Unplugging the Worry Machine
While it appears we'll get enough rain this weekend to bring thoughts of Noah's Ark (or should it be NOAA's Ark?), my Shipoke neighborhood in Harrisburg, Pa., appears to have avoided yet another serious flood. A look at the latest AccuWeather map finds that less rainfall is being predicted than 24 hours ago. But it's still a lot, and I won't rest easy till it's over and the upstate rainfall has moved safely past me on the Susquehanna River, which I can see from my window (although barely, the sun is just now rising) as I write this.
This one didn't get to the nail-biting, clear-out-the-basement-and-first-floor stage, unlike the flood scare in late June. On the night of June 27, the streets of my neighborhood were choked with moving vans carrying furniture into storage. It is always somewhat comforting, if you look at the history of floods in Harrisburg, to note that they are separated by many years. The last bad one was in September 2004 and before that it was January 1996. From there you jump back to the granddaddy of them all, Agnes in 1972. We have endured some brief, intense worry periodically in Shipoke along the way to our infrequent floods. And we party when they don't transpire, although a lot of people are away this weekend so it won't be quite the same.
The fear, spoken by some and unspoken by others, is that global warming is changing the equation, that the flood cycle will be shortened because hurricanes are becoming more severe. I'm not sure if the Shipoke lifestyle could endure floods in quick succession. Real estate values have been surprisingly immune to the flood threat, because people want to live here, but I wonder if that would continue if floods were more frequent.
Anyway, enough of the worrying. I'm happy to have been wrong, and plan to relax this weekend before heading off for a four-day seminar on energy supply and pricing at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland. As a side note, I removed the AccuWeather links from my previous posts about the Ernesto flooding because they no longer went to the charts and pages that I originally wanted to highlight. Accuweather.com, it seems, recycles its links.
So barring any change in this scenario, it's back to politics and culture. Until the next Shipoke flood scare.