Nature Bats Last

Law enforcement officers climb through debris
looking for survivors early Saturday in Rolling Fork MS
(Rogelio Solis/AP)

Max Olson Chasing

Straight out of an epic Hollywood disaster movie.

How Mississippi’s tornadoes unfolded overnight and why they were so deadly

At least 23 people are dead in Mississippi following a terrifying Friday night in which large, destructive tornadoes tore across the state.

The violent twisters formed amid a severe weather outbreak that unleashed damage from Louisiana to North Carolina. They were fueled by record-setting heat and energized by howling jet stream winds.

The twisters formed from the same destructive storm system that barged into California’s Bay Area on Tuesday and produced deadly flooding in both the Desert Southwest and the nation’s midsection.

The twisters’ terrible toll can be linked to their utter ferocity, the vulnerability of the region they struck and for sweeping through at night, when it was difficult to see them coming.

How the tornadoes were unleashed

The rotating thunderstorm or supercell that spawned the deadly tornadoes swept across the entirety of Mississippi and continued through northern Alabama — an exceptionally long path for a single storm. Supercells contain rotating updrafts fueled by warm, unstable air near the ground and are twisted by changing winds with altitude.

The National Weather Service in Jackson, Miss., first issued a tornado warning for the storm as it entered Mississippi at 7:40 p.m.

Just before 8 p.m., it cautioned “a large and extremely dangerous tornado was located 7 miles west of Rolling Fork.” By 8:03 p.m., the Weather Service said the storm was located near Rolling Fork. “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. TAKE COVER NOW!,” it warned. Rolling Fork was among one of several towns especially hard hit.

The wedge-shaped funnel was probably on the ground for the next 90 minutes covering 80 miles as it barreled across west-central Mississippi at high speeds. The Weather Service was compelled to declare multiple tornado emergencies, the most dire alert for twisters, as it carved a path through the towns of Anguilla, Louise, Midnight, Silver City, Tchula and Winona.

Along this path, tornado lofted debris 30,000 feet high, said Samuel Emmerson, a member of the radar research group at the University of Oklahoma, describing it on Twitter as an “extremely high-caliber” tornado.

Shortly after passing Winona, around 9:32 p.m., the tornado may have weakened or lifted for a time as the storm raced across northeast Mississippi.

However, it appeared to re-form and strengthen around 10:50 p.m. when the Weather Service office in Memphis declared yet another tornado emergency for the town of Amory and then the city of Smithville.

When radar displayed an unmistakable signature of debris immediately west of Armory, confirmation of the destructive twister, broadcast meteorologist Matt Laubhan for television station WTVA could not contain his emotion.

“Dear Jesus, please help them,” he pleaded.

The storm crossed into northwest Alabama shortly after 11 p.m. and continued producing tornadoes until it reached the northeast part of the state around 12:45 a.m.

The Weather Service received at least 10 reports of tornadoes in northern Alabama from this storm. Around Hartselle, which is about 30 miles southwest of Huntsville, the agency logged reports of damage to homes, people trapped and a tractor-trailer overturned.

Severe storm affected 7 southern states and it’s not over

The storm that swept across Mississippi and northern Alabama was one of many that raged through the South on Friday into early Saturday morning.

The Weather Service has logged more than 100 reports of severe weather from Louisiana to western North Carolina, including more than 80 instances of violent straight line winds that toppled trees and power lines and damaged homes. Tens of thousands lost power.

The Weather Service reported one person was injured near Nashville when a tree fell on a house.

On Saturday, the storm system will push off the East Coast but could still set off some strong thunderstorms in parts of the Southeast and Ohio Valley.

The risk of severe weather and tornadoes is much lower compared to Friday, however. The Storm Prediction Center has placed the zone from southern Mississippi to South Carolina as well as eastern Ohio, northern West Virginia and western Pennsylvania in a Level 1 out of 5 risk of severe thunderstorms; Friday’s risk in the Mid-South was a Level 4 out of 5.

As the storm front stalls across the South on Sunday, the risk of severe weather could increase again between Louisiana and Georgia, with damaging winds and a couple more tornadoes possible, the Storm Predicton Center said Saturday.

A deadly legacy

The larger storm system which spawned Friday’s tornadoes has a deadly legacy. When it slammed into California on Tuesday, at least five people were killed by trees toppled by winds up to 80 mph in the Bay Area. The same storm spawned the strongest tornado to hit the Los Angeles metro area since 1983.

As the storm exited California on its way toward the central states, it triggered severe flooding in central Arizona, where at least three people died after their vehicles were swept away by floodwaters, the Associated Press reported.

The storm unloaded more heavy rain that spurred flooding over an extensive swath of the central and eastern United States — stretching from eastern Oklahoma into northern West Virginia. The Associated Press reported a car was swept away by floodwaters in southwest Missouri, killing two passengers.

