The 100th anniversary of Ohio’s greatest disaster is just days away. This epic hydro-meteorological event utterly ravaged river towns from Illinois to Ohio and beyond, but it seems like the event has largely been forgotten in history’s annals. Even flood-obsessed me had lived in Ohio for a few months before …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous It’s been quite a week. My home in northeastern Ohio got off lightly from “Superstorm” Sandy, compared to places closer to the Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean. But still, over 250,000 people lost power due to high wind, especially in Cuyahoga and Lorain counties along …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous There’s nothing particularly deterministic about starting a new year on January 1st. Our wall calendars happen to do so because of the circumstances of history. For hydrologists in the northern hemisphere, January 1st is not a great time to declare one year dead and a new …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous When Hurricane Isaac passed over New Orleans as a Category 1 storm on the seventh anniversary of the disastrous Hurricane Katrina, everyone in the US let out a big sigh of relief. A category 1 storm, the lowest level of hurricane intensity on the Saffir-Simpson scale, …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous Here is a brief update on the floods I covered in the last edition of flooding around the world. Note that there has also been flooding in Xiengkoung, Viengtian, Boolikhamxay, and Xayaboury provinces of Laos, as a result of heavy rainfall from a tropical storm; in …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous Since the last edition of flooding around the world, flooding along the Mississippi River has mostly subsided, but flooding continues along the Missouri River and in China. Several new flood wetspots have also popped up, as the image below from The Flood Observatory (at the University …
Wow! I won the “strange quark” (2nd place) award in a science writing contest, hosted by Three Quarks Daily, for blogging about the Mississippi River, floods, levees, and the illusion of control. As I wrote in the comments at 3QD: Wow! I never thought I’d actually win something for writing …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous Got flood fatigue yet? Too bad, because the wet weather and the high water keeps coming. Here is a quick round up of the notable flood-related news of the week. Mississippi River My post, ‘Levees and the illusion of flood control‘, has been nominated for the …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous One week ago today (28 May 2011), I had the chance to explore the lingering flooding along the Mississippi River and its tributary Big Muddy River in southern Illinois. The area was long past its crest; it is upriver of Cairo and the Birds Point Floodway. …
Flooding along the Mississippi River Last week, I wrote a post for the Scientific American Guest Blog on “Levees and the Illusion of Flood Control,” about the ways that while levees around individual communities may be good, the systematic leveeing of entire waterways is a bad long-term strategy. On Friday, …