Remembering the Year of the Floods: What’s your tale?
This morning, NCPR kicks off a week-long look back at the defining element of the last twelve months: water.
Devastating spring rains last April carried us into what would turn out to be a series of interlocking disasters, from the massive landslide on Little Porter Mountain in Keene to the soaking of the Lake Champlain Coast to the flash-flood violence of Irene.
As we revisit some of the voices and some of the stories we aired over the last year, I’m curious to hear your first-person account.
What was your experience of the Year of the Flood? Did it affect you personally? Did it change your community, or your sense of your community?
How well did your local government do, helping you weather storm? And how well have you recovered?
Chime in below and tune in all during the week. As I listened back to all the first-person accounts, it sparked a lot of memories, some painful, others dramatic and full of courage.
Tags: environment, weather
My favorite is the ad hoc marker at a driveway between Jay and Ausable Forks (or east of there) which has marked in paint the April high water mark then the mark for Irene that is 6-7 feet higher then 200 yards down the road a house still standing but crushed by the late summer flooding. I think of the song “Hard Times.” It reminds me of flooding in Pennsylvania from Irene of Swatara Creek that was over 20 feet above flood stage. Awesome. I don’t forget the devastated towns in VT and the Catskills that were destroyed.
Here in Potsdam, the spring flooding was mild compared to that which happened to folks after Irene. However, it showed us where the waters might rise in that year of odd or extreme weather. As extreme weather events are expected to become more commonplace in our new climate-changed future, it might be wise to think about averting the next disaster by moving these few homes and buildings out of the flood plane. It would certainly be cheaper to move a dozen or so houses than to try and re-structure the river.
It might make sense to start keeping some water bodies at lower levels if we control them with dams. For example we are having a very dry spring and yet the water-level in some Adirondack lakes that I visited this past weekend are still very high. Open the floodgates.
The ultimate clock, the Astrological signs, has Aquarius (our current time) spilling her water jug.
Water, water, everywhere…..