Green Group discussion

With this topic I hope to create a general discussion of and analysis of each major flood event.
We are told that a pluvial event (rain) is the worst in 150 years or 500 years - why?
With tragic deaths related to mudslides, rain is often implicated.
Snowmelt can also be an issue, and breaking of ice dams.
Flooding can occur from a tsunami or a sea level rise during a storm.
Please post here as such news events arise and we can try to analyse whether climate change is a contributing factor to each event. Please include links to news coverage if you can.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/envir...

Donegal in northwest Ireland has just experienced severe thunderstorms which dumped two thirds of a month's rain on the area in one night. Donegal and nearby large town/small city Derry are no strangers to rain, sited where the Atlantic meets the North Sea. But the infrastructure was relatively basic, since this is a mountainous, rural area.
A factor in the inability of the land to hold water and reduce flooding may be the nature of the land use. Donegal has a good proportion of forest cover but these are spruce forests, fast growing non-natives. Conifers produce thin acidic soils and do not allow ground cover and fringe shrubs to grow. Good foresters recommend planting at least ten percent broadleaves to improve the soil.
Sheep are famously stocked in the county. But headage payments to farmers from the EU mean overstocking, and sheep nibble grass down to the ground, compacting the soil with their small hard hooves.
The cleanup is under way, but many homes, roads and bridges have been destroyed. Householders, the local authority, the state and insurance firms will be paying. A poultry farm was flooded with all the penned chickens killed.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/envir...

https://www.rte.ie/news/2017/0824/899...
Drone footage can be very useful to give the scale and extent of flooding. And with a tiny fraction of the carbon burned by a helicopter, of course.
http://www.independent.ie/videos/iris...

Estepona in Spain experienced the worst floods in 30 years, in December 2016. My husband and I had stayed there and at the time were staying in a different Spanish city, not affected.
http://www.theolivepress.es/spain-new...

Sadly someone was killed by being trapped in a building.
A greyhound rescue centre was cleared of dogs by volunteers. Marbella and other coastal cities affected, are popular tourist resorts.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...
The previous summer I note that Spain had experienced severe forest fires north of Estepona. While we were staying in Denia, a more easterly town near Cape Vincente, I was watching the rain and how it fell on the nearby mountains that surrounded Denia and got absorbed by the forest cover and shrubs. The town did not suffer in any way. If the mountains had been burnt bare, the water would just have rushed down slope to the town, carrying a great deal of mud.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-...

http://globalnews.ca/news/2882802/por...
Therefore I consider it possible that the forest fires contributed to the flooding some months later. Although some of the fires are considered arson, if the forests were not extremely dry they would not have burned with such speed and ferocity.

Sierra Leone has just experienced severe flooding and mudslides, wiping a village off a mountain and killing an estimated 450 - 1000 people.
http://globalnews.ca/news/3699499/sie...

Tragically, poorer people are the ones who are obliged to live in unstable and risky locations. The growth of the population means that all the safe places to build are taken.
Three days of heavy rain are blamed for the disaster.
http://reliefweb.int/disaster/ms-2017...

On the opposite side of the Atlantic we see Hurricane / Tropical storm Harvey. This has hit Heuston and continues to dump rain on Texas as I write. It has been called a once in 500 years event. Quite soon after Hurricane Mitch just near-missed Galveston. And don't forget Storm Sandy. And Hurricane Katrina.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvey-s...

We're told that the ground was already saturated and rivers full when the storm hit.
Over 1000 people have already had to be rescued, despite large scale evacuation. An evacuation centre had to be closed due to flooding. Two people are known to have died. Oil refineries and oil platforms have had to be closed. As a result, the price of gasoline has risen, and permission has been given for poorer grade gasoline to be sold. This could perhaps be used as an excuse to dump poor grade fuel on the market.
https://www.rte.ie/news/us/2017/0827/...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...

Here's a meteorological analysis of why Harvey is so devastating.
https://gizmodo.com/why-tropical-stor...

Scientific American:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...

NASA:

https://pmm.nasa.gov/resources/faq/ho...

After Harvey, I'm hoping more Americans will start asking themselves why we seem to have a "500-year weather event" every other year. The warning signs of climate change and its impact are becoming harder and harder to ignore...

I don't believe people world wide have any real idea of what kind of changes we are in for in the immediate future. Anyone washed out is rebuilding the old locations.

The Houston officials know there is no practical way to evacuate the city. The roadways are designed to divert the storm run off out of the city. That systems doesn't work very well when it doesn't stop raining.