The Quake In Turkey

... and - Anticipating The GOP Fuckery.

It'll be interesting to see how the MAGA gang in Congress decide to deal with sending help to Turkey and Syria.

MAGA:

Why would we send money to help Syrians, when there are so many Americans that need help right here at home?

Normal People:

Yes, let's spend that money here to help homeless veterans and feed kids at school.

MAGA:

NO!!! That's socialism!!!

Or maybe they'll flip completely so they can rationalize helping their fellow Autocratic Assholes, Erdoğan and al-Assad.

What do we know about Monday’s earthquake?

The earthquake struck at 4:17 a.m. local time near the town of Nurdagi in Turkey’s Gaziantep province, causing destruction and death in Turkey and neighboring Syria. People felt shaking as far away as Cyprus and Lebanon.

Earthquakes are measured by their magnitude, which is set up as a logarithmic scale. That means that each whole number represents a tenfold increase in strength. While there’s technically no upper limit, the most powerful quake on record is a 9.5-magnitude one that struck Chile in May 1960. Based on this scale, a 7.8-magnitude quake is very powerful.

Dozens of destructive aftershocks, smaller earthquakes that occur in the same general area after the main temblor, have continued to shake the region. A 6.7-magnitude aftershock occurred 11 minutes later. And a 7.5-magnitude earthquake that struck after 1 p.m. local time may have been a “doublet” earthquake, one of similar magnitude that occurs close to the original spot.

Turkey sits in an earthquake hot spot. Three tectonic plates — the Arabian, Anatolian and African plates — meet in this region, and as they slide past and squeeze against each other, they build up friction and stress that gets released as earthquakes, according to Yaareb Altaweel, a seismologist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado.

The Arabian plate is plowing northward at a rate of about 11 millimeters (just under a half-inch) per year, said Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at University College London. Turkey, which sits on the Anatolian plate, is therefore being squeezed westward.

That movement means Turkey has two major faults where earthquakes originate: the 930-mile-long North Anatolian fault and the more than 300-mile-long East Anatolian fault. Many of Turkey’s largest quakes originate on the northern fault, and it has gained the most attention because of the potential for a major quake near the population center of Istanbul.

Why was this quake so deadly?

The grim death toll is a result of several factors: the sheer size of the quake; the fact that it struck relatively close to the surface; and its proximity to where people live. Monday’s quake originated just about 11 miles below the surface. That means the seismic waves did not have to travel far before they reached buildings and people on the surface, leading to more intense shaking.

But this one is thought to have struck along the East Anatolia fault zone — which has been flying a bit under the radar, with no earthquakes greater than magnitude 7 “at least since our seismological monitoring network has been in place — the 1900s,” Hicks said. The lack of recent large earthquakes in the last century along that fault, combined with the northward movement of the Arabian plate, suggest there was pent-up strain in the region, he said.

In this case, the quake happened at what’s known as a strike-slip fault, a fracture in the Earth’s crust where the rocks slide past each other horizontally when they break.

The aftershocks from this quake have also been large — and are expected to continue, Altaweel said.

“So far, we’ve got about 40 aftershocks,” Altaweel said. “What caught the attention of the media is the big ones,” but the aftershocks can also be destructive.

Would better building codes have helped?

The U.S. Geological Survey warned in its report about this event that “the population in this region resides in structures that are extremely vulnerable to earthquake shaking, though some resistant structures exist.”

The USGS highlighted buildings that use unreinforced brick masonry and low-rise concrete frames to be at greatest risk. These materials are too stiff to sway with the shaking and are more likely to buckle, leading to catastrophic collapses.

While better building codes can help, the shallow 7.8-magnitude earthquake caused very intense shaking in a region within Turkey that, unlike the north, had not routinely experienced such large temblors.

“In the southeastern part of Turkey, they hadn’t felt a strong earthquake in most people’s lifetimes,” Hicks said.

What are past examples of notable quakes in this region?

Monday’s event is thought to be the largest quake to occur anywhere in Turkey since 1939, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck in the northeastern part of the country. In March 1970, a destructive 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit western Turkey, killing more than 1,000 people and destroying more than 8,000 buildings.

And in August 1999, a devastating 7.4-magnitude earthquake shook northwestern Turkey, causing more than 17,000 deaths and displacing more than 250,000 people. It was followed by another 7.2 earthquake a few months later that killed more than 800 people. A 6.7-magnitude earthquake also struck eastern Turkey on Jan. 24, 2020.

Today's Reddit

We have to get our asses off dirty fuels.

Poor Relations

Instead of regarding them as part of the United States (which they are) we treat Puerto Ricans like they're the poor cousins in the family, and we barely acknowledge them. We don't even like to talk about them, much less invite them over for Christmas dinner.

BTW: Climate Change, dummy.

