detroit Detroit: Where the storms settled

[iowndiscti 141]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonvingiano/insane-pictures-of-the-detroit-metropolitan-area-underwater

 

 

 

As you may or may not know, Metropolitan Detroit was in the center of some life threatening storms Monday afternoon. I'm here to tell you guys my side of the story from a first-hand encounter.

     Firstly i must say that i work in the GM technical center on thirteen mile road East, which unfortunately was the greatest impacted area (and IMHO , the epicenter) of all the watery destruction monday night. Everyday i walk two miles to work, thirty five to forty minutes,  from just east of schoenherr ( Pronounced Shay-ner- for anyone wondering) across the area which is littered with small streams and ponds that no one would have ever thought  would become so dangerous. The day started pretty normal for me with the exception of a little rain. the rain was a very light drizzle by the time i made it to work (around 2). Since im still in training at work I was placed in a small windowless classroom in the center of the building so i had no idea what was going on outside. My first inclination that something was wrong was that we had a rolling power-out  across the building at 5:30ish. then about 7 the  glass roof in the cafeteria came crashing in (with rain) from about 25 feet above. Still i chalked it up to the building being slightly on the older side and didn't think much of it.

     things really got serious about 8:30 when the teacher said she would release us an hour  and a half early, at 10 from our 11:30 class. when ten oclock came around we were informed that  we were being barricaded On the GM campus unintentionally by a Semi (Yes, an eighteen wheeler) that had stalled right in front of the gates. my superiors came down and said that basically (because the campus is on higher ground than the surrounding areas slightly) we were  surrounded by water on all sides, basically we were an island in the middle of warren. Since i wasn't driving anyway i was free  to leave. I thought to myself "its only a little bit of water. Im 6'6, what can possibly happen"?

 

     At first - the water was high but still maneuverable. it came up to the mid part of my shin. after the quarter mile walk (from the Chicago entrance of the GM center to Van dyke) the water shallowed out slightly. I was able to cross the street with no problem but when i got to the other side mass hysteria had broken out. Right along the side of the Lowe's a small storm drain had completely overflown just recently and was stranding people in about five feet and the half feet  of brown murky moderately fast moving water. after i realized i couldn't cross it i doubled back to the parking lot of the lowe's where i was met with about  75 - 150 new faces of people who had been stranded on their way home. Some of them were talking about making a swim for it across Van dyke ( which was submerged in about 5.5 feet of  murky dark brown water. Granted, that isn't bad for me because im 6'6 but for the average person who isn't a strong swimmer that's hell). I tried.... i really tried to persuade people to stay put and not to try to make that swim ( there was a small current that i was particularly worried about that pulled you out near the storm drain) but some people were so adamant on it. Once i had crossed the big lake that was once van dyke by straddling the gate down for about half a mile I tried to save at least three cars from being submerged by flagging them down and telling them that the water was a lot deeper than expected just a few hundred feet ahead but they also didn't listen. I don't know if any of the people i warned are okay or not, and i feel bad that i wasn't able to save  or influence anyone. after two and a half hours of walking around trying to direct people to safety while looking for an area of van dyke that wasn't submerged so that i could cross behind it safely i was completely and utterly exhausted both physically and mentally. The whole ordeal was very reminiscent of the last scenes of titanic when the boat is still going down, and they're playing the sad song on the violin.

My only wish now is that everyone affected by this ( all the south east michiganian's, as well as other Mitten simtropolites Such as Nofunk, Jasoncw, Theol'Michiganian, and myself) crisis is now somewhere safe.

[CapTon 592]

I'm sorry that you had to deal with such atrocities but this storm system affected many other people as well, and took lives.

 

The following cities were affected:

 

Detroit, MI

Cleveland, OH

Columbus, OH

Cincinnati, OH

Pittsburgh, PA

Philadelphia, PA

New York City, NY

Washington D.C.

Boston, MA

Baltimore, MD

Montreal, QC

Augusta, ME

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Weather patterns are changing.  Expect trouble for anything built on flood plains and/or riparian sites.  The post-ice-age honeymoon is over.

[SteveMSim 275]

I'm sorry that you had to deal with such atrocities but this storm system affected many other people as well, and took lives.

