This article caught my eye last weekend. It’s a quick read, but the implications – for WV as a whole and rural residents who are agriculturally dependent, but also for traffic that must transit the state – are dire.
Having just driven back and forth through 4 hours of WV, I can attest to the number of bridges, and I was surprised how many of my favorite passes in Colorado were still closed because of avalanche/road damage from all the precipitation the past 18 months. If even a few bridges are knocked out because of the combined effects of more moisture and drier, less-absorbent soils, so much commerce will grind to a halt! I know in our talks of Climate Change, rarely is attention given to infrastructure and what happens once it fails. Some places, like WV, are so dependent on bridges that a string of collapses would put a damper on a huge area’s economic activity, not to mention the permanent population shifts as the land no longer supports the people that cling to it.
An excerpt:
If nothing is done to mitigate temperature rise, the study says, Appalachia is likely to become not only hotter, but wetter and drier. How can it be both? Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology in the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design and his team, just completed a study of the entire 7 state region. Here’s how they say it would happen: “As the atmosphere warms, evaporation increases so water that is in the trees, in the soil, in our crops, in wetlands lakes and rivers, evaporates more quickly.” And with all that water held in the atmosphere, when it rains it pours. “In the steep topography of the Appalachian region, what this translates to, is landslides and floods.”
Article (and audio, for those interested): Appalachia to become hotter, wetter, drier
Open thread!
Yarrow
That’s the truth. Investment in our failing infrastructure is so important. Maybe this good news will help:
trollhattan
“But it’s a dry wet.”
Long article in today’s paper re. how the California oyster industry could be if not doomed, in for dramatic downsizing. The conditions in which oysters thrive now occur in smaller slices of estuaries than ever before, and increasing acidity (the result of CO2 in water) makes it difficult for shells to form.
Yay, us.
trollhattan
In other California news, take note Michigan, this is how you do it.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
Fucking liberals trying to fix problems instead of bemoaning our inability to do anything about them.
NotMax
On the road from Hana to what are touristicly called the Seven Sacred Pools there’s a string of bridges, not all that far apart from each other. Been many a moon since drove there but when I did always found the signs on the bridges quizzical.
First bridge: weight limit 5 tons
Second bridge: weight limit 10 tons
Third bridge: weight limit 6 tons
and so on.
(May in reality not be the actual first, second and third bridges one comes to, but somewhere along the way there’s a string of them with signage in that type of order, and continuing changing with each bridge along the way.)
trollhattan
@NotMax:
“I survived the drive to Hana” t-shirts cannot be purchased, they must be earned.
Dan B
There was a project to use old mountaintop removal mines for solar pv projects. I wonder how that is going.
Fair Economist
I’m sure the huge piles of rubble and dirt from mountaintop removal will cause no trouble whatsoever with the intensified floods to come /s
JPL
@NotMax: I’d stay home.
JPL
@Fair Economist: Should do wonders for the quality of drinking water also. WV will still vote for the republicans though.
NotMax
@trollhattan
Beautiful drive to get to Hana, though. Plenty of hairpin curves and one lane bridges to test a driver’s mettle, too. There’s nothing there once one gets to Hana, but still an awe inspiring journey. The drive I mentioned above is further on after Hana.
When first I arrived here, there were zero guardrails between the asphalt and the sheer drops to the sea.
Elizabelle
Lots for President Warren or President Harris to clean up, after this criminal administration.
Infrastructure development and repair, and person to person healthcare, are such jobs producers. Amazing they’re such unpopular remedies with the Fox set. They work. And the general public gets something out of their tax expenditures.
J R in WV
@NotMax:
Where is Hana?
Here in WV, last Monday a week ago we had a strong rainfall event, over 2 inches with some lightning and thunder from around 4 am til around 9 am.
Today we have a crew building a walking / wheelchair path up to the front door, and the soil is powder fine, as dry as talcum powder, no sign of moisture… even the tiny creek is as dry as can be. Also, it’s 97 degrees outside.
We’ve had a 4 foot thick beech tree taken down over two days last week, for which the bill will be astronomical because they couldn’t get a truck back to it. They cut it down, dropped into the woods away from the house, and dragged huge pieces down the creek bed to where they could chip most of it, and load the rest into trucks to drop off down on the bottom.
I would like to get a slice of the butt log to make a desk top from, but it’s so large… I don’t know if it would be possible to handle it.
Anyway, yes, the climate here in southern West Virginia is changing, and so far the new weather sucks, hard.
NotMax
@J R in WV
Far northeast Maui. “F” on this map.
Raven
@J R in WV: The Hana Highway, you need to drive it.
