I've noticed an almost complete lack of coverage of the flooding in Iowa and Nebraska - I have a lot of family there and the amount of damage has been astounding[1]. Nebraska has more miles of rivers than any state in the US, and many of them are flooding or close to it. It's a complete disaster there.
Its not on the coast or in Chicago or Denver, so it really will only get regional coverage. The book about fark.com "It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News" has a section illustrating this with a crane collapse in Manhattan and then one in St. Louis.
A few years back with that winter storm hit South Dakota and killed a lot of cattle (the cattle were mostly in the summer fields and the weather actually went from freezing rain to blizzard), it wasn't really reported and people wondered what the heck was going on with steak prices. I sometimes wish there was a "trend news" website that reported supply to consumer news.
There was a front page story about it in the New York Times last week (in fact there is still a story on the home page below the fold about it [0]) but it got bumped for coverage of the attack in NZ
People on the coasts live in floodplains too. Living in floodplains is just a fact of life. Has been for 10's of millennia. Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Persians, Egyptians, Chinese, and so on and so forth back to the beginning. They all built in floodplains. Let's stop jabbing a finger at people and give them a hand instead. If you don't want to lend a hand, that's fine too, just go about your day. No need to denigrate people.
In those cases people had to live on the good farmland, in order to farm it an protect it.
That is no longer a consideration.
I used to work in the city architects for Waterford. We would never ever build public housing on a 100 year floodplain.
Private developers would do it, they shouldnt have gotten planning permission but they inevitably did. They knew they could make a profit as most buyers wouldnt check.. That practice should be illegal.
A mortgage company will not issue a loan for a house on a 100 year flood plain without flood insurance. You can not purchase a house in the US in a 100 year flood plain without knowing you are doing so.
I observe no denigration in his comment. These people made a choice. Sometimes people make bad choices. Sometimes I do. I'm looking at a building that's in a 100 year floodplain. It's a great location, but I know it's going to flood. If I buy it and it floods, I'd accept people telling me that I made a bad decision.
> I observe no denigration in his comment. These people made a choice.
It's not even my personal opinion. I am merely describing the biases of the general public that result in the discrepancy in newsworthiness. It's not due to some coastal conspiracy against inland states. Florida is viewed by many as a backwards state, a popular target for mockery and derision, so a bias against inland states does not explain why hurricanes in Florida get more news coverage than floods in inland states.
To reiterate myself a third time, the discrepancy arises from a perceived, not actual difference in culpability of the victims. People who are hit by hurricanes are thought to be the victims of bad chance, while the people living on floodplains are thought to be people who knowingly tempted fate. That this is not squared up with reality is of little consequence because newsworthiness is not some objective trait; newsworthiness is the product of the subjective biases and worldviews of the general public.
I'll offer another reason for why the discrepancy exists, again relating to hurricanes being named. When a community gets hit by some hurricane, they're not hit by some generic hurricane but rather by a particular hurricane, that had a name and it's own news cycle leading up to contact with the coast. And throughout that news coverage, the location that the hurricane would come to shore at was up in the air. The weather forecasters were offering up stochastic predictions, but none knew for certain. The result of this is it feels like it was pure chance that the hurricane hit one community and not the other. Hurricanes are viewed as discrete independent events that could randomly hit your community, while the more rational point of view would be that at some point your coastal community is probably going to get hit by some hurricane.
In floodplains the chance of a flood is considered as a flat probability per year, or century. The "hundred year flood" is a concept most people are familiar with, even if they misunderstand it[1]. People don't think of hurricanes like that, they don't consider a general hurricane threat. They consider the threat of each individual hurricane as it comes along. The "hundred year flood" concept is not considered for coastal regions, even though it's just as valid there.
Interesting point about naming hurricanes. Perhaps we should formally name floods. The floods here in Pittsburgh are usually the remnants of hurricanes coming north and so do inherit those names. And those ones are perceived differently than when there's just a big snow melt-off. But a flood is a flood. They happen and they are getting worse. We've had five "hundred year floods" here in the last year.
Yes I understand that, but that's not how it's perceived. People do not have objective worldviews, and it is the worldviews of the general public that determine whether or not something is considered newsworthy.
I'm not defending this status quo, I'm explaining it.
Something else to consider: hurricanes are personified. They're given names, and therefore make convenient villains. This increases their newsworthiness. If particularly snowy winters or intense rainstorms were given names, that would increase the newsworthiness of inland floods.
Another thing to consider: when an inland flood occurs due to a dam collapse, rather than because of unnamed weather systems, that becomes more newsworthy and memorable than most hurricanes. I'd say the Johnstown Flood is about as memorable, maybe moreso, than the Galveston Hurricane, despite killing fewer people. That's because the Johnstown Flood was due to a dam collapse. A dam with a name, a discrete object with human owners. That's why an inland flood in rural Pennsylvania is remembered nearly a century and a half later, while most inland floods hardly make the news at all.
Consider also the Great Molasses Flood. By flood standards or even industrial disaster standards, the number of casualties were small. However everybody has heard of the Great Molasses Flood. Why? Because it happened in Boston? No, because it was molasses! That's very unusual, nobody would have anticipated that, and therefore it's newsworthy.