 

The following cities were affected:

 

Detroit, MI

Cleveland, OH

Columbus, OH

Cincinnati, OH

Pittsburgh, PA

Philadelphia, PA

New York City, NY

Washington D.C.

Boston, MA

Montreal, QC

Augusta, ME

 

Add Baltimore, MD to that list.  Baltimore had a 6.30" deluge Tuesday.

[CapTon 592]

Done .

[SteveMSim 275]

Weather patterns are changing.  Expect trouble for anything built on flood plains and/or riparian sites.  The post-ice-age honeymoon is over.

 

This article from the Weather Underground site backs that up.  Flooding rains are becoming increasingly common, and the deluges earlier this week were unprecedented for the vast areas they covered.

 

http://www.wunderground.com/news/detroit-long-island-baltimore-flood-record-rain-wetter-future-20140814

[CapTon 592]

Weather patterns are changing.  Expect trouble for anything built on flood plains and/or riparian sites.  The post-ice-age honeymoon is over.

It seems that you are suggesting that we are experiencing a thing called climate change. I don't want to start any arguments here just because it would be a never-ending argument, but I don't believe in climate change. I just believe that the Earth goes through ten to twenty-year cycles, where it's either warm or cold.

 

In the seventies, scientists predicted by this time that the Earth would be going through the beginning phases of another Ice Age, and we're not. So I don't believe anything regarding climate change.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

There are other cycles besides the 11 year sun spot cycle and the 20 year winter/spring slippage we have all experienced. 

 

One of the important geologic cycles is the one where the earth goes through a heating/cooling cycle over some twenty thousand years.  I believe we are coming into the nadir of the current cycle and heading towards warmer weather for the next couple of centuries.  Once the permafrost starts releasing the methane locked up there and the oceans get warm enough to release all the methane there, things will accelerate.

[Easy Bakes 253]

then again N.Texas had had one of the mildest summers in a long time. we were actually getting rain and 80f temps in July

[Xenocity 343]

Yet living only 50 minutes north of Detroit, I was left wet with no floods!

[Odainsaker 2,137]

In the seventies, scientists predicted by this time that the Earth would be going through the beginning phases of another Ice Age, and we're not. So I don't believe anything regarding climate change.

One of the important geologic cycles is the one where the earth goes through a heating/cooling cycle over some twenty thousand years. I believe we are coming into the nadir of the current cycle and heading towards warmer weather for the next couple of centuries.

The 1970s was also when the Vostok ice core was drilled, revealing a geologic record of cycles of glaciation for the past 420,000 years of the current ice age. Although not known at the time, these cycles have now been closely matched to Milankovitch cycles of variations in the orbit of the Earth. Reasoning from the cyclical pattern shown in the ice record, it was expected that we were on the cusp of a long cooling cycle with increased glaciation. A brief slowdown in increases of average temperatures in 1960s and 1970s had some thinking that the increases had finally reached a plateau.

The Vostok Ice Core Record:

Left-most side would be further in the past, right-most side brings us to today, with some four major cycles of glacial and interglacial periods in between . We were not at a nadir, but at a zenith! Of course, these are zeniths and nadirs on the scales of ten thousand years...

What has significantly changed from the fairly regular cycles in the ice record induced by the regular cycles in the orbit of the Earth are the measured huge increases in greenhouse gases dumped into the atmosphere in the past 160 years of global industrialization creating dramatic concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane that have never before been seen anywhere in the retrieved ice record. We are now reaching the kinds of greenhouse gas atmospheric concentrations that have only been determined by proxy to have perhaps previously existed 4.5 million years ago, well beyond the known periods of stable climate that ushered forth human civilization.

Plotting in recent CO₂ levels onto our previous graphed record:

We have been directly measuring temperatures for this modern period of emissions, and, indeed, the temperatures have generally been going up. We have also directly measured output from the sun via satellites since the late 1970s, and while solar irradiance has gone through several regular cycles with no great change among them, warming on Earth has since steadily increased.