“The Hana Highway is a 64.4-mile-long (103.6 km) stretch of Hawaii Routes 36 and 360 which connects Kahului to the town of Hana in east Maui. To the east of Kalepa Bridge, the highway continues to Kipahulu as Hawaii Route 31 (the Piilani Highway). Although Hana is only about 52 miles (84 km) from Kahului, an uninterrupted car-trip takes about 2.5 hours to drive, since the highway is very winding, narrow, and passes over 59 bridges, of which 46 are only one lane wide.[5] There are approximately 620 curves along Route 360 from just east of Kahului to Hana, almost all of it through lush, tropical rainforest. Many of the concrete and steel bridges date back to 1910 and all but one are still in use. That one bridge, badly damaged by erosion, has been replaced by a portable steel ACROW bridge erected by the United States Army Corps of Engineers.”
opiejeanne
In the PNW we’ve lost 7 big trees to the combination of drought years followed by torrential rain years. The tree surgeon tried to explain this paradox to me but I’m still trying to understand what he said. He says we’re still in a drought here despite setting records for rainfall the past two years, and it’s not just because the rain is concentrated in a few big storms, because that’s not the pattern here. I would imagine this is not localized to Woodinville.
This summer has been very mild, no 90 degree days here but we got a couple of days that hot back in the spring. Today is the only day in the past 10 that is supposed to be more than 80, and most of the time it’s just been In the 70s and It’s rained almost every week since early July. Supposed to get a third of an inch tomorrow.
bluefoot
It’s the infrastructure issues wrt climate change that really freak me out. All of our infrastructure is built assuming certain climate norms/ranges. We will be (are) seeing the impacts WAY before “sustained” climate change. For example, previously 100 year storms coming every few years…Roads get washed out, sewage backs up, power is disrupted, subways (think Hurricane Sandy) are flooded and unusable, for days or weeks or more.
Parts of the Midwest and Plains have been flooded pretty much all year. How do you farm? How do you transport what you’re able to produce if the roads are washed out or you can’t transport fuel to the area? How do you protect watersheds from getting polluted from runoff to the point of non-viability?
We needed to start improving our infrastructure yesterday. With the increased energy in the atmosphere, etc the problems resulting from storms, drought, wildfires, etc will continue to get more frequent and more severe. We need both to stop/mitigate climate change and adapt and upgrade our existing infrastructure.
It’s not cool to say so, but it deeply offends me as an American that the nation has all this money and resources and know-how and people who could/would do the work – and we somehow can’t find a way to address this? We are (were) supposed to be better than that.
wvng
Last year in WV (and much of the East) practically every storm system came with flash flood warnings, and there were flash floods in every storm. Landslides into roads were a serious infrastructure issue, as were roads getting cut in two and mostly small bridges taken out. I suspect State Highways spent a lot of money keeping up with that. I would also add that if most of your rain comes in extreme events, there is a lot less recharge of groundwater and infiltration generally, so the paradox of being both really wet and in drought conditions for agriculture is quite real. I work a lot on Chesapeake Bay issues, and if the rainfall we got last year became a frequent event then the globally important Bay restoration will fail.
wvng
@bluefoot: remember a few years ago when roads in Scotland were melting and, in the same year, pipes in Dallas were freezing? building infrastructure to handle extremes on both ends will be a huge challenge.
NotMax
@NotMax
Will add that while that map shows what looks like a southern route to get there (and there is) what it doesn’t convey is that it’s mostly unimproved roadway, with portions often shut down due to washouts, rockslides, etc. Rental car companies’ literature includes warnings not to attempt that route, and if you break down or have an accident on it you’re on your own (plus responsible for any costs).
trollhattan
@NotMax:
The shabby appearance of Maui rental cars is pretty much explained by the Hana “highway” and the road up Haleakala. More specifically, dragging the brakes all the way down Haleakala.
wvng
I was part of a technical working group exploring the fate of different mid Atlantic forest ecosystems under different climate scenarios. The tendency in these exercises is to work with predicted averages of precipitation and temperature, but really you need to look at the extremes. How many tree species will be able to successfully reproduce when young trees are exposed to sustained extremes of drought, heat, or both every few years?
Elizabelle
@bluefoot:
Agreed. “We” are better than that. It comes down to political will. Republicans are not. Vote those fuckers out.
We will never get back the four years that Trump illegitimately roosted in the White House. In between million-dollar golfing trips, all costs completely borne by the taxpayers. Never.
opiejeanne
@NotMax: It was gorgeous, the part we saw. We chickened out and turned back, about halfway to Hana from town. Some of the traffic coming the other way was not polite about who gets to cross those bridges first, and sometimes we and they couldn’t see around the curve and it was just a scary drive.
