Sometimes Mother Nature gets a little heavy-handed with the irony:
This pic comes from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer – a flooded Wal-mart in Chehalis, Washington.
Headline in the paper: Climate change could mean more massive downpours.
And then this in the Seattle Times:
Did development, logging set the stage for disaster?
Big-box stores, restaurants and strip malls galore. A railroad line extension, parking lots for a church. A coal-unloading facility, a new natural-gas pipeline, a mine expansion. And barns, homes, carports and shops. All built in the floodplain.
Then last Monday, heavy rain punched into the watershed from the southwest. Faster than anyone had ever seen before, torrents of water gouged hillsides, broke levees and overtopped dikes as flood gauges reached record highs and some blew out altogether….
Many state officials and regional experts, including a former county manager who says he was fired after criticizing floodplain development, say they have been warning for years that the hunger for development was running counter to common sense….
“It’s kind of sad, we keep repeating the same mistakes, even when we know better,” said Andy McMillan, a longtime wetlands manager for the state Department of Ecology. “It’s the same old things coming into play: There’s money to be made, and people want to make the most money for their land.”But in the wake of the storm, Lewis County leaders still say it’s unfair to blame them for nature’s wrath. And they predict the development will go on.
“The floodplain in the Chehalis is so vast that the filling in the floodplain for local development has no significant impact,” said Bob Nacht, the director of community development for the city of Chehalis.
More here.
i love how the title of the article is all about climate change and the fear that it generates but the article really is about land use and basically what urbanization can do to the environment.
furthermore, the article states,
“”There isn’t really a firm pattern or trend yet,” Ashby said. Ashby said 1950 is still the wettest year on record for the Pacific Northwest and the rainfall pattern is notoriously chaotic when viewed over the longer term.
“It’s a very important question and there is some evidence to support the claim that rainfall is increasing in the Northwest,” Redmond said. “It’s possible. But the jury is still out on whether you are getting more of these warm, tropical moisture events.”
its just another example how we are all on autopilot when global warming is mentioned
That part of Chehalis flooded because a levee on the Chehalis River broke. That area lies in a flood plain that also flooded in 1990 and 1996 and even before that, given that the problem was studied as far back as 1982.
Here’s a link to the rmy Corps of Engineers Study re-evaluation of a 1982 study addressing the flooding problem. Excerpt below.
http://www.nws.usace.army.mil/PublicMenu/Doc_list.cfm?sitename=cent&pagename=reports
The studies documented in this report are General Reevaluation Studies of the recommended project in the 1982 Feasibility Report titled Centralia, Washington Flood Damage Reduction. That report recommended modification of Skookumchuck Dam to provide for increased flood control storage. That recommendation was later found to be economically unjustified during the Preconstruction Engineering and Design (PED) phase and studies were terminated. The current General Reevaluation Study is in response to Congressional direction to reexamine previous
recommendations for flood damage reduction in the vicinity of Centralia and Chehalis and to
examine opportunities for ecosystem restoration.
ron c:
because i’m bored here at work, i thought i might read that report, however, its 500+ pages long with appendixes. ouch.
I just skimmed this part of the report:
http://www.nws.usace.army.mil/publicmenu/DOCUMENTS/cent/GRR.pdf