Among things demolished by Hurricane Ian was the causeway to Sanibel Island, a popular vacation spot off the coast from Fort Myers. https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/29/us/sanibel-causeway-bridge-florida-hurricane-ian/index.html
DeathSentence says:
“It washed away roads, it washed away structures that were not new and could withstand that,” he said, adding that while many people evacuated, some people had been brought off the island safely. Air operations continue, the governor said, since the area is inaccessible by ground.
The causeway will be rebuilt, DeSantis said. “But that’s not something that will happen overnight.”
(YA THINK????)
This makes me want to scream, "So DeathSentence, what about the $12 mil American Rescue Plan dollars you spent on a stupid political ploy to move 50 migrants from Texas to Massachusetts????? Maybe some of those "not new" causeway structures could have been upgraded or replaced??? And now, although, "the horse has left the barn", maybe if you have any $$ left you could use them to speed the rebuilding??"
But no, no doubt the a..h..e will beg the Feds for emergency money for rebuilding. Double-dip much?? (And even then I wouldn't be surprised if DS used the emergency money to fund still more of his idiotic games. )
Floridians and the nation MUST hold him accountable for any poor designs he (and others) have made which have negatively impacted recovery efforts after Ian.
To be fair, if there are any positive ones, they should also be recognized.
I hope misuse of funds doesn't negatively impact Floridians.
As I am typing this, it has been announced Ian is now back to Hurricane 1 status. Sending love and prayers to Georgia, and the Carolinas. What a ride Ian has had!
I am sorry, but I have got to post this.
I saw pictures of the houses at Fort Myers just prior to Hurricane Ian (I went there once on vacation), and my first thought was "this is going to be SOOOOOOO bad."
Yes, many of the newer homes withstood the wind damage. Good for them. But none of the homes looked as though they could possibly survive flooding. AT ALL!
Believe me, there is a lot to consider when building to protect from flooding. I went to law school in Grundy Virginia (Appalachian School of Law). It is located right in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains where Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia meet. (If any of you ever watched "October Skies," it is literally five minutes away from there, so it is a very rural area. Nothing to do except enjoy nature and study!)
You may not believe it, but the area is very prone to flooding. You would think that being in a mountain range not near major river systems would make us safe, but it was the complete opposite. The terrain was such that if there was excessive rain, it had nowhere to go but inside people's homes.
The good people of Grundy Virginia knew this (having suffered several floods over the last few decades), so while I was in law school, the town and all surrounding residences were literally raised up several feet. Drainage systems were built, and buildings were built on literal stilts (by stilts, I mean millions of tons of concrete and building materials designed to hold up foundations of buildings so that the local Walmart was literally several feet above two levels built into the bedrock that served as an indoor parking garage in the best of times and a twelve-foot barrier against water in the worst of times. I learned quite a bit watching the designers and builders because it was important for us law students to know what was going on construction wise so we could travel around the construction areas. In a nutshell, the town was risen several feet higher on strong construction to protect businesses and residences from flooding.
I could not help comparing my quaint mountain community from my law school days to the building I saw in Florida and think that I was looking at shoddy workmanship. Yes, I know that Florida prides itself on airy, tropical buildings and flooding is an occasional hazard. But if a small town in the middle of Virginia can read the writing on the wall and make changes to ensure that the next flood does not devastate the town, then why can't the rest of us. Yes, it is very expensive (the town took out a grant and had to increase taxes a bit), but isn't it better to pay now rather than later? Would it not be better to build new homes with flooding in mind (especially in a state prone to hurricanes, of all things) than to focus on wind damage?
I hope that the Republican party gets over their self-righteous hypocrisy and environment denialism so they can work with us to make permanent solutions instead of sticking their heads in the sand. But I wouldn't count on it, or even for them to pay a price for it in the future. After all, Abbott is still projected to win Texas, and he can't ensure that his people will have a working electric grid, or even if their kids are safe from school shootings. So why should we expect any different results here?
@allyn You are right that Florida has a ways to go to repair their flooding issues. I am waiting for someone here who knows more about Florida's water table issues, which are nothing like any other state. I wonder if @ana would be interested in helping with this, if nothing else than to send us to some good articles on the topic. My understanding has been that near the coasts and in many parts of Florida, the water table is only a few feet below ground, making flood plans very challenging.
As sea level rises, the ground water in FL has and will become more saline.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/ever-historic-water-levels.htm
As water warms, it expands, and because the oceans have absorbed most of the planetary warming, there is already sea level rise (8-9 inches since 1880). So, combining the rapidly increasing ice melt with thermal expansion, even the conservative sea level rise estimates would make constructing large expensive homes and buildings in coastal FL seem unwise and wasteful. Those of us who have long lectured on the threats of climate change point to storm surges as a major threat of even slight sea level rise which, unfortunately, Ian demonstrated perfectly.
About 10 years ago, in a conference that I attended, Robert Watson, a British climate scientist who was one of the founders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, opened the meeting announcing that we are looking at 1,000 years of sea level rise. Even before Antarctic ice shelves became so unstable, Jim Hansen was predicting a 6 ft sea level rise in this century but the Antarctic instability means all bets are off. We just had a 18 ft storm surge predicted in Fl--and that is now. Even centrally located Orlando suffered from serious flooding with Ian. There is no high ground in the state and no "final" number of feet of sea level rise to which the state could adjust/adapt.