I hope they have better management of the places where thousands of flood refugees are being temporarily housed compared to what people displaced by Katrina experienced.

There is no reason why authorities should fail to maintain the sanitation facilities in Houston emergency shelters, having seen what happened in New Orleans during Katrina.

I wonder how people will get their medications replenished if they lost them during their emergency evacuations from flooded areas.

The fact that the national weather service has added two new colors to their rain total maps seems to indicate they have no idea how climate change is impacting the weather.

"While the old scale used 13 colors from light green to dark purple to depict precipitation from 0.1 inch to greater than 15 inches, the new one resets that dark purple color to denote 15-20 inches of rain — and tacks on two more lighter shades of purple to denote 20-30 inches and greater than 30 inches."

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-wa...

What Happened to the Two Reservoirs That Were Supposed to Protect Downtown Houston?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2...

This is from the business section of The Guardian, looking at US building permission standards in potential flood zones. And whether the state should pay to reinstate such works.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/...

I say, live up a hill....
In Ireland we've had a decade or two of exposing past corruption, when builders sat on County Councils or paid councillors with cash. Homes and shopping centres were built on floodplains; apartments built on riverbanks which flooded every time the upstream reservoir had to open its gates; and an estate was built in an area whose Irish name translates as Big Marsh. All did not go well.

In this Guardian article, about infrastructure, I note that Heuston had cut down thousands of trees to protect power lines since Hurricane Ike in 2008. However, it occurs to me that trees drink up and store rainfall, and we're told that the land was saturated in this instance. Maybe judicious extra tree planting would have been in order?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
Michael Mann, professor of atmosphere science, explains why climate change has made Harvey more intense and allowed it to carry more rain.

That was very interesting about the reservoirs and urban sprawl.

I read the other day that a "five hundred year" weather event actually means the odds are 500 to 1. The average person (like me) thinks of it as an event that occurs only once in 500 years, and that is the wrong way to explain it. Now the odds of such events are decreasing from 500 to 1 to a much lower first number.

You can forget about the odds, the storms are simply getting bigger, it's not the same rules anymore. We have storms everyday. What was safe yesterday doesn't have to be safe today.

If you can see it, you can feel it. The overall warmer surface temperature means that there is more energy on the surface, which can only translate into bigger storms.

Harvey has added a new layer to the formula by sucking up surface water that has just fallen as rainwater, putting the water back into the clouds and then it comes down as rain all over again.

Usually a hurricane comes ashore, smashes the first point of impact, steadily weakens, then heads inland where it falls apart. This storm is recycling energy and water, and has now gone back out over deep warm water. Unless the situation drastically changes the only way this can turn out good is for the storm to keep going east and out into the Atlantic. The odds of that happening are probably one in a thousand.

The higher elevations are always taken first, it's just common sense. Once the higher areas are taken the only place left for development are the lower areas. Usually poor people settle there first, then as time goes on, the development continues and the money moves in and it looks just like the developments at the higher elevations. As people continue to move in, unless they check the elevation and look at a topographical map [unbiased, not generated by politics], people will pick locations that they like because of what is there, or because they can afford it.

People will do what they want to do or are forced to do.
Landslides happen to the rich and the poor, simply because of the location they are living in. One has no choice, the other deliberately picks that spot. Many cities have rivers running through them. When it floods out, everyone rebuilds right up to the waters edge again because otherwise it is considered to be a waste of valuable space. The people assigning values to everything have their priorities upside down. But they can't be blamed for using money as a guiding light because everyone believes in money like it was some kind of a religion. We're stuck with it.

It is not known how the flooding is going to progress because it has never been like this before. Some areas may remain flooded until October.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/08/29/...

With rising oceans, we will find many more areas permanently under water.

Jimmy wrote: "I read the other day that a "five hundred year" weather event actually means the odds are 500 to 1. The average person (like me) thinks of it as an event that occurs only once in 500 years, and tha..."

Yes this is true, I learned a lot about the probability of flooding in my hydrology and soils class.

A great issue with flooding, in the south especially, is the degradation and destruction of wetlands and deforestation. If we continue to create humanized landscapes with impervious surfaces we can't expect flooding events like these to stop. There is simply nowhere for the water to go anymore since there are less trees, vegetation and porous soils to lessen the impact. Another issue is the alteration of the natural floodplain in cities like Houston and New Orleans. This is a really interesting article going into some extra explanation if anyone is interested.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-do...

