Kentucky Rain Keeps Pouring Down

 And up ahead's another town that's flooded. 😨

Floods in the eastern end of Kentucky along the Appalachian foothills have devastated the area, affecting sixteen counties and killing more than three dozen people.  More rain fell on the region last night.  Among the towns hardest hit was the coincidentally but appropriately named town of Hazard.

Flooding in this part of Kentucky is actually a common occurrence because of the steep terrain and the narrow valleys in between the hills and mountains.  What's different this time is that the rain falls more heavily and more frequently, thanks to the ongoing climate crisis.  Another problem is because is area is in the hinterlands, there is little if any investment in the infrastructure, so there is no system of culverts and pipes the can redirect the flood waters away from populated areas.  Homes that were destroyed overnight will take far longer than before to repair or replace.

This puts the climate bill that Senators Schumer and Manchin agreed to in a more immediate perspective.  Most politicians care about the present, while this bill addresses future climate conditions.  Ironically, current events would suggest that no time is better to pass this bill than now.  

The Show's Not Over Yet . . .

It seems that every time I think a problem has passed, it comes back big time.  And that has led me to start using a certain saying . . .

Last night I reported that Congress had approved a COVID relief package that funs the government through September. Now Trump wants to blow it up by adding more money to relief checks, which Democrats want and Republicans don't want, even after he hadn't been involved in the negotiations.

The show's not over yet, this one's a double feature.

I had trouble getting to the post office to mail our monthly utility bills, but the electricity bill went through all right, and I could bathe a sigh of relief. Except that the cable bill - for the service that gives us the Internet, television broadcasts and telephone service - still hasn't processed twelve days and counting since I mailed it and the due date is tomorrow.

The show's not over yet, this one's a double feature.

We were the victims of credit card fraud, but we got new cards to replace the canceled ones.  Except that my mother had to cancel the replacement for her card due to a computer glitch and she's been waiting for the replacement for the replacement for a week and counting.  And I started getting signed up for money transfer series I never heard of, which I had to report. 

The show's not over yet, this one's a double feature.

We had a big snowstorm last week, but we got through it all right.  So we can enjoy Christmas, right? Maybe not.  Tomorrow night we're expected to get heavy rain and strong winds that could give us the electrical outage we thought we might get in the snowstorm.  The rain is more precipitation than the snow had been (two inches, whereas the foot of snow we got was comparable to an inch of rain), and the winds could gust up to 45 or 50 miles an hour.  

The show's not over yet . . .   

. . . this one's a double feature. 😓

Oh, Fay!

All right, I guess you've heard, we had a little tropical storm in New Jersey yesterday . . . 

Fay, the earliest sixth storm of any Atlantic hurricane season, formed out of a garden-variety low-pressure system off North Carolina and quickly strengthened into a storm serious enough to be given a name, but despite some winds between 50 to 60 miles an hour, it wasn't that bad for my part of the state - just a lot of rain, which we needed anyway.  But I am deeply concerned about what this means for later in the season.  A hurricane in the Northeast is still possible for September or October, according to the almanacs.  And even if you think that almanacs are bunk, the expectation from weather experts that this could be the busiest storm since 2005, which had so many named storms (a lot of which were major hurricanes, like Katrina) that it ran into early 2006 the National Hurricane Center and ran out of names for storms (having to resort to Greek letters), means that the chances of the Northeast getting walloped this year by another storm like Sandy - or something even worse - are very good.  Which of course, is doubleplus ungood.    

There are scarier things than Kanye West and William Barr.

MORE STORMS?

My neighborhood has had at least one severe thunderstorm every week for the past three weeks, and last week we had two - and the second one wasn't supposed to materialize.  Tomorrow (Tuesday), my neighborhood will likely get another severe storm.

And each storm feels like it's been worse than the one preceding it.

See that big red blob of intense rain over northern New Jersey in the NAM 3km projection, for 3:00 PM Eastern time tomorrow, above? That's where I live. 

These storms have left me frazzled, and one more severe storm could send me over the edge. A dead tree up against the wires on my street - :-O - might be sent over the edge. It's not the lightning so much that has been a problem with these storms, but the mile-a-minute wind gusts the come with hem. Even if the overall wind is about five miles an hour or so, one gusty thunderstorm could increase the wind speed tenfold. And that's not to mention the flash flooding.

I won't be here tomorrow; I've already decided on that.  Assuming I still have power, I hope to be back on Wednesday. 

Raining All Over The World

Or so it seems.

We in the metropolitan New York City area have gotten up to two inches of rain - in some areas three inches - and some of that rain fell at an inch an hour, which is like getting a foot of snow.  Not a nor'easter, not a line of  severe thunderstorms, but stormy enough to make people wonder what the hell is going on with this weather (*cough cough*, climate change, *cough cough*).