“It’s a double whammy. You have a hurricane

with strong gusts and then a tail of intense rain

that remained stationary over the south

dropping two to three feet of water.”

(pay wall)

Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico as a Category 1 storm. Flooding still wrought havoc.

FEMA allocated billions for disaster mitigation after Maria. Few projects have gotten underway.

When Leida Rodriguez started building a house in Villa Esperanza, neighbors suggested she lift it because the nearby Rio Nigua rose a few feet during Hurricane Maria — nothing these weathered coastal souls hadn’t seen before.

So she built the house four feet off the ground, hoping to mitigate coastal flooding in southern Puerto Rico, where she found an affordable spot in a beautiful community to live out her retirement. Never did she imagine that a Category-1 cyclone would bring so much rain that the beams of her white-and-blue trim home would buckle and slide into a deep mud hole.

“It was my refuge, my place of peace,” said Rodriguez, 50, who along with her husband used their life savings to build the home block by concrete block. “We thought it wasn’t going to happen. No one had ever seen flooding like what happened.”

Hurricane Fiona dumped at least half as much rain as the coastal town of Salinas — where most of its residents live in flood zones — sees in a year. Though the storm brought far less powerful winds than Category-4 Maria in 2017, some parts of the main island experienced just as much rain or more. Many were caught off guard. First responders rescued hundreds of people from inundated homes and some roads and bridges repaired after Maria were destroyed again.

The U.S. government made historic allocations, including more than $3 billion for hazard mitigation, to Puerto Rico after Maria — some of which was slated to go toward preventing severe flooding during storms. A separate pot of federal public assistance money is designated for rebuilding public infrastructure. In Salinas, which was walloped by Maria and battered again by Fiona, officials have submitted 74 projects to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for funding. To date, just seven — including road repairs and a basketball court — have been completed, data from Puerto Rico’s Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency, shows. About two dozen more entered the construction phase in the last six months.

Salinas officials have identified 44 potential mitigation projects. So far, they’ve submitted three, including a proposal to build a water treatment plant that was approved in December and is in the design phase. Two other projects under review propose installing generators at critical facilities and a new storm water system on public streets leading to a hospital. Neither one of those projects has been constructed.

“I’m pretty sure if these mitigation plans would have been carried out, it would’ve mitigated the issues that some of these municipalities experienced,” said researcher Jennifer Hinojosa, who works for Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York and been tracking the recovery from Maria.

Instead, residents and experts say unrestrained coastal construction, mangrove destruction, deforestation, coastal erosion and poor canal maintenance have heightened the risk for marginalized communities like Salinas, a town of 25,000.

Across the island archipelago, 5 percent of the available post-Maria FEMA funds for hazard mitigation have been obligated, according to the data from Puerto Rico’s recovery office, a first hurdle in getting a project started. The cumbersome management of those funds at both the federal and local level is slowing down Puerto Rico’s slow long-term resiliency reconstruction, experts said.

FEMA officials said they are continuing to work with municipalities to help stave off the most severe — and in some cases, preventable — damage when a storm rolls through.

“Hurricanes are a natural phenomenon,” said Victor Alvarado, a local environmental activist. “Disasters are man-made.”

A satellite image shows a bridge before Hurricane Fiona in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, on Jan.18. (Maxar Technologies/Via Reuters)
A satellite image shows a flooded bridge in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 21. (Maxar Technologies/Via Reuters)

‘Maria didn’t do this’

Puerto Rico’s southern region is drier than its northern coast and its topography makes it prone to rapid flooding. Hurricane Fiona concentrated its heavy rainfall over the southern slopes of the central mountains where water rushes down steep highlands and spills into the coastal plain until it reaches the sea. The soil is often unable to absorb all the moisture and instead it runs off the surface, according to meteorologists and regional climatological reports.

While the eye of the storm swirled westward, it dragged a line of intense weather that brought with it sustained humidity. That system pounded the southern coast with relentless precipitation.

“It’s a double whammy. You have a hurricane with strong gusts and then a tail of intense rain that remained stationary over the south dropping two to three feet of water,” said University of Wisconsin meteorologist Ángel Adames-Corraliza, a native of Puerto Rico. “That’s a nightmare scenario.”

Weeks earlier, Salinas residents had been worried about persistent drought conditions threatening their aquifer and only source of drinking water in the municipality. Today, many neighbors are struggling to understand why the inundation was so fierce that it triggered midnight rescues for hundreds who said they had never seen so much water. Engorged streams and creeks burst in all directions. The Rio Nigua jumped its banks and discharged into channels never carved in recent memory.

Daniel and Maria De Jesús have lived confidently inside their home in the Coquí community of Salinas for more than 40 years, never before experiencing a severe deluge. The house sits a few feet above the low-lying roadway. Yet several hours into Fiona’s downpours, brackish water invaded their bedroom.