Excellent article. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Clare wrote: "https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
Michael Mann, professor of atmosphere science, explains why climate change has made Harvey more int..."

Eden wrote: "Jimmy wrote: "I read the other day that a "five hundred year" weather event actually means the odds are 500 to 1. The average person (like me) thinks of it as an event that occurs only once in 500 ..."

Thanks for that article, Eden. I learned a lot.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/envir...

Returning to Europe, where records are lengthy, this looks at new studies relating to flooding. Timing of floods is changing depending on whether it is East Europe (snow melt) or West Europe (warmer seas and shifting jetstream) or Southern Europe (warmer Mediterranean).
There is also depth of flooding, intensity of rain versus rain over a long period, and differing uses for water such as dams and irrigation.
Soil moisture intensity affects agriculture and the ability to cope with floodwaters.

Thanks, Eden. I notice the article was written in May.
We don't associate Heuston with swamps and saltgrass, so it will be interesting to see how these temper the storm in Louisiana.

Monsoon flooding in India, Nepal and Bangladesh.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wor...
Monsoons occur here each year of course when warm air from the southwestern sea hits the Himalayas and drops its moisture. But officials say the rain is more intense and flooding worse this year.
The clip at the start shows Mumbai in India going about its business, if wet, and starting to evacuate. But the pictures from Assam give a better idea of the poverty experienced by people who lose everything every year.
Bangladesh is a river delta, so flat, and fertile so very heavily over populated. As infrastructure is not well developed we see that this combination inevitably causes many deaths during floods.
1200 people are thought to have died in the three countries.
India has been building a wall to stop Bangladeshis coming in to India as climate refugees.

Development in Houston and how it helped with flooding:

http://www.slate.com/articles/busines...

Ecowatch:

https://www.ecowatch.com/hurricane-ha...

This is one of those watershed moments, pardon the pun, where we have to fight to wake people up about climate change.

This is not the only company that will have problems with the aftermath of Harvey.

As chemicals heat up in a Crosby, Texas, manufacturing plant, a large-scale fire or explosion looks increasingly likely.

https://www.texastribune.org/2017/08/...

Robert wrote: "As chemicals heat up in a Crosby, Texas, manufacturing plant, a large-scale fire or explosion looks increasingly likely."

More than likely now, unfortunately:

Crosby, Texas, Chemical Plant Explodes Twice, Arkema Group Says

Both Canada and Mexico have offered assistance to the U.S. in dealing with Harvey.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ameri...

This is where having an inclusive consciousness helps. Good neighbours lend a hand in times of need. So, when it comes to policies, agreements and practices between friendly countries, its important to consider how interdependent we all are.

All three countries are in the midst of renegotiating NAFTA. Let's keep this top of mind and think win-win-win.

Small sample of Texas floodwater contains concerning levels of E. coli bacteria, expert says

The flood waters have redistributed the bacteria populations in the Houston area so that they are now more evenly spread out than before the flood. This makes them stronger as they will be able to compare genes and update each other to have the latest genetic configurations needed to survive in the Houston area.

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/small-sampl...

While Houston is rapidly drying out in some locations, and is experiencing warm weather compared to the cold weather after Sandy hit the East Coast, another powerful hurricane, Irma, is approaching the Caribbean area. Where it will go, no one knows, the models are coming up with widely different results. One model predicts it could do U turn and head back out into the Atlantic.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/31/us/hurr...

Mumbai monsoon flooding worst in years. Flooding displacing millions, their routines completely disrupted, across the Himalayan foothills in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. 18,000 schools destroyed so far.

"Unabated construction on flood plains and coastal areas, as well as storm-water drains and waterways clogged by plastic garbage, have made the city increasingly vulnerable to storms."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...

Unbelievably tragic. At the same time African climate refugees are fleeing drought. We were warned that climate change would start by accentuating whatever weather a region already got. Here it is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/c...
This has graphics of the Texas flooding to help us realise just how much water is dumped in one go.
From their next article:
Hubbard agrees that the climate is changing and precipitation is becoming more intense in some areas, but he said it would be complicated to adapt the flood return frequencies. “The challenge is trying to separate when you have these 500-year events happening all the time, what part is a changing climate, what part is changes in urbanization and agriculture and what part is the lack of understanding of what’s happened in the past,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/c...

The water that came down was equal to how much water New York City would use in 69 years. And it all goes to waste.