And we’ve driven in rural Ireland*. Not that the local roads in Ireland mark us as brave, because every time a car was coming from the other direction there was a lot of screaming in our car.
*We didn’t intend to drive on such rural roads, our GPS was the cheapest model Garmin made and it was prejudiced against using the gorgeous highways. I played with it quite a bit, trying to program it to use major highways. One day, trying to leave Clonakilty we got a tour of every place Michael Collins lived or worked or walked, followed by a trip across a farmer’s cornfield, and when I finally got us onto the highway (with much screaming to turn around from the GPS) we saw the shrine where he was killed.
Jay
@trollhattan:
Lead water outbreak in New Jersey as well.
NotMax
@trollhattan
Know someone who works at a nationally well-known rental car company. They also rent Corvettes. For a very pretty penny, and figure on a rental life for each one of those averaging 2 months before some schmuck driving it has an accident.
Kelly
@opiejeanne: Interesting article in the Oregonian explaining that the drought stricken conifers were not commonplace at these lower elevations before white folks took over and are more vulnerable to drought than I’d thought.
Also I’ve seen many riverside conifers are dying that grew in areas that were flood plain before all the dams were built. The soil is thin and drys out quickly. Cottonwood, maple and ash are original dominant riverside species doing fine and will likely take over these habitats.
https://www.oregonlive.com/hg/2019/08/western-oregon-conifers-continue-to-show-damage-from-drought.html
Also much of NW Oregon is in drought which kinda surprised me because the weather this summer felt moderate to me.
https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/oregon
Seanly
Resiliency is a new buzzword in transportation. How do we make roads and bridges that can withstand the local extreme events (be they seismic, hydraulic, hurricane & storm surge)? And how much does the frequency of those events change due to climate change?
We can only make bridges that are resistant to events, not EQ-proof or storm-proof, and even then there is still a trade-off. For a lower level seismic event we design it to make it through the event in the elastic range (ie, no damage). For a larger seismic event, we design it to be damaged but repairable so the bridge can still be used for critical access. We determine the storm or seismic event on the frequency to return (10-year, 100-year, etc) which then drives the level of demand for sizing the components, but climate change could increase or decrease those. That then changes the demand and once the bridge is built, we can’t increase the sizes.
And of course, one issue is that few older bridges are designed with any of these considerations in mind.
I haven’t gotten to study resiliency per se, but some of it is already built into how the bridge responds to the event. My firm just announced a corporate officer for resiliency
If the road is washed out but the bridge is still standing, that is just as bad as the other way
TenguPhule
It seems excessive until you find out they stole 90 pounds of sand from the beach which has a history of people stealing sand from it.
opiejeanne
@NotMax: A rental agency in SoCal where I was picking up a small SUV got a call while I was at the desk. They’d rented a gorgeous and expensive vehicle to some idiot who got less than half a mile before banging it into the sound wall on an onramp. The agent was pretty upset. I was still there when it limped back onto the lot and one side of it was scraped and mangled.
bluefoot
@Elizabelle: I know. MoscowFuckingMitch and the sychophants won’t ever work for the good of the country or the planet. It just f*cking kills me that we don’t lack for anything to address the problems except political will. But Republicans would rather line their pockets and wank like the nihilists they are.
Not just the four years of Trump, but what if SCOTUS hadn’t handed the election to GWB and we had Al Gore instead? Not only would many, many Iraqi people still be alive, we would be in a much better position wrt climate change. And wrt general sanity…
NotMax
Sigh. Self-control, where hast thy gone?
Know I previously stated my kitchen was full and closed to new appliances.
But.
While putting together a very small order today for well under a handful of miscellaneous and inexpensive items on Amazon, saw a Lightning Deal (limited number of hours only) for Prime members on a well-reviewed large size air fryer (30% off!) and sprang for it. Where I’m going to put the thing when it gets here – most likely next week – is anybody’s guess. It may well end up being stowed under the desk in the living room.
opiejeanne
@Kelly: What you say makes sense for those conditions, but we’re on top of a hill, Hollywood Hill. The nearest creek is more than a mile away from our property and we are well above the flood plains, down in the Sammamish River Valley. Maybe 400 feet higher.
In my yard it’s only one variety of spruce that’s having this problem. Some of the birch trees fell victim to a borer and died before we figured out how to stop the damage.
Searcher
My experience driving the Hana Highway was, I don’t recommend doing the full loop around the south of the island.
