Saturday, April 30, 2011

Storms of Spring


It is springtime in the South, and that means big storm systems. In good years (for agriculture, not city life) we get two weeks of more or less solid rain in the spring, causing flooding of waterways. We may get the same in the fall, some years. This shortens an otherwise very long growing season.
The tree in this picture died last year. We left it as a convenient place to park the bird feeder, but it blew over in the most recent storms. It hit the fence and did nothing more than cosmetic damage. I cut it up with a hand saw today, to be hauled off later.
The storms are being especially destructive this year, probably because we have chosen to take up agricultural/forested land with concentrated population centers. The destruction is awful to contemplate. There are reasons why this continent was not as densely populated as Europe when the Europeans arrived. It simply has large sections that are not very hospitable to large groups of people- too wet, too dry, too hot, too swampy, too stormy or unstable geologically, etc.
Here in Memphis homes and businesses are being flooded as the Mississippi backs up into its tributaries. A lot of people decided that the older parts of the city (on higher ground) were not desirable anymore, so they wanted to move out. "Out" has a lot of low ground in the regions surrounding the city. We should either build enough levees to protect the whole thing or bring the population back to high ground. Selling people houses in"100-year flood plain" should be outlawed, plain and simple. More storms are coming in the next few days. I pray they don't bring more destruction. We've had enough to last a while.

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