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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7793 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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Also outside of the coastal areas it is virtually impossible to be caught off guard by a flash flood. The topography of Florida precludes the sort of sudden deluges of water pouring down on unsuspecting towns, rather it would be a slowly rising water level that gives someone time to find elevation.

Like I try not to downplay the power of a hurricane, but Florida is uniquely well-positioned to survive and eventually recover from an event.

More importantly, this also isn't their first rodeo.

Florida is well-acquainted to dealing with hurricanes. They've had devastating category 5 storms in recent living memory that were extremely and extensively damaging, yes. But there's something odd I've begun to note with hurricanes, especially in the recent years - people have begun to learn from them. Infrastructure modified. Procedures amended. Housing codes changed. So that when the next one comes through, people and infrastructure are actually better able to handle it than the previous one.

This is the reason why Helene is so devastating - this is a region of the country that just doesn't have to deal with this sort of weather. It's a one-off fluke, their one-in-a-century storm. No one sensibly could have predicted it would have happened, no one could have accounted for it. Mother nature be like that, sometimes.

Yes, there was a marked difference between the impacts that occurred in areas that were built up in the 70's and 80's and 90's to those built up post-2003ish.

Anywhere that has lucked out to not receive a hurricane hit in a few decades is more likely to get totally obliterated when one does come through.

But houses built to recent codes and specced to survive high winds can make it through mostly without damage, sans a tree falling on it or something.

Its a 'silver lining' of a hurricane strike, the stuff not built to current code will go away, and ideally be replaced with structures that will survive future strikes, and so the whole state becomes hardened against future impacts.

That, and the absolute speed and efficiency with which utilities are restored and cleanup ensues is a stark contrast from how things went even 20 years ago.

I don't know if there's a better answer where structures that are vulnerable get updated or replaced (with whose money?) over time, or if we are just resigned to having to clean up and rebuild such places after the fact.

The topography of Florida precludes the sort of sudden deluges of water pouring down on unsuspecting towns, rather it would be a slowly rising water level that gives someone time to find elevation.

Can you help me understand why this is? I would’ve thought Florida, so much of it near the coast, would be more prone to rapid flooding. The water has a much shorter distance to reach wherever it’s flooding after all.

Or is your point just that people somewhere like Florida are accustomed to flooding so would be carefully observing water levels?

Imagine that a bunch of rain falls into the mountains surrounding a valley. It ALL has to flow down to the valley, then flow through the valley as water tries to reach the lowest point.

Enough water collected in the mountains, flowing down a valley, all at once, can be a concentrated force that crushes most things it encounters. Like a GIANT waterslide, the water collects and gains velocity on the way down.

Florida has no mountains. We're flat. All the rain falls on the state and mostly just sits there. We have a lot of rivers, canals, etc, and the big lake in the middle of the state, so there CAN be flooding, but not a huge rush of crushing water.

Thanks to Helene, one of my friends who lives on a river in Florida (just bought this year, sadly enough) had three feet of water in his house. He was there when it started coming in, and when it hit the one foot mark he was able to load up his car and drive out.

Also Florida sits on a bed of limestone, which is porous, so a decent portion of the water will get absorbed down into the Aquifers.

Downside is there's nothing to stop the wind, so a heavy windstorm will flatten whole areas. But if there's a will to do so, building back up isn't too hard.

Ah right, makes complete sense. I was thinking only of flooding caused by the ocean surging and not rain on land.

Mountains also have another possible source of flash fooding: spring melt.

This was a big part of what tore through Yellowstone a couple years ago; up to 5 inches of rain brought down up to another 5 inches of meltwater, before all that got channeled into the Gardner River. This can't be much of an issue for Tennessee, though. 5 or 10 inches of snow a year there, that would turn into less than an inch of meltwater even in the worst case.

Flash flooding happens when water rapidly appears from somewhere else. This generally requires a ton of water moving into a small area. Imagine you opened a dam into a giant plain. It fills with water but the water is spread the fuck out. Imagine you opened the same amount of water into a valley....it's going to be a valley with a big ass river covering the ground real fast.

Because Florida is wide and flat it fills, but evenly and over a period of time. Valley towns in a mountain though.....

You get flooding from rain when you get rain coming in much faster than it can drain. Florida is VERY well-drained; there's few bottlenecks between wherever the water lands and the ocean.

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