“I’ve never felt so much fear,” said Daniel De Jesús, 76, whose family was rescued by National Guard troops Sunday. “I stayed here during Maria. If I had done the same for Fiona, I would not be here to talk about it.”

Pieces of newly-laid asphalt was shattered like shards of glass and strewn about the neighborhood. The smell of rot was inescapable as residents piled their waterlogged furniture on the curb next to mounds of riverbed soil and sheared vegetation. Families strung out their clothes hoping the blistering post-storm sun would dry them out and get rid of the unmistakable odor of mold.

The De Jesús family lost most of their possessions. But that is not what worries them. They said they have warily watched how new construction projects, such as a nearby solar farm and housing developments, have taken little care for the geography and risks of the flood plain.

“Nature is reclaiming and telling us this belongs to her,” Daniel De Jesús said. “As the saying goes, the river always finds its course.”

Developers build too close to creeks and canals. They compact the soil and fill in wetlands with sand and gravel. They change natural water flows, said environmental lawyer Ruth Santiago, who works closely with a coalition of community-based organizations.

“There are things that are being approved...that are making the flooding worse,” she said.

Salinas Mayor Karilyn Bonilla Colón did not respond to interview requests but has been vocal in the local press about using the federal dollars principally for flood mitigation and urban renewal.

Illegal coastal construction in protected estuaries and sensitive land reserves, such as nearby Jobos Bay, has become a flash point for locals and other Puerto Ricans living near the ocean. In recent years, communities have waged court battles and protested against the central government giving what they see as illegal permits to builders destroying mangrove forests and exacerbating flooding.

Mangroves act as natural barriers that protect communities from storm surge and can absorb water, among other ecological benefits. These same communities saw flood levels rise dangerously in the middle of the night, Santiago said.

“Puerto Rico is a group of islands that is very limited in geographic space. It can be described as a mountain range surrounded by a narrow coastal plain. And that coastal plain is very narrow in the south,” Santiago said. “So you can’t keep building, using up land space. Floodwaters need areas that are not impacted by construction in order to go out to the sea without causing damage.”

Victor Bonilla said he held out as long as he could but when the water reached nearly a foot in height at 12:30 a.m. on Monday, he put his two boys and wife inside a dump truck that was helping to evacuate residents of barrio Playita — walking distance from the popular Punta Arenas beach.

“I didn’t want to leave. I’m a fighter but when you have a family, you’ve got to surrender,” said Bonilla, 37, whose family has lived and fished here for generations. “You learn how to live with flooding and adjust but we didn’t think this storm would do this. Maria didn’t do this.”

Mitigating disaster

The type of construction work that should be happening, residents and experts say, has not transpired in decades. Levees, canal dredging, sea walls and other diversions are the kind of flood control measures the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has long studied in this region. They’ve made recommendations and drawn up detailed plans, but the work either was not funded or was not completed, local officials and residents said.

In 2018, Puerto Rico’s congressional representative, Jenniffer González Colón(R), announced the approval of $2.5 billion of federal funding for flood control projects, including the canalization and construction of levees along Rio Nigua in Salinas. Some work has begun and is in the design phase, but not in time to make a difference for hundreds of families like the ones community leader Ismenia Figueroa’s serves.

“You learn to fight for what’s yours here and depend on no one,” said Figueroa, 60, her eyes reddening with tears. “But the sense of powerlessness can be so suffocating.”

This is the kind of thing Puerto Ricans in these Salinas neighborhoods and leaders said they have come to expect: Many overtures and announcements but lagging progress.

The sluggish pace of FEMA dollars reaching those communities with the most urgent infrastructure needs is a frustrating fact of life for residents. Much of the completed public infrastructure work in Puerto Rico has gone to rehabbing roads or rebuilding recreational facilities, records show, after Hurricane Maria.

The work is necessary, community leaders say, but so many of the projects that require significant investment, engineering and design to create resiliency, stay suspended in the proposal phase. Some of these plans and requests for hazard mitigation date back to declared disasters from previous hurricanes, according to FEMA data obtained by The Washington Post.

A member of the Puerto Rico National Guard distributes water in an affected community in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 21. (Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters)

The delays are the consequence of bureaucratic hurdles and management struggles at the state and federal level, said former FEMA hazard mitigation expert and historian, Rafael Torrech. The veteran grant writer was brought in after Hurricane Maria to help guide applicants through the process. Hazard mitigation projects normally take longer and can take a back seat to the rebuilding of public infrastructure because they are focused on planning for the future.

FEMA has dedicated staff but the mechanisms for releasing money are outdated and ill-suited to long term reconstruction, Torrech said. The added complications of Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy and lack of access to financing meant the government could not afford to put out bids for work through the federal agency’s reimbursement model. It took time for FEMA, Puerto Rico’s recovery office, and the fiscal oversight board managing the Commonwealth’s finances to develop cash flow solutions.