The south end is frequently one-lane, with only occasional pull-offs for letting other vehicles past. If you have several vehicles in a row, and there usually is not room for all of them to pull off, which can be … interesting, and most tourists aren’t up for that kind of maneuvers while hanging off the side of a mountain. I feel like the inconvenience to the locals who have to drive that way isn’t worth it for the extra “accomplishment”, and while the blasted landscapes on that side of the island have their own interesting nature, you can approach from the other direction for a short span to see them, without going the full loop.
Yarrow
@Elizabelle:
See my comment up above. Good news on that front.
TenguPhule
This fucking timeline.
Chip Daniels
OT, but I see in John’s Twitter feed that the troops who participated in the Mexican Border are getting a…participation ribbon?
Jesus.
TenguPhule
@NotMax:
Its not like you need to sleep on a bed. You can use the couch! //
opiejeanne
@NotMax: Heh. Every time some wonderful new thing is announced I look around and wonder where I’d stash it when not in use. Of course, maybe an air fryer would be in constant use at Chez Opiejeanne.
TenguPhule
@Chip Daniels:
“Served in a Concentration Camp and all I got for it was a participation trophy” //
NotMax
@Seanly
Trivia: The Whitestone Bridge in NY, which had much the same design, was retrofitted after the catastrophic incident with Galloping Gertie, which spanned the Tacoma Narrows.
opiejeanne
@TenguPhule: A commemorative T-shirt would be more useful.
TenguPhule
John Sullivan, deputy SOS to be appointed as the next Russian Ambassador by Trump.
Jezus fucking christ.
TenguPhule
Two and a half mooches.
Kelly
@opiejeanne: There are trees showing stress throughout the region. I hiked up Maxwell Butte on the Santiam pass this summer. There are thousands of acres of dead and dying pines. All is not lost, for some reason the mountain hemlock are fine and rapidly filling in the gaps. Scary amounts of dead, dry pine all over the place. This is a trail I’ve hiked since the late 1960’s. The changes over the last 10 years are dramatic.
TenguPhule
Gillibrand: Its not my fault he fell off a cliff, that’s gravity at work!
Franken: You pushed me off of it.
Gillibrand: Fuck you!
Jay
@Kelly:
We are in a TF1, that since colonization has been clear cut twice, and grazed almost constantly except for a 10 year period when we fallowed it, and a 15 year period in the 1930’s/40’s when it was abandoned due to drought.
So that’s 121 years of biomass being removed from the land cycle, with nothing being put back, ( until we bought it).
Then of course, the salmon collapse in the 1920’s, ( salmon feed the forest) with only a tiny fraction recovering.
That’s a lot of nutrients “mined” since colonization.
The land here, used to be Interior Douglas Fir dominated, now there’s a few still rotting stumps and a few history trees still standing. For a while it was Pine/Spruce/Aspen dominant, but the pine is now gone, ( pine beetle),
So it’s no surprise that the forests are stressed compared to pre-contact times, because they arn’t the same forests.
People forget, ( or never learned) that when the explorers came, and marvelled at the “vast wilderness”, they wern’t actually seeing a “wilderness”, they were seeing the largest “managed ecosystem” in the world. Europeans had their tiny farms, the Indiginous had millions of acres of “farm”, mostly in the form of permaculture and terraforming.
TenguPhule
I need to recheck where we are in the Nazi timeline.
Elizabelle
@Yarrow: That’s wonderful news about Mark Kelly. I think he could win that seat. Fingers and toes crossed.
Plus, he’d be an excellent senator. Tragedy that Gabrielle Giffords’ elective political career has ended.
catclub
@trollhattan:
downshift!
catclub
@TenguPhule: Not often you get a top boxer as ambassador.
NotMax
Icing on a sh*t sandwich.
debbie
@TenguPhule:
I’m listening to her now on NYT’s podcast. Self-righteousness burns bright.
Bill Arnold
Along the same lines,
Heatwaves longer, more deadly even in a 2C world (August 19, 2019, Marlowe Hood)
Paywalled letter in Nature Climate Change:
Summer weather becomes more persistent in a 2 °C world (19 August 2019)
(Any wealthy people reading, please consider somehow making Nature Climate Change open access.)
catclub
@NotMax:
i want something like a giant rotating hole punch, with the different punches replaced by kitchen appliances. Blender, mixer, cuisinart rotate up and into position.
Jay
@TenguPhule:
According to the Holocaust Museum list #8 of 10.
Jay
Jay
TenguPhule
@NotMax:
The USDA is outsourcing to the FTC now?
TenguPhule
@debbie: I love how she proudly states that a Democrat should not expect to be supported by their party in the face of any accusations.
