I usually try to come up with a topic a couple of weeks before the NFTH comes out. With parts of Vermont inundated by torrential rains on July 10 and again on July 30, I thought I had found this month's story. But the appearance of Hurricane Debby has certainly taken over the weather news. I had to tweak the focus of what I had already written.
It’s an understatement to say that the weather has been making headlines across the country in the last few weeks and months. Record heat in the southwest, fires all up and down the west coast, and the hurricane season just getting underway. Not weather-related, there was also the unexpected eruption of the Black Diamond pool at Yellowstone a couple of weeks ago that sent tourists running for cover (LINK).
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Yellowstone Hydrothermal Explosion July 23 |
In the past, we’ve generally felt pretty safe from the extremes here in Vermont, aside from the occasional blizzard and of course Mud Season. With no ocean coastline, we're not immediately concerned with rising sea-levels, and hurricane winds generally fizzle out before they get here. Add in the fact that we’re far from tornado alley, not particularly earthquake prone, and nowhere near the Pacific “ring of fire”.
Our sense of security was only reinforced in 2020 when the independent ProPublica published a county-by-county climate study of the entire United States, and came to the statistical conclusion that the safest place to live in the coming century will be.... Lamoille County (Stowe area) in Vermont. Orange County (our fair town of Randolph) ranked second.
The study was based on several factors, including heat, sea-level rise, fire potential, and economic damage. Curious as to where your particular county rates, based on the ProPublica statistic? Click on THIS LINK and scroll all the way to the bottom of the story.
Back to Vermont, I can't help but wonder how those statistics would differ if taken after the sporadic but increasingly more frequent rain storms of the past two summers.
A storm on July 10, 2023 brought up to 9 inches of rain over 48 hours to some areas of Vermont. Downtown Montpelier - unfortunately built along the banks of a river – was flooded completely and took months to return to normal.
While 9 inches may not seem excessive, Vermont’s hilly terrain serves to turn any gentle stream into a roaring “power-wash” that undermines bridges and surrounding roadways. And so, history repeated itself this year in July - both on the anniversary of last year's flooding and again on July 30. The very localized nature of that storm meant that, while St. Johnsbury (50 miles away) got 8 inches of rain in 3 to 4 hours, here in Randolph we had barely an inch.
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Downtown Montpelier during the post-flooding clean-up last summer |
The rainfall totals for Florida and the Carolina's as a result of Hurricane Debby are just coming in -- in measures of feet, not inches. I hope that those of you living in those areas have stayed relatively dry on higher ground.
Meanwhile, the Vermont Emergency Management Team has put out the following warning for our region and the rest of the East Coast. I hope I don't have to write about Vermont flooding next month.
P.S. Another thing to worry about: just the other morning I saw an article about "Apophis", an asteroid roughly 1,000 feet in diameter, that will come within 20,000 miles of the Earth's surface on (I'm not making this up) Friday the 13th, in April 2029. Read about it at THIS LINK.
Maybe rising sea levels will be the least of our problems.