By then, there were labor and material shortages driven by the pandemic, transportation issues and an ongoing exodus from Puerto Rico. A limited supply of professional firms able to do design and engineering work from the island archipelago drove up costs.

“Puerto Rico is a perfect example of everything that went wrong,” Torrech said. “Practically, none of the mitigation projects has gotten to the construction phase. You cannot control nature but you can control your reaction to it. It’s a question of management.”

It’s a cycle that has been repeated disaster after disaster, experts said. Soon, the only options left for some of Puerto Rico’s most under-resourced communities such as those in Salinas, is to abandon their homes and relocate.

Wanda Lee considered it. The 44-year-old left her seaside home to start anew in Pennsylvania, overwhelmed by the weeks of powerlessness and joblessness in the aftermath of Maria. But, she said, the island called her back home.

Then came Fiona. Lee was asleep for most of it, relegating the storm to an afterthought. When she awoke and stood up from her bed, she stepped into a puddle of water. The flooding was worse than five years earlier and she and her neighbors had to be rescued from their homes. But this time, she won’t be packing up.

“I stick out the storms and I stick out these hurricanes because it’s part of me,” Lee said in front of her newly-waterlogged home. “I’m a playera [beach lover] and this is what we do.”

Rodriguez, the woman who lost her house to a mudslide near the river, spent hours on the phone Thursday with federal officials to see if she qualifies for help. She said she is not optimistic because the low-cost lot where her house once stood was in a flood zone where many of her neighbors did not get help after Maria.

“I will recover,” she said. “But I won’t rebuild here.”

It's The Climate Change, Dummy

Flash flood in Death Valley strands about 1,000 people in national park

I was going to say, "Here's one you don't see every day", but that little bit of funny is fading fast, or at least becoming more than a little sardonic.

Without a certain stability in weather patterns, we get real trouble, and that trouble will come more often, at an accelerating pace, and eventually the ripples of each disaster will overlap the ripples from all the other disasters.

When this week's Once-In-A-Thousand-Years Flood happens in Death Valley, it fucks things up for a comparative handful of tourists and their car insurance carriers. When it kills 40 Kentuckians - some of whom will never be found because they're 5 miles down stream, buried under 8 feet of mud - and whole areas are rendered unproductive for some years to come, we have to begin to grasp the broadening scope of "Nature Bats Last".

BTW - I wonder how long it'll take the Suits at the insurance companies to figure out how to fuck people over on this one. After all, when we could be preventing these terrible things from happening - but we don't - well, was it really a "natural" disaster? Wasn't it really your own fault? Sorry - claim denied.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Death Valley National Park was closed Saturday after exceptional amounts of rain drenched the park Friday, triggering flash floods that left about 1,000 visitors and park staff stranded.

The park received 1.46 inches of rainfall at the Furnace Creek area — just shy of the previous calendar day record of 1.47 inches, set on April 15, 1988. This amounts to about three-quarters of what the area typically receives in an average year, 1.94 inches, and is the greatest amount ever recorded in August, The lowest, driest and hottest location in the United States, Death Valley averages just 0.11 inches of rain in August.

The National Park Service said in a news release Saturday that the national park roads remain closed, but “visitors who were previously unable to leave the area hotels [were] able to carefully drive out with law enforcement escorts.” It said water has receded in most areas of the park and “extensive mud and gravel deposits” remain.

As of Saturday morning, “everything is going well,” said Nikki Jones, a server assistant at a restaurant in the park’s Ranch Inn, who also lives there and posted a video of the flooding from her colleague on Twitter. Jones told The Washington Post that the floodwaters receded Friday afternoon, but light debris remain on the roads.

“CalTrans has done an amazing job to get it cleaned up as soon as possible,” she told The Post in a Twitter message. “I drove on the roads today.”

Jones said some people are stranded at the Inn at the Oasis because of trapped cars, “but people are able to get out of the park today.”

“The floodwaters pushed dumpster containers into parked cars, which caused cars to collide into one another,” the National Park Service said in a statement Friday. “Additionally, many facilities are flooded including hotel rooms and business offices.

The torrent was triggered by the Southwest monsoon, which develops each summer as prevailing winds shift from out of the west to out of the south, drawing a surge of humidity northward. This moisture can fuel vigorous downpours that douse the parched desert landscape. Because there is little soil to soak up the rains, any measurable rains can cause flooding in low-lying areas, and heavier rains can collect into normally dry creeks, triggering flash floods.

This year’s Southwest monsoon has been particularly intense — which has helped relieve drought conditions in the region but also resulted in many significant flood events. Serious flooding has recently affected areas around Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Las Vegas flooding sends water gushing through casinos

The Death Valley flood also comes amid a series of extreme rain events over the Lower 48 states. Over the week spanning the end of July and beginning of August, three 1-in-1,000 year rain events occurred — inundating St. Louis, eastern Kentucky, and southeast Illinois. Earlier this summer, Yellowstone National Park also flooded.