Keeping Firing INTO the Tent. //
catclub
@Jay: My impression was that if Conte steps down and takes his party with him, Salvini will not have a majority.
Would Conte’s party continue to back Salvini and the coalition?
Chris T.
I’m convinced that we’re already past the tipping point. The climate is already changed; the globe is already hotter. The actions we take now determine how bad things will get: terrible, or worse than that?
Jay
@catclub:
No idea. Making sense of the Italian Parlementary factions, is way beyond my pay grade.
Sandia Blanca
@NotMax: That’s why my one and only trip to Hana (30 years ago) was by plane–what a beautiful way to arrive at a peaceful getaway! We even saw whales from the air. A weekend at the Hana Hotel was indeed heavenly. Making that drive would cause me far more stress than could be undone by the stay at the resort.
NotMax
@catclub
Kitchens of the future, 1950s style: #1 – #2.
21st century style. Do not want a kitchen that converses with me, thankyewveddymuch.
;)
Bill Arnold
@Chris T.:
The fight is currently over how much the human global population gets reduced. 1 billion, 2 billion, 4 billion, 8 billion, extinction?
The Holocaust was what, 11 million?
(BTW Stephen Miller advertises yet again his lack of moral standing when he says that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. The Romani and others cough not so politely.)
namekarB
I’m in deep red CA-04 (McClintock-R) in northeastern California. I just jacked up one of the Democrats running for the primary for not having anything on her campaign web site about climate change. I emailed her campaign and said I would not support any Democrat that did not have climate change front and center as part of the campaign. Of course if she wins the primary I will support her in the General but, man, it is the 21st century. How come some Democrats won’t take this issue seriously?
JDM
Good thing we did that Infrastructure Week. Didn’t we do that two or three times, too?
J R in WV
@Fair Economist:
Actually, while water quality in terms of metal contaminates declines downstream of valley fills, in hydrological terms, the fills tend to absorb large quantities of water, which is then released slowly.
This tends to provide more downstream water during minor droughts, which are common around here. Of course, selenium and other metals dissolve into the water as it percolates through the valley fills, and this is a bad thing.
In the Upper Mud River impoundment, upstream of Hamlin WV, the fish have sexual identity issues, IIRC dimorphism. Lots of people fish in the lake, even swim and canoe in it. I do not, and would not eat fish from the lake, which is just a few miles below the former Hobet Mountain Top Removal mine, which was the biggest MTR mine in the nation at one point.
Now it’s “reclaimed” with Russian Olive, a despicable invasive shrub/tree which does fix nitrogen in otherwise barren subsoils, which is why it’s good for reclamation work in hostile environments. But now our farm is infested with the olive shrubs. Cutting it with chain saws or brush hogs doesn’t slow it down. I cut it and spray the butts with the most severe herbicide, just spraying it doesn’t do the job. I’m hoping cutting it out and then spraying will kill some of it out. We much prefer native shrubbery, flowers, orchids, etc.
The Olive chokes out native plants. Sad!
J R in WV
@TenguPhule:
You are out of control.
I love Al Franken, and I don’t think those photos show any harassment whatsoever. In the first one, he didn’t even touch her, and she wasn’t asleep. It was a comedy tour, for dog’s sake.
But Franken resigned on his own, before any hearings could take place.
I’m not gonna vote for Kirsten G, but she’s way more qualified than many of the Dems in the race, and surely better than Trump in every way.
You are Out of Control, get a grip on yourself!
J R in WV
@Raven:
OK, we’ve never been to Maui, just the Big Island, Kona to HIlo, via Volcano. I have a cousin in Kona and a rockhound friend in Hilo, who showed us around the Volcano area. We hiked around fissures and ridges of lava just outside the National Park, so I could actually collect various specific types of lava.
Had a great time, would love to go back to see the new lava fields.
Word was that Pele doesn’t care if you take her rocks, if you respect them and adore her, which we do. K’s husband was a member of the Astronaut corps, til he got tired of the goody-two-shoes requirements. So then he was a astronomer at the high altitude observatories on the mountain. Very interesting folks, with spice trees in their yard.
TenguPhule
@J R in WV:
Yes he did. Gravity at work.
But Gillibrand led the charge to push him off the cliff.
Jay
@J R in WV:
Cut the stems in spring before the buds break, drill a hole, fill with rock salt, cap with black plastic.
Do not allow them to fruit.
J R in WV
@TenguPhule:
Out Of Control get help!!
2shoes
Thanks for posting this report! We in NC and SC have experienced some of the catastrophes of debris slides. Anything extra is a great help, the hostility Trump administration has shown for the data collection and informing public is criminal!