From the Vostok record, we saw that cycles of increases and decreases in temperatures matched closely with cycles of increases and decreases in CO₂ levels. Now that there is an anomalous spike in the modern era of CO₂ concentration, one sharper and more dramatic than anything previously seen in the record, what might we suppose could similarly happen with temperatures?

Personally, I think it's too late now, and that we are only feeling the slow feedback effects of long-past emissions while our greenhouse gas dumping has only been accelerating. Just wait till China and India, let alone South America and Africa, really get going in their industrialization and modernization. Climate change was always going to happen, has happened in the past, and is happening even now, but now we have added a new spike that was unexpected and unpredictable to the system, and unpredictability is usually messy and expensive.

Ah well, on the good news, though we are now in the dog days of back-to-back 100°F summer weather in San Antonio, Texas, the string of such miserably hot days has not been as long as in recently past summers when we were under the most exceptional of record-breaking heat waves and parching droughts, and we have even had a few thunderstorms this week.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

An interesting set of facts. 

 

We have this misbehaving species, homo sapiens, releasing much more CO₂ than in the past.  Was there a curve for atmospheric methane (CH₄) as well?  This is a much more important (worse) greenhouse gas, and it shouldn't be overlooked.  Methane is one of the main products of organic substance decay.  One of the "bad" things we do is covert it to CO₂ and water by burning it off in landfills and other places.  Is that bad, or should be just release it?  After all, methane is just another fossil fuel, eh?  It is at the bottom of the aliphatic hydrocarbon chain.

[Jasoncw 11,949]

About a week before, there had been a heavy rain which had caused the street infront of my house to flood, all the way to the front lawn. I don't think it had ever flooded like that before.

 

Then the day of this storm, I must not have been paying much attention, because to me it just seemed like a grey rainy day that had a bit of a storm near the end. The street infront of our house didn't flood at all, but our basement got a few inches, and our basement has only flooded a few times (one time was due to human error down the block and not from rain).

 

Then on the news all the footage was being shown. The freeways were flooding enough to be impassable, and some freeways flooded all the way to the top of the ramps, as if it was a river. At least one of the pumps that normally keep water out of the freeway had broken or something and was gushing water which caused a lot of erosion under the service drive and caused some of the nearby pavement to wash away. Monday is garbage pick up day for my area, and up and down the streets are destroyed carpets and furniture.

 

Luckily we only store things in our basement, and almost everything was either elevated on a shelf or kept in plastic containers, so we only lost a rug that we should have thrown out in the first place, and a few other random things that we were just as well without. We mopped the floor and cleaned off the affected objects, and in all honesty the storm probably left our basement cleaner than it was before. But most people weren't so lucky and lost stuff. My brother and sister in law bought their house two years ago, furnished the basement, and my brother uses it as an office and a den, and the flooding wrecked a lot of stuff.

 

But really, even though this is unprecedented flooding for Detroit, other parts of the country are regularly in the news for their natural disasters, and even this flood doesn't seem as bad as most of the stuff you hear about, and considering that this is the first natural disaster in generations, we're not doing too bad.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Speaking of Detroit, is anyone in Windsor, Ontario?  I don't remember seeing anything about flooding there and it is south of Detroit.

[Easy Bakes 253]

my parents are in Saginaw, MI  and they said there was not any flooding there.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

I didn't see many of my friends and family back in Toledo complaining much about this, either.  Here in Japan, the island of Shikoku has been drowning in rain, literally, something like 2 meters of rain since the beginning of June.

[Easy Bakes 253]

I didn't see many of my friends and family back in Toledo complaining much about this, either.  Here in Japan, the island of Shikoku has been drowning in rain, literally, something like 2 meters of rain since the beginning of June.

those 2 cyclones within  a week of each other which didn't help, one dumped 30 inches of rain in 2 days

[hamsterTK 93]

Sounds like Houston. The freeways are infamous for filling up with water, and a lot of people die from driving into flooded underpasses. It has been like this for a long time. Historically it was 288 that you could spit on and submerge, now it is some of the ramps off 59. There is pumping infrastructure but if trash clogs up the drains as is prone to happen they don't work. I've long had the idea that there should emergency ladders positioned in the trenched roadways, but I suspect that these would misused.

 

Flood water is nasty..sewage, snakes, ant rafts, etc.