Jackson Mess

Jackson, Mississippi's capital and most populous city, is suffering a water crisis brought on by the flooding of the Pearl River that overwhelmed its water treatment system, but the disinvestment in Jackson's infrastructure has been a problem that has been worsening for decades.  Water is running in Jackson once again but it's unconsumable.

The lack of investment in black-majority Jackson is mainly due to white flight and the lack of, as the late Detroit mayor Coleman Young would put it, "plain damn money."  Jackson doesn't have enough of it, and the state can't be bothered to bail it out.  But much of the country doesn't care that Jacksonians have to rely on bottled water just to bathe when, meanwhile in Florida, everyone is really, really excited about the coming launch of the Artemis rocket that will test our ability to return to the moon (a launch that, as of this writing, has been delayed a second time).

NASA wants to go back to the moon and look at the possibility of water at the moon's south pole.  Excuse me? How about focusing on the finding water for the residents of Jackson?  Oh, and a woman and a person of color are going on the mission to find water on the moon?  News flash: There are black women in Jackson on a mission to find water right now! Let the Chinese play with sending humans to outer space so we can fix our own problems here on Earth!   Because we know the Chinese government doesn't care about their people anyway.

I understand that Chinese are having trouble finding water too. 

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 Flood This Time

Don't start looking here for commentary on the competition of Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election - not yet, anyway, as no one knows what's in it.  Today, I want to - no, I have to - talk about the flooding in the Midwest.   

Floods like this one along the Platte River in Nebraska have been so devastating that areas that have never been flooded before like look vast inland seas.  The floods were caused by rapid snow melt  and subsequent rain.  There's no place for the water to go, and it's just sitting there until the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers can drain it all out, leaving a lot of productive farm land under water.  To respond to the inevitable charge that it's only March and the water will likely drain out before planting begins, the flood waters are taking away badly needed topsoil - plowed down to almost nothing after decades - and leaving the land a whole lot less fertile.  It would appear that climate change has come to the Republican heartland, though no one there wants to admit it.

America, whose leaders think climate change is a hoax, was smitten with huge fires in California in 2018, and now it's flooding.  The order has been biblically reversed, but the proportion of the flood is consistent with Scripture.          

Rain, Rain, Go Away!

August has been an impossibly rainy month in my area so far, with flooding so bad even indoor events are getting rained out.

How bad is it?  As I reported here back in 2013, the undevelopable wooded lot in my neighborhood with a brook running down the middle of it was taken over by the neighborhood and developed into a sitting park with flower gardens and a bench and called Waverly Park after an adjacent street (Waverly Place).  I'd hoped to take some pictures of it after having helped get it into shape this year.

Unfortunately, these aren't the sort of pictures I had planned to take.

This is the park viewed from the south after a flash flood hit it on Saturday, August 11 (yesterday).

Here is is again, viewed from the west.

I have never seen it this bad before.  A rain storm in my area usually means that this brook becomes a whitewater rapid.  But not a lake!

The streets adjacent to the park were not affected, and when I went by later in the evening, the flood waters had receded to the point where the bench was accessible.  By the morning, the flood had completely subsided. Fortunately, none of the gardens we planted this year were flooded out.  But there was still foam on the water where the brook enters the culvert under the bench.

Twenty eighteen is turning out to be some year, isn't it?  Four winter nor'easters in as many weeks, a derecho in May knocking out my power for seven hours and change, now this!  And in the outside world there are fires in California and in Sweden above the Arctic Circle while the Iberian peninsula bakes in 116-Fahrenheit-degree heat.  

I tried to stop talking about the weather on my blog for the past few months, but I couldn't contain myself any longer.  Neither can the brook in our neighborhood contain itself.  And the only nation on the planet to razz the Paris Agreement on climate change can expect more of the same from sea to polluted sea.

Did I happen to mention that more flash flooding is possible tomorrow? 

No Cities Matter

Shortly after Houston (below) got flooded by Hurricane Harvey, messages and memes on Facebook suddenly cropped up linking the flood to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Come again?  Here's the deal.  To show how it doesn't make sense to answer the insistence that black lives matter with the retort that "all lives matter," folks have shown messages and memes saying, "I'm going to pray for Houston, but I'm also going to pray for (insert other city here), because all cities matter.  Now, see how stupid that sounds?"