Oh yeah, the stormy weather we got is a by-product of a major April blizzard in the Plains that also handled the upper Great Lakes region and southeastern Ontario.

It may be spring, but the extreme weather that's been going on since late February is hardly over.  Thanks to a phenomenon no one can comprehend (*cough cough*, climate change, *cough cough*), this period of extreme weather is only just beginning.

And thanks to Scott Pruitt and his new coal-lobbyist deputy, it's not going to end. >:-(   

Forty Winks

I give up.

I thought we'd make it this time.  Up to this past Wednesday, we hadn't had a single electrical blackout in our house since November 2016. It looked like we'd get through the entire year of 2017 without an outage - or at least get through this November without one.  Think of it . . . a full year without an outage.

Then we got two outages.

The power went off this past Wednesday night for a moment and then it came back on.  Then it went off for more than a moment, maybe about a minute or so - before going back on again.  Outage number 39 . . . and outage number 40 since November 2009.  Forty winks.

I now officially surrender.  My mother and I will never again have a whole year, calendar or otherwise, without an electrical blackout.   And I'm going to have to get used to resetting the clocks more often than twice a year (due to Daylight Savings Time). 

This past Wednesday afternoon, a severe thunderstorm hit my neighborhood and warranted an official warning from the National Weather Service through 2:15 PM, but the power stayed on, even if the cable service went out for about five minutes.  (We got through more than a full year without a cable outage, at least - one year, one month and one day to be exact, so that ought to count for something.)   So I can't figure out why it would go out momentarily - twice - close to 11:00 PM, long after the storm - and the steady rain it ushered in - had passed.   Maybe it had to do with the 2.6 inches of rain my area got in under ninety minutes that afternoon, which may have compromised things.  Maybe it was a wayward tree branch.  Maybe it was just the electric company's incompetence.

I don't have time for more conjectures, because the forecast calls for it to be rainy and stormy today . . . and to leave it at that would be like saying that Scarlett Johansson has pleasant features.  We're getting a day-long rainfall that could include heavy thunderstorms, and the Storm Prediction Center has already put New Jersey in a severe-thunderstorm risk zone for today.  We were in a marginal-risk zone this past Wednesday, and even the smallest risk turned out to be a big deal.

If there's a silver lining here (and believe me, I know I'm grasping at straws), it's that we are expected to get about an inch of rain over the whole day, not double that and half again in a few hours.  Of course, a heavy thunderstorm could give us extra rain if it hits at the right time, and the ground may still be very saturated from Wednesday's storms, so I think we're in trouble again.  We could lose our electricity again today, and maybe for more than a moment.

It's over.  I no longer have any hope of having uninterrupted electricity for at least a year.  Especially with climate change, which causes the weather that gives us blackouts, in the offing.  And I hope Steve Bannon goes straight to hell for getting Trump to reject the Paris Agreement (more about that later).  

Rain and Wind and Thunder, Oh My!

It doesn't look like much on the model map for 2 PM Eastern Time today. 

The American Northeast is getting one to two inches of rain today, as much rain as we got on Tuesday.  So what? you ask, that's obviously nothing you can't handle.

Well, what if I told you that the ground was already well saturated before Tuesday, and we're no under a flood watch for the second time this week? 

What if I also told you that a strong wind is also expected - mainly in the upper teens in terms of speed but also with gusts of 40 miles an hour possible?

What if I also told you that my area could get severe thunderstorms with even higher gusts that would almost certainly topple trees onto power lines and cause outages that could last a long, long time?

What if I also told you that I have to go out today four times? 

Well, I am telling you all that - right now.  This could be the worst storm my area has seen in a long time, even counting the recent winter storms we've had.

Since we haven't had an electrical outage of an hour or longer for awhile, and since my power utility has been reliable in very nasty weather of late, I'm cautiously optimistic that we will not lose electricity.

Our cable service, on the other hand . . . :-O

Stick around . . . I may be back.    

Preparing For Irene

I'm ferociously trying to to everything I normally do that requires electricity before Hurricane Irene hits New Jersey on Sunday. I'm astonished at the precautions being taken. All of Cape May County on the state's southern tip between the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay is being evacuated, and the entire New York City rapid transit system shuts down Saturday until further notice. I'm impressed that people are preparing for Irene and doing everything possible in advance to minimize the damage. But all of the storage of supplies, all of the battening down of various hatches, and all of the tree limb cutting probably won't keep the experience of Irene from being a possibly catastrophic experience that we will remember - and clean up from - for a long time.

Some good news: Irene may be weaker than expected when it hits the New York area, and it may make landfall on Long Island farther east from the city then previously expected. In West Caldwell, New Jersey, where I live, about four inches of rain are expected with winds at 55 miles an hour. Thank goodness my mother and I live on higher ground.