Stories tagged flooding
In Iowa, 83 of its 99 counties are now disaster areas
Iowa flood warnings: Sunday, June 15, 3 pm
Courtesy National Weather ServiceIowa was the epicenter of the flooding that swamped Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Indiana this week.
A levee holding back the Des Moines River broke Friday night in Des Moines, sending water rushing into a neighborhood near downtown.
In Cedar Rapids, the state's second-largest city, the waters of the swollen Cedar River crested Friday night, but more than 400 city blocks remain waterlogged and 24,000 people have been forced from their homes.
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flooding in Iowa (Yahoo News)
Tags : We’ve talked a couple of times before about using corn to produce ethanol, and how this increases the demand for corn and thus the price. Well, now there’s more bad news: the recent flooding in the Midwest is wiping out some farmers’ fields, reducing this year’s corn crop and pushing prices to an all-time high.
Here's a video link to the incredible footage of Lake Delton near the Wisconsin Dells suddenly draining after a dam broke on Monday. And here's a full newspaper report with photos and maps from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal. The story includes this unsual quote: "It's pretty hard to put a water ski show on when there's no water on the lake." And here's the link to a great photo that shows what happened geologically -- the dam to the left is still okay but a sogged sandy bank between the lake and Wisconsin River in the center gave way, releasing the lake's backed up water. Once the water broke through the lake bank, it took only about three hours for the lake to drain dry.
The region normally experiences heavy rainfall about this time every year, but meteorological authorities said this was the worst in five decades.
Flooding has affected many cities in the Pearl River Delta -- home to many export manufacturing plants -- and the western part of Guangdong province. (Reuters via Yahoo News)
Flooding in Indiana forces evacuations
Storms dumped as much as 10 inches of rain on already-soggy central Indiana on Saturday, threatening dams, inundating highways and sending the Coast Guard to rescue residents from swamped homes. (The INDY channel)
- View: Flooding Pics From Users 1
- View: Flooding Pics From Users 2
Baseball sized hail in Wisconsin
A powerful line of storms in Wisconsin dropped baseball-size hail on central and southeastern parts of the state, blowing roofs off homes and knocking down trees and power lines. CNN
Tornadoes in NW Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Chicago
The storm leveled eight barns at a turkey farm near Menahga, MN. killing thousands of turkeys. No human deaths have been reported.
The Myanmar coast on April 15
Courtesy NASASatellite images from NASA of the Burma (or Myanmar) coastline show some pretty amazing pre- and post-cyclone images. It's now thought that the death toll from tropical cyclone Nargis could eventually exceed 100,000.
The Myanmar coast on May 5: pictures taken by NASA's Terra satellite.
Courtesy NASA
The Netherlands has a long history of flooding – over half the country is below sea level – and during the North Sea flood of 1953, nearly 2,000 Dutch lost their lives in a flood after sea water breached several dikes and water poured into unsuspecting villages during the night of February 1, 1953. Even before this particular natural disaster, the Dutch had been dealing with the problems of living in a low-lying area, and in the 1950’s embarked on a massive civil-engineering project called Delta Works.
Delta Works is a network of dams, sluices, locks, dikes, and storm surge barriers that are set up to protect the Netherlands from future flooding. The work is incredibly vast, and was completed in 1997 when the Maeslantkering (the largest moving structure on Earth) was completed.
But now, the Netherlands faces another problem – global warming – and the associated risk of increased winter rain in Europe, according to the climate-change models. That will bring high water to the Meuse and Rhine rivers that flow into Holland. The strategy is now different. Instead of the historic approach of raising the heights of the dikes to contain the rivers, the Netherlands is going to lower some dikes to allow flooding in certain areas of the country to relieve pressure in others. So instead of keeping the water out, they are allowing the water, to a certain extent, go where it wants. The plan, called “Room for the River”, was featured in a recent NPR story. The story includes a cool feature that shows the impact of climate change on low-lying regions around the world.
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