Whoa. Please don't cross into personal attack regardless of what someone else posted. I get that you have good reason to feel strongly about this, but the contract here is that you need to contain your strong feelings when commenting. As do we all.
Just to give my experience: I'm from Nebraska, and was back there this past week. When I arrived home (in Lincoln), there was still 4-6 inches of snow on the ground, following the snowiest winter they've had in decades. It turned about 60 degrees on a rainy day and all that snow melted, but the ground was still frozen and had nowhere to go. We didn't have bad flooding in my area, but my parents yard was ankle deep in water for about 24 hours. The interstates were closed, and I got detoured twice driving out. It really is something.
I just heard about the flooding yesterday. Sometimes I don’t get the news. I’ll see wall-to-wall coverage on some inane thing, but only learn about huge, destructive flooding from random people I follow on Twitter.
Maybe we’re just sleeping in the bed we made, but how do we get out of it?
Well, some people think that we can't, the only thing left to do is to brace for impact.
The one getting most media visibility recently is Jem Bendell's "deep adaptation". This is not a new invention though. It was preceded by various resilient communities/resilient cities approaches, post-societal crash prepper books and prepper forums in general, and so on.
Wow. Why have this much critical infrastructure near flood zones? Given that climate change is increasing the frequency of major floods, why hadn’t they hardened their protections?
To be fair, The Pentagon has repeatedly listed climate change as one of it's biggest threats for a number of years, but it's currently too politically touchy to do much about.
One report in particular...
> The 22-page assessment delivered to Congress on Thursday says about two-thirds of 79 mission-essential military installations in the U.S. that were reviewed are vulnerable to current or future flooding, with more than half vulnerable to current or future drought. About half also are at risk from wildfires, including the threat of mudslides and erosion from rains following the blazes.
Yes, but concerns about building air bases in locations that flood predate the Pentagon's relatively recent concerns about "climate change", which is little more than political spin.
The truth is that the location of military bases is a political decision and the wisest decision-making processes (e.g., one that included good flooding estimates) are not always used. Of course, reality has a way of intruding into political thinking and decision-making but usually only long after critical decisions were made. But the crows eventually come home to roost.
IOW not everything is driven by the political topic "climate change". Sometimes its simply flooding, flood zones and extremely capitalistic local land developers.
I’d imagine that the location was seen as useful during the Cold War years due to being far inland in a rural area away from likely targets of a nuclear attack.
As for flood mitigation, I’m sure it’s the same as it is anywhere: risk assessments probably considered the likelihood of ‘really bad’ flooding, and the potential impacts, too low to be worth the cost. (As to whether that was wise or not, I’ve got no idea.)
(Edit— from Wikipedia:
”Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington chose to locate the Air Force's crucial long-range atomic strike force at Offutt primarily because the base was centrally located on the North American continent, placing it well beyond the existing range of long-range, nuclear-armed bombers to (then) stay safely out of range of hostile missiles or bomber aircraft.”)
From the omaha.com article on the subject it seems like there was a desire from Offett and an intent to put in greater flood-resistance infrastructure but it was stonewalled by questions about whether it was needed. So i guess the answer is in the realm of "some people knew and planned, but others tried to disregard both warnings and previous near-disaster floods."
Airfields tend to be easier to build on flat, level ground. Strategic reconnaissance and airborne command aircraft make sense to base in a geographically central location so they can easily cover the entire continent.
How is the flooding related to climate change? Seems like 'climate change' is now a catchall bucket for unexpected weather, regardless of being too hot or too cold.
Yes, that's how climate change works. A warmer climate results in more extreme weather. A warmer climate does not result in uniformly warmer (or drier) weather.
The river isn't necessarily going to reach the 45' point that CNS requires for shutdown - it might, but no guarantee.
FCNS shut down due to budgetary concerns - its operational costs were too high to justify keeping it open. The flood was just the last of a long series of issues they had down there.
I'm actually a bit worried about the Red River in North Dakota. 1997 really was not very fun (well, the 96-97 winter was horrid). This rapid melt with too much snow and frozen ground is hitting a lot of places. My parent's place in MN had water coming in the basement apartment. It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are.
> It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are.
I'm from ND originally and remember that flood, and yeah, it floods here in the cities a lot. This was more due to the super: zomg cold+snow, to... zomg its 40F and the entire streets a river cause nobody cleans out the drains in the fall prior to winter so that thaws are ok.
I'll just say in St Paul, rapid thaws means almost everyones basements flood. Even on the hills, its insane how easily it happens.
See the interactive slidable map. A google data center that is probably us-central1 is just above the lake above the 'e' in Detail. The waters appear to still be a ways off. Google says it is in Council Bluffs, Iowa and there's a large google data center there you can find on google maps. A link to the location on google maps: https://goo.gl/maps/xEJt83kKoe22
As I understand it, it needs to be something unforeseen and/or fast moving.
Climate change has been predicted for some time.
So probably not, as the president has well paid advisors that will have advised him of this fact. And the president won't want to overreach his authority.
George Carlin used to criticize people living in flood planes back in the day, catastrophic flooding is such a regular occurrence it made its way into his stand-up routine.
[1]https://weather.com/news/news/2019-03-17-flooding-before-and...