How two 1-in-1,000 year rain events hit the U.S. in two days

Death Valley holds the record for the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth, as well as several runners-up. Officially, Death Valley reached 134 degrees on July 10, 1913, but some climatologists have questioned the legitimacy of that reading. The next highest temperature on record, 131 degrees from Kebili, Tunisia, set July 7, 1931, is also controversial. Last summer and the summer before, Death Valley hit 130 degrees, which may be the highest pair of reliably measured temperatures on Earth if the 1931 Tunisia and 1913 Death Valley readings are disregarded.

The rainfall inundated the park, trapping vehicles in debris, according to a video tweeted by John Sirlin, an Arizona-based storm-chaser. He wrote that roads were blocked by boulders and palm trees that had fallen, and that visitors struggled for six hours to leave the park.

Earlier this week, flash floods hit parts of western Nevada, forcing the closure of some roads leading to the park from Las Vegas. Flash floods also hit parts of northern Arizona.

Sirlin told the Associated Press that Friday’s rain started around 2 a.m. and was “more extreme than anything I’ve seen there.”

“There were at least two dozen cars that got smashed and stuck in there,” he said, adding that he saw washes flowing several feet deep although he did not see anyone injured, and the NPS reported no injuries as of Friday.

Last July, rare summer rains also soaked Death Valley, bringing 0.74 inches in a day at Furnace Creek approximately two weeks after the park set the world record for the hottest daily average temperature, at 118.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

Scientists say human-caused warming of the climate is intensifying extreme precipitation events. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found some evidence that rainfall from the Southwest monsoon has increased since the 1970s.

More Fun With Disasters

We are to be even more sorely tested.

The storm is the first to reach hurricane strength in this year’s Atlantic season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. It brought harsh winds and rain to Corpus Christi and the surrounding area.

They tell us we can expect a rather robust hurricane season this year.

Weather.com:

The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season is predicted to be more active than usual, according to an outlook released Thursday by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, a division of the National Weather Service.

The NOAA outlook calls for 13 to 19 named storms, six to 10 hurricanes and three to six major hurricanes – one that is Category 3 or higher (115-plus-mph winds) on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

This forecast is above the 30-year (1981-2010) average of 13 named storms, seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes.

NOAA's outlook is in agreement with that released in April by The Weather Company, an IBM Business, which calls for 18 named storms, nine hurricanes and four major hurricanes.

So -

• Wild fires that burned almost an entire continent to cinders
• Murder Hornets
• Killer hurricanes

Those were the 2nd tier stories so far this year.

Fuck you, 2020.

Bob Cesca

Something I think most of us missed (I did anyway) - Jody points out the staging of 45*'s little paper towel stunt. (starts at about 11:00)

Which underlines this crapola thing that's been bouncing around Facebook:

see also - Snopes

FEMA Prime

SNL writers get it. 

Good morning, and thank you for calling our very great FEMA.

We're experiencing a bigly heavy call volume, so please hold.

In order to give you the best possible service, please have your FEMA account number ready - or if you're a first-time caller, your credit card number, birthdate, Social Security Number, and proof of citizenship.

For faster response - especially if you're experiencing a power outage, loss of cell service, or imminent death - please go to our website, www.fuckthegovernment.biz where you can register to win a free pizza and 20 ounce Coca Cola brand soft drink - just fill in the form indicating which Anti-Trump Facebook posts you've Liked in the past 8 months, and then enter the promo code ICONFESS.

Press 1 to hear today's special offers

Press 2 for mortuary coupons

Press 3 for a discount on Nestle's bottled water

Press 4 to see if you qualify for one free surplus MRE

Press 5 to hear our tremendous hard-working best president ever, Donald J Trump tell you to go fuck yourself.

And have a beautifully blessed, non-mooching, glorious free market day - sucker.

45* Fading Away

It's a tough gig. And I promise I'm not just sitting around taking shots, but General, don't you guys have - you know - helicopters and stuff?

The people who know something about disaster planning know there's no such thing as normal.

And they know that a good Hurricane Response and Recovery Plan can survive anything except an actual hurricane.

One of the reasons they know that one really important concept comes partly from the truly shitty lessons they had to learn on the fly after Mt St Helens blew up in 1980.

They had a good long run-up; they spent weeks working out all the little details; they had National Guard troopers ready to roll with all the gear and goodies they could imagine.

Then the mountain covered the area with a cubic kilometer of dirt and rocks and vegetation and critter parts, plus the first installments of almost a million tons of ash. Suddenly all the maps are wrong, and nobody knows where anything is or how to get there even if they did.

