Side Tracked

“Honeymoon Catch, Sept 1912” The bride is not identified but it looks as though she was a successful angler. It’s hard to see, but she’s standing in mud, a situation with which I, unfortunately, can relate.
..

You might not associate hurricanes and tropical storms with the Appalachian Mountains as we are 300 miles from the Atlantic, but when the perfect storm forms over the Gulf Coast we can get heavy rains that funnel through the narrow river valleys. This happened last week when Fred came through. It was sudden and devastating to communities on the rivers. Lives were lost. Two hundred homes were destroyed. Many small, local businesses, including our fabulous little brewery were damaged.

I was lucky. My husband’s childhood home which we own but do not live in, is on the Pigeon River in Clyde, NC. Unlike 2004 when Hurricane Frances and nine days later Hurricane Ivan both brought four feet of water into the house, we had only about five to eight inches. There was a thick layer of mud on the floors, but thanks to the best friends in the world and the kindness of strangers, the house is now clean and dry.

One thing that helped was that money was spent to develop a flood runoff park just upstream from my little town. It’s an example of town planning that worked to lessen the impact of this flood. Upstream the situation was much more devastating.

The 2004 floods were referred to as 100 year events, but here we are seventeen years later with another one. Only fools think climate change is not real. We need to look at the attitudes toward climate change of candidates at all levels of government. We simply cannot continue on this path.