No, I don't.  Because all cities do matter, or at least they should . . . except that in America, cities don't matter.

Look at the past sixty years of how we've treated cities in these United States.  We've denied them necessary federal funding,  we've imposed on them so-called "urban renewal" schemes that ruined their downtowns, uprooted whole neighborhoods, and replaced many established sections of cities with hideous university campuses, soulless housing projects and modernist office complexes, we've destroyed their public transit systems to make room for cars,  we've promoted car-based suburban development in the open spaces outside the cities that drained them of their middle-class populations, and we've rammed freeways through once-proud places like the Bronx and the West Side of Chicago.  We've treated our cities like they're irrelevant, and with a couple of obvious exceptions like New York, I guess they are.  But there was a time when even New York didn't matter, like when President Gerald Ford told New York in no uncertain terms that it would receive no federal help to get out of its 1975 financial crisis.  Look, I've seen my grandfather's old neighborhood in Philadelphia, and it looks like no one has cared enough to take care of it since he left for northern New Jersey in the fifties.  Did I not just comment on the twin fiftieth anniversaries of the major riots in Newark and Detroit and illustrate how those cities haven't mattered since?  Both cities still have a long way to go before they get back to where they once were. 

Houston, ironically, has been undone by its own growth; now the fourth-largest city in the United States, it's become a sprawling collection of suburban-style neighborhoods that have been built on the very land that was needed to remain undeveloped in order to absorb rain water - hence, the flooding.  No serious effort has been made in Houston to build storm water systems to alleviate floods, and no one there has dared challenge the idea that sprawl is the best way to grow and sustain a city.  But that's just another example of how a city in this country doesn't matter.  Houston's chef economy - oil refining, which led to the abundance of cheap gasoline, which led to the car-based living pattern that has destroyed other cities - led to its current predicament, with all of those refining facilities blowing up and causing environmental damage.  Shouldn't that at least matter?

As for older cities, the highways that were pushed through them became what James Howard Kunstler called "Chinese walls" that separated the cities from their suburban satellite communities, where all of the economic development relocated, and created in the central cities a "pathological ghetto culture" (Kunstler's phrase) that now includes rap "music," crumbling infrastructure, high crime, failing schools, deteriorating buildings, in the most extreme cases, dying downtowns.    

Do I have to show you pictures of abandoned skyscrapers in Detroit again?     

So, yes, I'm going to pray for Houston. And Detroit, which has needed a prayer for five decades.  And Newark, New Jersey.  And Newark's neighbor East Orange, a four-square-mile town of 65,000 residents that is bisected by two expressways and has been left to fend for itself against all the urban ills associated with larger cities.  And Baltimore, and other cities, because in a country that doesn't value any of its cities, these places need all the prayers they can get.  It is ridiculous to say that all cities matter, because, again - in America, no cities matter.

And while we focus on the flooding from Harvey, Hurricane Irma is churning out at sea, and the next city we'd better pray for could be Miami, or Charleston, South Carolina . . . or Norfolk . . . or maybe . . . New York. :-O

More on Irma soon.

Like a Hurricane

Hurricane Earl did damage and caused flooding in North Carolina's Outer Banks and should graze southeastern New England. In the greater New York area, it's been a mixed bag. Earl has brought heavy rain to Long Island -a show at the Jones Beach amphitheater was canceled as a result - but much of the metropolitan area was spared. A tropical storm watch was actually in effect for inland northern New Jersey and a tropical storm warning was issued for the entire New Jersey coastline. I can't speak for the Jersey Shore, but in Essex County, twenty miles west of New York City, we were supposed to get showers or possibly a heavy and consistent rainfall.

We haven't gotten a single drop.

Even the wind was light. I forgot to take in some plastic lawn chairs, but it turns out I need never have bothered.

So, my mother and I were spared a sixteenth power outage for the year. Of course, on our block, the power can go out without warning on a calm, clear day.

In fact the power in my house could just as easily be out by the time you read this.

Meanwhile, Earl is going by so quickly, they call it Speedo. ;-)