So I'm not counseling patience in the face of people suffering and dying. This thing has been a clusterfuck of the highest order; there's no excuse for it; and if the guy in charge is worth a shit, he stands up and he takes the heat.

But we don't have that guy in charge.

Now, I hope I'm just being a little paranoid here, but I've been wondering for a while - is 45* really the president?

I have a bad sick feeling that he heads for the golf resort every weekend because he's being told to stay out of the way.

Color Me Skeptical

Reuters (Houston):

The U.S. Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency are working with Texas state regulators to clean up oil and chemicals spilled from a dozen industrial facilities after flooding from Hurricane Harvey, authorities said.

The spills came from oil refineries, fuel terminals and other businesses, but EPA spokeswoman Terri White said it was not possible to provide an estimate for the amounts spilled.

"Initial reports were based on observation," White said. "Some spills were already being cleaned up by the time EPA or other officials arrived to assess them and others had already migrated offsite."

(Gotta love that passive voice bullshit - inviting the inference that a spill is no longer a problem because it's "migrated offsite")

Refineries owned by Valero Energy Corp in Houston, Motiva Inc in Port Arthur, and Exxon Mobile Corp in Baytown, were among the facilities that had reported spills, according to White. Representatives for those companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The piece kinda rambles on with plenty of Company SpokesPimps telling us everything's peachy, but it mostly translates to: "We've made billions at the expense of everything and everybody, and now that the storm's gone, we need to notify the tax payers to get this shit cleaned up so we can get back to making more billions and externalizing more of the costs".

BTW - the humanitarian crises that are coming into focus in places like USVI and the Florida keys could get turned into some very effective cover: "We really can't worry about the feel-good niceties of protecting Snail Darters and Spotted Owls when real Americans are suffering blah blah blah".

Also: We should be hearing about a whole suite of Mystery-Maladies for years. Some folks will make the obvious connection with all that Ethyl-Methyl-Death that "escaped" into the water, and then "migrated offsite", but the American Chemistry Council will have their dis-information campaign in place very soon, and the Plausible Deniability is likely to be thick enough to choke a fuckin' hippo.

This shit doesn't stop until we put a stop to it.

Go get 'em, Press Poodles.

Trump's Kattrina only worse: Houston’s Floodwaters Are Tainted With Toxins, Testing Shows https://t.co/WhL2edOUdF

— Maurice Ross (@MauriceMichael) September 12, 2017

Another Tweet

Seems to be a bit breezy today

He jumps out of the car and measures Hurricane Irma's wind. His conclusion: It's windy. #Irma #Irma2017 pic.twitter.com/XdmCUvhf4u

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) September 10, 2017

Two Weird Ones

Some very odd shit goin' on

Eastern Bahamas:

Impressive slow moving landslide due to permafrost melting spotted in Tibet on September 7, 2017 https://t.co/PsU9BDl667 pic.twitter.com/OUWH39PFC9

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 9, 2017

Market-Based Solutions

I think we can all say we're fairly well aware of the Natural Disasters that're piling up all around us, even if way too many of us are still resistant to the reality that hurricanes and wild fires are Human-Exacerbated.

But let's not dwell on the past. Let's talk about sensible Vienna School solutions.

You see, it's not a problem of happenstance - it's a simple problem of distribution and logistics.  So all we have to do is transfer some of the western states' fires to the Gulf Coast, and send some of the rain in Texas Louisiana and (soon) Florida to Alaska Oregon and California.

Can you imagine the payoff for some bright young entrepreneur with a good idea and mom's garage to work in?

And of course, we start the ball rolling by providing incentive - like, say...oh I don't know...a tax cut.

So c'mon, libtards - trade in those Birkenstocks for a nice pair of Khakis and a white polo shirt, and let's get to work.

You Know It's Likely

In some ways it's kind of a cheap shot. At least it's a little too easy and obvious.

But I think we know that a year from now - even tho' a lot of 'em will still be getting payouts from Treasury - because it'll still be pretty fucked up down there - somebody will shake that Etch-A-Sketch and jagoffs like these guys will be right back at it.

And I might as well put my cynicism to work here and make the point that lots of cronies are about to get rich(er) because of their sudden realization that they have a burning passion to provide "relief goods" to all those poor innocent victims.

It's The Visuals, Stupid

The people running Willard's campaign have to be some of the least adept political operatives ever.  You have to know that Romney's little stunt in Ohio - the one that wasn't a campaign rally at all cuz it was really a food drive event(?) was another stab at making Willard not look like The Rich Guy With No Fuckin' Clue.  Oops.

From Kay Coppins at BuzzFeed, via AmericaBlog:

But the last-minute nature of the call for donations left some in the campaign concerned that they would end up with an empty truck. So the night before the event, campaign aides went to a local Wal Mart and spent $5,000 on granola bars, canned food, and diapers to put on display while they waited for donations to come in, according to one staffer. (The campaign confirmed that it “did donate supplies to the relief effort,” but would not specify how much it spent.)

