Monday, August 15, 2011

Glug, glug ...

Ain't no such thing as "climate change", right?

Record rains here yesterday, almost 11" in 24 hours at Chez Fixer, and for the first time in a long time, I worried about flooding. One of the great things about living on Long Island is, to quote Danny DeVito in Twins, "[We're] the crap?" that was once the top layer of Quebec, Canada before the last ice age (one of my reasons for saying we should secede from the US and join Canada). We're on a glorified sand bar here (120 miles long by 15 miles wide) and usually, even in hurricanes, the water just soaks into the ground (after 2" of topsoil and 6" of red clay, there's nothing but sand). The only flooding we used to get here was in shore communities, not from rainfall but from tidal surges.

Not yesterday.

FREEPORT, N.Y. (WABC) -- It will be a sleepless night for families whose homes were flooded by Sunday's soaking rain.

At one point, the water was so high, people were using rowboats to get down the street.

...


I had 3" of standing water in the yard (the dogs were not pleased) yesterday and all the electronics were acting stupid (we still have above-ground electric, cable, and phone lines), let alone the lights flickering regularly.

It seems, over the past couple years, that we've had arctic winters and tropical summers. It's gotten so people around here just expect the worst when inclement weather is forecast (when people around here keep sandbags in storage, "just in case" you know something fucked up is happening). They saying another few inches today. Thank god it ain't snow.

And Al Gore is fat.

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