If the architectural industry wants to stay relevant it will have to be able to tell people what is possible to do and what isn't going to work. They will also have to build in back up power systems where they can't be compromised, as well as make use of designs that will accommodate alternative power sources.

It is remarkable that people are still putting back up power units on the ground floor. They are absolutely useless in a flood. The feeling is that if you are not located in a flood plain on a map, then the ground you are on can't possibly flood. While the pen might be mightier than the sword, it isn't stronger than the reality of the natural world. To compound the problem the flood plains are not set in stone and do move around.

Trump wants the federal recovery money to only provide for replacement structures to be built where they were washed away. He says Obama's idea of not rebuilding them in a place where they will get washed away again does not take the economy into account.

Apparently the replacement funds don't cover the cost of relocating the facility and the value of the original property isn't what it used to be. If you rebuild in the same place, elevating the structure could prove to be quite expensive.

There is still no agreement on whether to abandon construction in flood plains, to build on elevated foundations, or just rebuild and hope it doesn't flood again. In some areas destroyed by Sandy, if the building was considered to be excessively damaged it had to be rebuilt on stilts or not at all. If the building was not severely damaged, it could be left on the ground the way it was, without being elevated. On the same street some houses are on stilts while others are still on the ground.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/nyr...

If the houses weren't wrecked in Houston most people will throw everything away and move back in again. The warm climate and lack of funds probably helps make this decision easy.

The next hurricane might answer the question of how do we proceed from here, or it might just continue to be business as usual, which means until it gets too expensive to do what we want, we will continue to do whatever we want to do.

Apparently the insurance industry has invested heavily in the petroleum and natural gas industry and other industries long on using the natural environment as a source of raw materials and short on restoring it back to its natural state. By providing less coverage for natural disaster victims, they are inadvertently helping to restore developed land back to it's natural state. However, patch work layouts of property left to go back to it's natural state does not recreate the original natural habitat that was originally there. You might get the tress and bushes, but you definitely don't get the forest. It's looks nice but it's mostly empty.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/irma...

Why Houston Will Never Be Able to Stop Flooding for Good

http://time.com/4922201/houston-flood...

Patchwork trees and shrubs at least provide bird habitat.

EPA attacks news agency, reporter for coverage of flooded Texas hazardous waste sites

"EPA characterized the Associated Press’ decision to publish an article suggesting the agency was not being responsive to the effects of Harvey on Superfund sites as irresponsible, arguing it “creates panic and politicizes the hard work of first responders.”"

https://thinkprogress.org/epa-attacks...

Meanwhile, Houston authorities are saying something quite different:

"Porfirio Villarreal, a spokesman for the Houston Health Department, said the hazards of the water enveloping the city were self-evident.

“There’s no need to test it,” he said. “It’s contaminated. There’s millions of contaminants.”

He said health officials were urging people to stay out of the water if they could, although it is already too late for tens of thousands.

“We’re telling people to avoid the floodwater as much as possible. Don’t let your children play in it. And if you do touch it, wash it off,” Mr. Villarreal said. “Remember, this is going to go on for weeks.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/us...

Scary. Thanks, Robert.

Irma has the problem of potentially being able to hold the new record for doing too many things first. None of the new models seem to be showing it staying in the Atlantic and never hitting land.

It could show us the max wind speed a hurricane can have, or if there even is a maximum wind speed as is currently believed. It could be the first time two major storms have struck the US in the same season in our recorded history. It could do the most monetary damage or be the longest running hurricane this season. It could do a lot of things, none of them good.

It could be down to the luck of the draw that the weather front that is expected to steer it northward comes through earlier than expected and pushes it away from land. Or another first where it ignores the front and pushes over it and maybe even gets strength from the front.

One thing to note, we are not seeing storms that are once in a life time events, nor are they biblical events, it's just the new weather that no one understands.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/05/us/hurr...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/c...

Brian wrote: "After Harvey, I'm hoping more Americans will start asking themselves why we seem to have a "500-year weather event" every other year. The warning signs of climate change and its impact are becoming..."

Finished novel 3 and now am back to sitting on my as s typing dribble to make myself feel better...and possibly make someone else feel worse. Anyway, was appalled by MSNBC yesterday--Chuck Todd's show asking his panel what the Democrat's agenda should be in the future. NO ONE mentioned climate change. Not one word about climate change. Even in the 'wake' of Harvey. And that my friends is the problem.

Virginia wrote: "Finished novel 3 and now am back to sitting on my as s typing dribble to make myself feel better...and possibly make someone else feel worse."