Empty-handed supporters pled for entrance, with one woman asking, “What if we dropped off our donations up front?”The volunteer gestured toward a pile of groceries conveniently stacked near the candidate. “Just grab something,” he said.

Two teenage boys retrieved a jar of peanut butter each, and got in line. When it was their turn, they handed their “donations” to Romney. He took them, smiled, and offered an earnest “Thank you.”

If you took maybe three minutes to go the the Red Cross website on your iPhone, you'd know what was going to go wrong with your attempt to look helpful.  Three lousy minutes, and you might've learned something, and you wouldn't leave yourself open to the massive ridicule being dumped on your over-gelled head.  You wanted a good photo op?  You just gave everybody a good look at just how out of touch you are.

And I get it - I really do - you know you get slammed for being a rich-boy jag-off who never thinks about anything but his money and what his money can buy, but this was the one chance you'd get where throwing money at the problem is the right thing to do; and what did you do?  What the fuck did you do, Willard?  You did exactly the opposite of what was needed.  And that kinda sums it all up, doesn't it?

Ed Note

We got slammed pretty hard by the storms last Friday.  We're OK, but electrical power is a problem.  We bought a generator during the monster snow storm of 2009(?), so I can power the fridge and the computers and a couple of window AC units.  We're far better off than lots of our neighbors, but there's very little about this whole thing that doesn't suck.

One thing - Americans behave like spoiled children the majority of the time, but when the real shit happens (like 80mph Derecho winds that knock the crap outa the power grid), people tend to rally together in a weirdly self-sufficient way.  I don't know how to describe it.  Like I said, our situation is considerably better than most, but when I offer the neighbors refuge in our relatively cool family room, they've all thanked me kindly and said more or less, "we're doin' OK for now" or "maybe take you up on that in a day or two" etc etc.  It just feels a little odd; like people don't wanna admit they're struggling with it or something.  I dunno.  Weird.

Anyway, even tho' I've got power for the PC, the DSL's been up and down the whole time, and blogging isn't a big priority right now.

Wait...What?

Most of the rationale behind most of the GOP's efforts to downsize government, and to cut spending, and to ease the 'tax burden' has been built around the basic tenet that "the government is broke" - especially the state governments.  So Repubs have been runnin' around making a lot of the usual weird noise about how the voodoo bullshit of Tax-Cuts-Equals-More-Tax-Receipts isn't just a fever dream due to an overuse of Rectum-Derived Statistics (hat tip = Bill Maher).

Anyway, they keep saying they have to fire cops and teachers and firefighters and street maintenance crews, and kill the unions because those rotten unionized workers just cost too darned much.  Every shitty thing they wanna do is because the gubmint don't got da money no mo'.

But then, this headline from Cincinnati.com:

Kasich turns down federal disaster aid

Ohio Gov. John Kasich said thanks but no thanks to immediate federal disaster relief Saturday, even as governors in Indiana and Kentucky welcomed the help.

Kasich did not rule out asking for assistance later, but his decision means tornado-ravaged towns in Ohio will not get federal aid now and are not eligible at this time for potentially millions of dollars in payments and loans.

The governor said Ohio can respond to the crisis without federal help and he would not ask federal authorities to declare the region a disaster area.

Oh, I get it.  The state's too broke to pay a decent wage to people who bust their asses to teach the kids and chase the bad guys and make sure the roads are safe, but there's plenty to go around when a camera hound like Kasich gets a chance at a little national exposure.  And of course, this can't possibly have anything to do with setting himself up for a run at The Oval in 2016, now can it?

The normal scenario here is that Kasich makes the news by "bucking the system" (he's a maverick; a take-charge guy; somebody who knows how to get shit done).  Then once the news cycle has passed and the Press Poodles are chasing the next shiny thing, the feds will come in quietly - "let's not be playin' politics with people's lives, Mr President" - and things will go along as they usually do, even if the help is too late for a few of the poor suckers who're always caught in the middle of this kinda shit; and the only thing that anybody will see or remember or care about is what makes it into the campaign ads or the coverage of Candidate Kasich - that he handled the tornadoes of 2012 like a seasoned executive blah blah blah.  And we can all be pleasantly surprised if the rubes don't just keep swallowing it.

The Wallow Fire

Still not contained, the fire has eaten over 400k acres since it started (May 30).

More great news; dry and windy weather should push it well over the current champion fire (from 2002) into first place by a fair margin.

See the progress of the beast here.

We hear practically nothing any more about AGW when these disasters pop up.  Have we finally begun to notice that when one of these huge things happens - lately anyway - we're no longer looking back to the 1800s or (usually) even the early 1900s to find the previous record-setting event?  So we've just kinda quietly accepted the whole thing now?