Still, the political and social pressure to rebuild will be strong even though it makes little sense. New Orleans provides a historical example of an unwise rebuilding effort.
Here's a link to a site that explains a lot, including how salt water seeps up through limestone that underlies most of the state.
https://sealevelrise.org/states/florida/
I grew up in Florida and it while wasn't always a national laughingstock, it has always been a building developer's paradise. Here's an article that explains how people are hoodwinked into buying homes in places no one should be building homes:
Republicans have been in charge of FL for over two decades now, and we all know how they love to bury their heads in the sand. And people keep moving down there because of the promise of no state income tax and a kind of southern version of Don't Tread on Me. I feel sorry for folks who move there without knowing what they're getting into. I've said this before on this site, that one day we'll wake up (maybe soon) and there will be headlines about how banks have stopped underwriting mortgages for FL real estate, in some areas, and the economy there will collapse. FL is reliant on the economies of South Florida and the areas surrounding Disney World. It can't survive without both, and both won't survive, not long-term.
@lynnventura
Growing up in NYC we used to have a saying: "If you believe that, I have a lovely home on some swampland in Florida to sell you."
It's been going on from day one - or the day after Ponce de Leon arrived.
Re: the water table--- the depth to it varies according to location, the geology of the location, and the weather patterns. Right now the water table of the Floridan Aquifer in North Florida is quite high because we have had a lot of rain in the past year despite that lack of tropical storms. This is generally a good thing because it means there is plenty of groundwater available for use. It does make things more flood prone. As you said, the water table can be very close to the surface. The water table may actually intersect the land surface. Pretty much anywhere that you see a lake or decent-sized stream in Florida, you are actually looking at a place where the water table is higher than the land elevation. The Everglades water level *is* the water table in that location . (There are also surface runoff streams not connected to the water table but those are generally small and/or ephemeral.)
Another advantage of a high water table is that it helps hold back coastal saltwater intrusion. If you've got a lot of fresh groundwater flowing from under the land into the sea (yes there are freshwater springs in the ocean), it makes it a lot harder for saltwater from the ocean to flow back towards the land. And saltwater is more dense then freshwater, so within the aquifer, the freshwater is on top and the saltwater is down beneath it. Problems with saltwater intrusion are really bad in the Tampa Bay area and in SE Florida because of the rampant building. Every time someone drills a water wall, they are sucking water out of the freshwater aquifer, meaning the saltwater rises up, or flows from the coastline, to replace it. When freshwater wells near the coasts suck out too much fresh water, people start getting salty water in their wells. This is directly human-induced.
@raincloud 's link also shows how sea level rise exacerbates the saltwater intrusion problem simply by adding more saltwater pressure to push back the freshwater underneath the land.
Here's a little article about Florida springs and the hydrologic cycle: https://fl.water.usgs.gov/PDF_files/fs151_95_spechler.pdf
And for those of you who really want to get educated about how groundwater works, here's a basic intro-level geology lecture I found on youtube. (I find that to many students this type of information is a total revelation):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eu55XyKBSM
@ana Thank you for your explanation. it's so interesting and actually it's kind of wondrous even though we are talking about a catastrophe.
@raincloud, thank you for your explanations too, and the links. It's better than anything I have found in the media.
This is good news, indicative of a Turning:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/politics/marijuana-decriminalization-white-house-joe-biden/index.html
Continuing our conversation over here, so as not to hijack a thread for predictions.
One of the newsletters I subscribe to is "Under the Big Tent" from Crooked Media, written by Brian Beutler. I find him no-nonsense and very insightful.
One of the reasons I believe we need to do more than just vote our consciences has to do with what's going on globally. Democracy is very much under attack everywhere. This is why I think we need to start fighting dirtier, and learn how to trick those who would vote authoritarian into voting in their own interests, rather than against as the autocracy has convinced them to do repeatedly.
Here's an excerpt from this week's email, I think this will underscore my point a bit. I am only a pessimist in the short-term, I agree that long term the sacred feminine will prevail. Luv ya, unk-p and I am enjoying this discussion.
Beyond improving America’s moral authority and insisting upon reciprocity in alliances, giving KSA(Saudi Arabia) the boot would be a clear signal to other authoritarian governments or parties (including in Israel) that governments form relationships with the United States, not with the American political party most willing to engage in quid pro quo arrangements that trade geopolitical favors for domestic partisan advantage, and that they will face consequences if they play favorites in our politics.
Really the only thing that makes these schemes so alarming is that the leaders of liberal governments don’t seem to know how to respond to them. Putin and Trump and MBS aren’t great walking billboards for autocracy. Russia and the GOP aren't kicking tons of ass because they’re run by strongmen. This nationalist international is fairly self-discrediting, even if the liberal order has bloodied its own nose more than once over the years. But the bad guys aren’t campaigning worldwide on their merits; they’re working angles of deception and sabotage to drag small-d democratic candidates below the threshold of guaranteed victory, so they can slip into power and fleece their societies. They’ve charged and retreated a few times since Brexit, but just in the past couple weeks or so we’ve watched them make tragic gains in Sweden and Italy and live to fight another day in Brazil, even as they’ve left catastrophe in their wake.