Ha, I can relate! Been blogging on this subject myself:

Storm Surge

http://jalopnik.com/heres-what-happen...

Recycling the flood-damaged cars. Clearly this is a major offshoot of the motor industry. Glad to see they are not just crushed.
A journalist on Sky News said she had been to Houston and there is a highway with eleven lanes on either side. She didn't believe the denizens would change their car usage patterns.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

Article and clip from NASA showing the fingerprints of sea level rise around the world.
Where you see the Arctic at the end with receding levels, I'm thinking this is because with less ice, the north of the world is lifting out of the depression it had sunk into the Earth's crust. We are not told.

Btw, here's a great way to exercise your creative eco-fiction voice for a worthy cause: Hurricane Harvey relief. Check it out, Green Group authors and poets!

Make Your Writing Count!

Speaking of depressing the Earth's crust, Harvey dropped so much water that it pushed the land down two centimetres.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...

Leading to some speculation that this caused the seismic shift which generated the Mexican earthquake on the other side of the continent. If you think about a tilting board you can see how it might work.
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innov...
That link is to the earthquake registering on seismometers. I have not found a reliable link yet to the flooding cause/ effect. Hurricanes themselves may trigger seismometers but would not cause the other side of a continent to tilt; however the weight of the rain is a different story.

At least six dead after Italy hit by heavy rainfall and flooding

One way to look at the intense rainstorms is that they are not once in a life time, or once every 500 years, but simply everyday storms that are bigger than they used to be because warmer air carries more water. When extra heat and water is added to the regular production of storms, they will be bigger.

When the climate changes in fundamental ways, the weather will change in fundamental ways. With more people and more flat non porous surfaces in areas prone to flooding, the results will not be good.

The averaged ground and water surface temperatures are warmer by a few degrees than they used to be. The global winds are changing. The amount of fresh water available for storm production is greater than it used to be. For years, we only looked at the surface area of the polar ice and thought that was a suitable method for determining the amount of ice being created and lost each year. That turned out to be like judging a book by its cover. The global ice melting is making more fresh water available for the production of storms than there used to be.

http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/10/at-leas...

A flood of garbage. Will any of it be recycled? The flood of thrown out items is being carted to landfills as fast as the trucks can carry it.

"Larger companies are reopening closed Texas facilities. “Our landfills are doubling in volume,” said Marcel Darby, an operations director for Waste Management, which is running its landfills seven days a week."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-st...

Vietnam is planting more mangrove trees and mangrove palms to stave off sea level rise flooding.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170...

Robert wrote: "A flood of garbage. Will any of it be recycled? The flood of thrown out items is being carted to landfills as fast as the trucks can carry it.

"Larger companies are reopening closed Texas faciliti..."

I am sure a lot of this could be recycled or safely burnt in factories burning waste. This would provide jobs sorting and hauling. But in Texas, and with so much all at once, it's unlikely to happen.

Robert wrote: "At least six dead after Italy hit by heavy rainfall and flooding

One way to look at the intense rainstorms is that they are not once in a life time, or once every 500 years, but simply everyday st..."

Europe has had intense heatwaves a couple of summers running. The city of Rome had 40 - 45 degree C heat during August. All of this makes the ground rock hard and trees are not actively growing. The rain falls and runs off, causing flooding.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-euro...

Wildfires in Italy are destroying the trees that would act as a sponge and barrier to rains.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-euro...

The weakened hurricane that hit Florida is being interpreted as a sign of things to come. Rebuilding in the same areas and continuing to build large developments on the shore lands is still progressing.

The way buildings are designed might need some changing. The installation of robust back up power sources that can work for days instead of hours seem to be needed for growth industry facilities designed for the elderly, such as nursing homes and assisted living centers.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-cana...

About 40 percent of gas stations remained closed in Florida, and the number was as high as 65 percent in some places, says Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst at the crowdsourcing website Gasbuddy.com.

http://www.npr.org/2017/09/12/5504640...

New York has already put in place a program to make sure coastal gas stations will have power in the event of super storms knocking out power for several days.

Stations that don't have their own generators have installed transfer power boxes that will allow them to instantly hook up to a generator that the state will supply from storage depots set aside for this purpose.

https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/About/News...

'Everybody is baffled' by Trump rescinding flood-protection rules...
“As far as the rules go, that FEMA and HUD were working on, they’re kind of in limbo now. Chances are they’re not going to move forward because the executive order was revoked,” Scata said.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/everybody-...