The Weather

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Yeah its a mess alright. pics do not include the flood out areas nor all the railways that only intersect the highways in a few spots.
Basically all the goods coming from the Vancouver ports are shut out from the rest of the country or have to take longer alternate routes, even through the US. More supply chain disruptions.
I did some research on the major flooded out area, east of Abbotsford. Well history goes that they drained a lake and set up farms, created dykes and huge pumping stations to divert the water.

Sumas Prairie is a 90-square-kilometre low-lying agricultural area in Abbotsford's southeast, and about two-thirds of it is the former Sumas Lake, Braun said.

Currently, the Sumas River flows north from the U.S. border toward the Fraser River, and dikes along its banks prevent it from refilling and reforming the Sumas Lake. The breaches in those dikes are allowing the lake to reform faster than the city's Barrowtown pump station can remove the water, according to Braun.

Asked about potential long-term solutions to the issue of flooding on Sumas Prairie, the mayor said the city's current focus is on getting the floodwaters to recede and repairing the damage left in their wake.

"We have a lot of work in front of us," Braun said. "I shouldn't say this, my staff will get mad at me, but I can see that whole structure, that whole dike, having to be repaired - not repaired, rebuilt - to a higher standard."

Some more pics
B.C. flooding update: Latest evacuations, road closures, power outages | Vancouver Sun
 
PRR-It did. Well, not far from you, over here in Vt.


The Irene flood(2011) destroyed five bridges on Rt7, the only north-south road that goes end-to-end from Mass. to Quebec, and for many the only access to their little roads. The railroads were interesting, a bridge in our town was 100 ft from its track.
A river south of Rutland moved a half-mile and cut right through rt 7(its original bridge was fine, just over a dry ravine now).



On the other side of the Green Mtns, there were two towns with only foot access for three days, until they could fix the trails for four-wheelers.


Of course, when Sandy hit the population centers of NY/NJ, our 'little' disaster dropped out of the news, even on the Boston stations.


We are still not done with the damage, and I fear that the BC highways will get fixed, but the towns and isolated places will fade on the priorities list.


Hopefully, the Canadians can sustain interest longer than our ADD society did.
 
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It’s good to remember that the “Sumas Prairie” was a lake until the 1920s, and Mother Nature doesn’t necessarily have a lot of patience for our species’ hubris. The exact locations of major failures of the dikes was predicted years ago, and rebuilding them is no guarantee they won’t fail at least as catastrophically within our lifetimes.
 
Makes me think: it could happen here.
Very much so. The earth's biosphere is undergoing pretty rapid collapse in recent years, and what used to be "thousand year" extreme weather events, are now occurring annually, sometimes even more often than that.

Here in southern BC, for instance, the little town of Lytton set extraordinary heat records for three days in a row back in June 2021, ending up hitting 49.6 Celsius / 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit (!!!), then bursting into flames and wiping itself off the map. During the same time period, the rest of BC was hot enough to result in 800 deaths (over and above the normal rate) during the three or four days of extreme heat.

Just five months later, a month's worth of rainfall fell in a 24 hour period, with the results we are all talking about in this thread. Abbotsford, just a few kilometres east of me, was one of many cities that were flooded. The city I live in could very well have been on that list, as the angry and swollen Fraser river runs just a little north of my home.

I'm sure we've all seen reports about extraordinary (and extraordinarily destructive) weather all over the planet for years now, most particularly during the last decade. The rate and severity of these events is accelerating, as is their coverage of the planet's surface.

There's no safe place any more. If your home hasn't been burned to the ground or flooded with rain-water yet, count yourself lucky so far. But the future remains uncertain for virtually all of us, with no guarantees of safety no matter where you live. Katrina/Louisiana, Sandy/New York, and so on, were just previews of worse and more widespread weather-related disasters to come.

-Gnobuddy
 
I guess Sartre was right.


If "Hell is.. other people" and we have enough people that our lives make a mess of our home, well, welcome to hell, with teasers of occasional 'normalcy'.



We knew things had changed in 2000, when we had no two days above 70 that were dry. Mud season all spring,summer, and fall.


It went from 'eight months of winter, and four months of damn poor sledding' to the opposite, now it's three and nine.
 
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It’s good to remember that the “Sumas Prairie” was a lake until the 1920s,
Let me assist my good friend Chris here. I believe what he meant to say is that Sumas prairie had a 'Sumas Lake' until it was drained for farmland a hundred years ago. The lake was actually only 9000 acres, whereas the prairie is large and can be flooded from multiple sources. In this first case the worst of it came north from Washington state.
 
Well Ed, we sure do have what’s needed. Oak for the structure, cedar for the planks, sitka for the spars and plenty of oil for the sails and lines, and then birch for the life rafts.
Decent biodiversity, excellent agriculture and unlimited salt for the barrels.
Do you think they might be looking for that ‘other’ boat in the wrong place?

EDIT: Originally typed on the iPad and heavily edited on the desktop. Darn spellcheck.
 
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Cal,

Then I may have good news and bad news...

As you know the original tale was spelled in Hebrew which often does not include vowels in the writing. Also also some phonetic options, so the directions to the assisting sons could have been “go for wood.” 😉

Others think it was what we call cedar. (No real definitive answer.)
 
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