The flood in the news
I'm very amused to reactions to the news of the flood. Interesting things I've seen:
1 - God is punishing Fargo for supporting gays.
Dude, God must punish Fargo an awful lot. I know that we've had flooding for allowing wiccans in town, or trying to get a monument of the ten commandments moved.
This can only lead me to believe that, if this person speaks the truth, God has a temper problem. I recommend therapy.
2 - People ought to leave the plains. They're too flat. or some variant of Move to higher ground.
I live in one of the highest neighborhoods in Fargo. If they have to evacuate, they will be moving everyone to the highest area in town. Our area will be the second to last to evacuate. If the levees break at this point, there's still a pretty good chance our basement will be flooded.
As someone else has noted, the flatness in Fargo is less than the curvature of the Earth. There IS no higher ground until you go miles in either direction. And if we all leave, then people better start figuring out how to garden real quick.
And finally, no one alive has ever seen the water get this high before. There are houses in Fargo that are a century old that would have been destroyed had this type of flood level had been a regular occurance. (And up until the last 15 years, large floods like this weren't very common.)
3 - It's like Katrina with white people.
Not at all. We've known for months that we might have extensive flooding (although no one really expected it to go higher than '97 levels). There's been time to prepare, although it was looking close for a while. People here have been through floods before and know how to prepare. After '97, people spent a lot of time figuring out how to prepare and react to this events. (It's not like New Orleans had levees breaking on a regular basis.) We aren't trying to hold back the ocean, just a relatively slow-moving and mostly benign river, and the sort of effort made in Fargo would've been fairly useless in New Orleans.
The only real difference, IMO, is that the people in Fargo-Moorhead probably would have tried to dike up the levees in New Orleans during a hurricane because they're just that darn stubborn.
After seeing all of these, however, I did come across something pretty funny:
“WE’RE ALSO GETTING REPORTS THAT AIG, OF ALL COMPANIES, IS ISSUING DERIVATIVE CONTRACTS THAT INSURE THESE SANDBAGS … BUT NOT ANY OF THE HOMES THAT MAY GET WASHED AWAY.”
1 - God is punishing Fargo for supporting gays.
Dude, God must punish Fargo an awful lot. I know that we've had flooding for allowing wiccans in town, or trying to get a monument of the ten commandments moved.
This can only lead me to believe that, if this person speaks the truth, God has a temper problem. I recommend therapy.
2 - People ought to leave the plains. They're too flat. or some variant of Move to higher ground.
I live in one of the highest neighborhoods in Fargo. If they have to evacuate, they will be moving everyone to the highest area in town. Our area will be the second to last to evacuate. If the levees break at this point, there's still a pretty good chance our basement will be flooded.
As someone else has noted, the flatness in Fargo is less than the curvature of the Earth. There IS no higher ground until you go miles in either direction. And if we all leave, then people better start figuring out how to garden real quick.
And finally, no one alive has ever seen the water get this high before. There are houses in Fargo that are a century old that would have been destroyed had this type of flood level had been a regular occurance. (And up until the last 15 years, large floods like this weren't very common.)
3 - It's like Katrina with white people.
Not at all. We've known for months that we might have extensive flooding (although no one really expected it to go higher than '97 levels). There's been time to prepare, although it was looking close for a while. People here have been through floods before and know how to prepare. After '97, people spent a lot of time figuring out how to prepare and react to this events. (It's not like New Orleans had levees breaking on a regular basis.) We aren't trying to hold back the ocean, just a relatively slow-moving and mostly benign river, and the sort of effort made in Fargo would've been fairly useless in New Orleans.
The only real difference, IMO, is that the people in Fargo-Moorhead probably would have tried to dike up the levees in New Orleans during a hurricane because they're just that darn stubborn.
After seeing all of these, however, I did come across something pretty funny:
“WE’RE ALSO GETTING REPORTS THAT AIG, OF ALL COMPANIES, IS ISSUING DERIVATIVE CONTRACTS THAT INSURE THESE SANDBAGS … BUT NOT ANY OF THE HOMES THAT MAY GET WASHED AWAY.”