Eat, work, play, donate, travel and live ecologically to stop the monster floods that are jacked on climate change – purty please!

Bigger and record floods keep happening around the world. Here is a little retrospect on the Boulder flood that took a few months out of my life.

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Via the Huffington Post [HuffPost]

As Earth’s climate changes, extreme floods now described as “100-year” and “500-year” events are expected to become more frequent. So will the number of times that the public gets confused by those labels.

Some experts wonder if it might be time to scrap such terminology.

So-called 100-year floods are becoming so common that the metric “is pretty much useless now as a baseline for an extreme event,” said Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia and a former president of the American Meteorological Society.

“We are in a new normal,” he told HuffPost.

Over the last five days in Houston, the former Hurricane Harvey has unloaded huge amounts of rain — more than 50 inches in some areas — triggering the city’s third “500-year flood” in as many years. Water levels could yet reach the “1,000-year” benchmark — or higher.

huffingtonpost: 100-year-flood-climate-change_us_59a6eaa3e4b084581a14ea14

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Colorado’s 500 Year Flood

[aka Colorado’s 1000 Year Rain]

1,500 Homes Destroyed

1,750 People Evacuated by Air

2.9 Billion Dollars in Damage

17.15 Inches of Rain in 8 Days

Rivers And Aquifers Contaminated

11,000 Evacuated

8 Deaths

A river of Pacific moisture flowed northerly into Colorado during the September 2013 flood event, as seen in images from the NOAA GOES 13 satellite.

The September 2013 flood was strongly influenced by extremely high surface sea temperatures off the west coast of Mexico, south of Baja and west of Guadalajara.

Sea surface temperatures there were over 30 degrees Celsius and 1 degree Celsius above normal in August 2013, “which made it the hottest spot for the ocean in the western hemisphere,” the paper said.

Additionally, “An incredible 77 mm (millimeters) of total column water vapor was recorded in the atmosphere in that region by NASA satellites.”

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choke on another 500 year flood
taste the climate change blood
hear its howling death ballad
feel the poison in the mud

We need a 500 Year Flood song.

Musicians :: Record this song and we’ll add it here, and maybe on our home page or environmental songs page.
Artists :: Do a video, art, dance or media for this song and we’ll add it here, and maybe on our home page or environmental songs page.
Fans :: Donate $1 or more to sponsor a better version of this song. Donate $44 or more to get a shared copyright certificate for this song or your choice of one of our other environmental songs.

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Here in Colorado the drought is weakening the pine trees making them more prone to the pine beetles that are now destroying many of our forests. Our forest fires keep getting hotter, more deadly and harder to stop. The hotter forest fires are now killing the forest soil. But when it does rain, the dead forest soils are more prone to erosion.

Our less frequent rains now tend to more extreme because a warmer atmosphere tends to hold more water. The
bigger rain storms result in higher and faster stream flows making erosion worse.

Our record flood in 2013 killed 10 people, destroyed 1,800 structures and damaged at least 1,600 more. Our September flood cost our region and the federal government about 3 billion dollars and killed 10 people.

The intensity and the resulting damage caused by our flood was made more likely by climate change.

The Boulder area broke every rainfall record in its books, for a day, for a month, and, ultimately, for a year, highlighted by 9.08 inches of rain falling in one 24-hour period at the peak of the deluge.

1,700 residents from Jamestown, Salina, Lyons and other communities were evacuated by helicopter extractions of in the largest airlift since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

More than 17 inches of rain poured on some parts of the Front Range over five days. 1,200 FEMA workers and thousands of volunteers have toiled.

The federal government has sent almost $285 million to Colorado in low-interest loans, national flood insurance payments and grants to individuals, families and local governments.

We got so much rain that some gauges were overwhelmed or rendered non-functional.

Fortunately there were some short breaks during the rain that helped keep it from being worse.

It likely will happen again and it could have been worse.

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Resources

+ smithsonianmag: climate-change-turning-500-year-floods-24-year-ones-180956781
+ washingtonpost: harvey-marks-the-most-extreme-rain-event-in-u-s-history
+ HuffPost: Climate Change Has ‘Loaded The Dice’ On The Frequency Of 100-Year Floods
+ washingtonpost: we-still-dont-know-how-to-talk-about-floods/
+ denverpost: big-thompson-flood-still-colorados-worst
+ yourboulder.com: boulders-flood-history

Song lyrics in comments.