Barre Floods UPDATE 7/13/07

As you may have heard, after about four inches of rain fell yesterday afternoon, downtown Barre flooded. jds lives and works in Barre. So, he may not be able to post for a few days but he and his family are fine. Neither their house nor his office flooded.

One interesting aspect of the flood is the contrast between Montpelier's looming (yet never occuring) flood last March and Barre's flood. Montpelier had engineers, scientists, and the National Guard all working around the clock during those few weeks trying to deal with a flood that never came. Conversely, Barre didn't even get any assistance from the National Guard yesterday as the streets filled with water and mud. As jds said in an email, "I love the front page of today's paper with the dude riding a bike through the water and his handlebars are barely sticking out. That's how we roll in Barre. No National Guard, no fancy monitoring system, no press conferences, no sandbags. We just ride through the sewer. F*** yeah. "

That guy in the picture is great. I worry about getting a bit of rain on my 19-year-old bike but this guy doesn't have a care in the world. I wonder if he ever hit anything.

UPDATE 7/13/07 9:24 AM by JDS
Thanks to Murf for the post. I blame my lack of posting more on a cocktail of crazy work deadlines, kidney stone pain (peeing through a strainer is SO much fun!), and a night of hotdogs and fried dough at Thunder Road, the Nation's Site of Excitement. I wish I could say I was busy riding my bike through the cesspool to resuce orphans. Thanks for cutting me slack despite my lack of heroism.

I want to note that the Burlington Free Press has been doing a superb job covering the flood. Click here to check out their great audio slideshow entitled After the Flood. It's funny to see in the background of one picture the Times Argus building, our local paper. It's rediculous that the out of town paper has been doing a better job covering the event then the paper that was surrounded by a lake of flood waters (driving home on Wednesday evening I looked down 3rd Street and noticed half of it was a sea of brown with water lapping against the Times Argus building. I guess they kept the water out of the building and were able to keep operations going.). Usually the TA is the better paper, but they seem to have lost the battle this time around.

The Free Press also has a write up entitled Why The Flood Happened on their weather blog. It's an interesting read about the training effect, illustrated in this radar loop (put together by Weathering Heights).

And yes, we in Barre are tougher then our twin City of Montpelier. Stupider, maybe (where the hell was that guy going on that bike?), but definately tougher.

UPDATE 7/13/07 11:42 AM by JDS
A fella by the handle BuzzFisher has a pretty great Flickr set focusing on the flood. One of his shots captures the previously described scene of looking down 3rd Street to the Times Argus building. It's a little dark, but the idea gets across.