So we need more vigilance. As a first step we need people who believe in democracy to recognize they’re not simply vying for power against legitimate rivals in free and fair elections, but under assault by a faithless opposition in concert with conspirators in foreign governments. (As a second step, we might consider charging Donald Trump for literally any of the many crimes we know he committed.) We need leaders who want to stop bad actors from manipulating the public, instead of just hoping the public will see through it all and vote in alignment with economic indicators. Leaders who see the news out of OPEC and Twitter (and Delaware, and anywhere else), suspect that shenanigans are afoot, and sound the alarm.
@laura-f love ya too, Lalabella!
Today i turned on the local news, hoping to catch the weather forecast. Instead, it was a little 1 minute story about how dangerously close we are to immenent nuclear holocaust. And then,without even cutting to a commercial break, the two cheerful newsreaders went right on to Sports. They were smiling and laughing. "How 'bout them Astros! Go team!. Hahaha". They spent much more time, and emotional involvement on that (non)story, then the one about possible nuclear war. Are they robots or something? Do they even know what words mean?
So then, a few minutes later, when a republiclan campaign worker knocked on my door, i guess i was not in a mood for any more b.s.
She was a young Latina, asking me to vote against County Judge Lina Hildago, who is also a young Latina. "Why would i do that?" i asked. "What's wrong with Lina?"
"She is too Soft On Crime(tm)! Do you enjoy crime?"
"Oh" i said, "but i remember last election, when we voted all the republiclans out of County government, and the very next day, the police union went on tv, and pouted out loud that they would no longer bother to fight violent crime in the city, bc of the hateful way we voted. Same thing they are doing in most every other blue city."
"But but democrats always coddle criminal" she tried to say, but i cut her off with "MISSISSIPPI!" "How many decades has GD Mississippi been under repubs, and are still number 1 in crime? And what about Donald Trunp? His crimes are big enough to see from the freaking Space Station!"
"I guess you don't want a yard sign, then?" she asked.
"Sure. How many ya got? I will be happy to take them to the recycling facility."
Jon Stewart!
OMG! This interview with the Attorney General of Arkansas.
OMG! It is a total brilliant take down.
Can he take down everyone who needs taking down?
They probably won't sit down with him...because he is logical, intelligent, relentless and gifted. Oh, and RIGHT!!
LMAO
Tell'em how you really feel!!
And yes, that actually is a valid strategy - take as many yard signs as they'll give you and toss them.
My SIL lives in Tampa Bay area - her house is surrounded by MAGAts, flags and all. Since 2016 she goes around at night removing and trashing all the MAGA candidate signs she can get her hands on. I was gonna go help in 2020, alas the pandemic... And I keep forgetting to gift her a new black hoodie too, or a Guy Fawkes mask.
My SIL lives in Tampa Bay area - her house is surrounded by MAGAts, flags and all. Since 2016 she goes around at night removing and trashing all the MAGA candidate signs she can get her hands on. I was gonna go help in 2020, alas the pandemic... And I keep forgetting to gift her a new black hoodie too, or a Guy Fawkes mask.
Russian plutonium: .They think it ended up in North Korea.
SIL? - took me a while to figure out what that was, now I guess it is Sister in Law.
Who is "they"?
They = US intelligence sources
SIL is sister-in-law - sorry it was end of day and I was getting tired of typing!
This is why I think we need to start fighting dirtier, and learn how to trick those who would vote authoritarian into voting in their own interests, rather than against as the autocracy has convinced them to do repeatedly.
I'm not sure about the rest of the world (though I suspect it might be similar), but in the U.S. all you have to do is convince the Republican base that if they vote a certain way they're "owning the Libs." The Republicans don't have a platform or a moral or ideological compass anymore. And just look at the way Fox news is constantly flip-flopping on issues and gaslighting their viewers that they didn't previously support something yesterday that they oppose (and are totally outraged about) today because it's the opposite of what Democrats want or because it offends Trump. A while back it was all their outrage about "defund the police" and now they want to "defund the FBI." They're about getting tough on crime and about "Blue Lives Matter" until some of their base start an insurrection at the Capitol, assault Capitol police officers, and try to destroy democracy. The Republican platform and news is almost all reactionary at this point.
All we need is for Nancy Pelosi, AOC, or some other "boogeyman" from among the democrats to come out and publicly say that we want something that we don't really want or that we don't want something that we really do (and perhaps put a slight spin on it where Republican voters might feel they are being slighted). For example, "we think trans folks should be exempt from the military and only cisgender folks should have to go fight in wars." The next thing you know, Fox news will be asking why trans folks should get special privileges and only cisgender folks are being put in life and death situations. Or perhaps, a big name Democrat suggests that we should gut our current healthcare system. Then Fox and the Republicans would be doing political and verbal back flips over why we should keep the Affordable Care Act.