that there isn't much danger of landslides, certainly not major ones, although there will be caved-in hillsides and big trees down as a result of accellerated erosion this time, I'm sure. And the very hilly and lumpy countryside, although it's hell to drive in in the winter, means that dry areas are all around and fairly close - though, again, if the side roads are flooded it may require rescue. But generally people have been able to get out under their own power, since it's been so gradual, unlike the Great Hurricane of '38. The big problem is going to be all the flooded basements - and businesses. There's a lot of damaged property and ruined goods now, and will be once the water's drained away.
Economically, this is very bad news. Maine's poor; NH's not as poor; MA isn't as a whole, but all of us have the problem of old infrastructure and never enough money to go around, and lots of small businesses run by families which will be hit hard, and the economy having tanked since 2000 as the underlying problem. The governor, Lynch, is on top of things, declaring an emergency early on and deploying the local Guard (only back from Iraq last summer) at once and working on relief plans for after the emergency is over, but he doesn't have all that much to work with - we'd just found out that we'd done a little better incomewise as a state than we expected, as we recover from our "CEO" governor's disasters, and then this.
If this is a one-off, then we'll struggle out of it, scarred but recoverable.
If this is a sign of things to come, climatewise, then it will be the fate of the Gulf Coast for the Northeast, only in slower motion.
Every adult who's lived here since they were a kid has seen pictures of the Merrimack when it jumped its banks and destroyed the bridge whose piers stand like stone Polaris conning towers a little down from the present crossing. You literally can't go a week without being reminded of what Nature can do to human affairs, just like that. And then, more recently, not just Katrina, but all over the country in the past years, we've all seen or heard about flooding elsewhere in the Midwest and Southeast, and so there's a sense of perspective, I think: it's bad, but it isn't that bad, really. It could be so much worse.
And, truthfully, it's one of the most exciting things to happen around here in a long, long time. This is a town where three guys patching a hole in the road downtown draws a crowd of onlookers. The last time something like this happened was back in, I guess maybe it was '96, I think, when some pipe-laying across the river resulted in the crane and dumptrucks on an artificial peninsula-turned-island falling over into the river. The public boat-dock was mobbed with sightseers. Not schadenfreud so much as beached-whale awe or volcano-watching.
It's just freaky to see the surface of the river where you never see it, and tree trunks entirely covered, and familiar rocks completely gone, and boat landings and steps to the waterfront totally inundated.
Yesterday, people from all walks of life and age groups were just ducking under the police tape along the riverfront with their umbrellas and taking pictures anyway. (One teenage guy suggested to his buddy that with the crowd, it might be a good place to pick up chicks.) There were some security guards posted at a few points, but people just went down to where they weren't and went around. (We're very law-abiding, for a given value of law-abiding.) There was almost a sort of morbid pride in it: look what a mess our river can make! Did you see that two-ton dumpster floating in the parking-lot of K-Mart's? That's got to be at least 5' above the dam there - and so on.
And since the highways and most roads are passable, and it isn't freezing, and the power and phones are still up in most places, in terms of disasters we've had worse in ice-storms. The dangers are not like the flash floods last year - Alstead was essentially taken out by a freak accident akin to a tornado, and while that could happen somewhere again of course, that a culvert get blocked by a big dead tree and form a temporary impromptu dam, all the regular dams are being monitored and none of the ones at risk are very large (there was a small one breached) and downstream areas are long evacuated.
The short-term danger is as always to those people who think because they've got a big truck they can ignore the road closures and drive on through.
From the pictures on the local TV station's website, you can see exactly why that rhymed couplet, Turn around/Don't Drown[ed] (that's how people say it here, with the extra D regardless of tense) is important. That's because of a "disposable road" attitude, towards everything except big highways - since they get beat up in the winter anyway, and the tar is recyclable, the feeling is that it's more efficient to just roll down 3" of asphault over a bed of sand and gravel, (usually where the old dirt cart-tracks were 200 years ago) patch it up until it can't be patched any more, and then scoop it up, melt it down, and start over again.
This means that most of the time you have a fairly poor driving experience, especially thru poorer districts, between the frost heaves and the patch seams and the edges falling off and the road crews all summer, but I don't know how much more it would cost to put in Roman-quality roads and how well they'd hold up under the intense freeze-thaw-freeze cycles we have here. (You'd have to get someone with experience from a similar climate system in a different country and knowledge of engineering to comment on that - how are roads handled in Canada, eg.?)
Generally it's adequate - it's just that it doesn't hold up well to unprecedented, or nearly-unprecedented, rainfalls that speed up erosion to the nth-degree.
The geology and geography we have is a stroke of luck, too. Although there's a lot of lowlying coastal plain which is getting badly drenched, much of the area is sand from when it was a prehistoric ocean, so water tends to soak away fairly quickly; and the hills here are so old and eroded that there isn't much danger of landslides, certainly not major ones, although there will be caved-in hillsides and big trees down as a result of accellerated erosion this time, I'm sure. And the very hilly and lumpy countryside, although it's hell to drive in in the winter, means that dry areas are all around and fairly close - though, again, if the side roads are flooded it may require rescue. But generally people have been able to get out under their own power, since it's been so gradual, unlike the Great Hurricane of '38. The big problem is going to be all the flooded basements - and businesses. There's a lot of damaged property and ruined goods now, and will be once the water's drained away.
Economically, this is very bad news. Maine's poor; NH's not as poor; MA isn't as a whole, but all of us have the problem of old infrastructure and never enough money to go around, and lots of small businesses run by families which will be hit hard, and the economy having tanked since 2000 as the underlying problem. The governor, Lynch, is on top of things, declaring an emergency early on and deploying the local Guard (only back from Iraq last summer) at once and working on relief plans for after the emergency is over, but he doesn't have all that much to work with - we'd just found out that we'd done a little better incomewise as a state than we expected, as we recover from our "CEO" governor's disasters, and then this.
If this is a one-off, then we'll struggle out of it, scarred but recoverable.
If this is a sign of things to come, climatewise, then it will be the fate of the Gulf Coast for the Northeast, only in slower motion.