Flooding ruins crops

[Kathy]

TN floods wipe out farmers' crops
By Getahn Ward • THE TENNESSEAN • May 4, 2010
Just weeks after planting 260 acres of corn, farmer Danny Rochelle expects a total loss after the Duck River flooded his farm last weekend.
"It's all under about 20 to 30 feet of water," said Rochelle, who estimates a cost of at least $30,000 to replant and fertilize a new corn crop at his farm near Centerville in Hickman County.
Farmers statewide are counting costs of the flood that brought rain at levels that occur only once in a thousand years to roughly two-thirds of Tennessee's 95 counties. "There's no one alive in Tennessee today that has seen a storm of this magnitude," said Kevin Brown, state conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Corn planted last month, wheat planted last fall and expected to be harvested next month, and soybeans whose planting season just began face the biggest risks, depending on how long the water remains.
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20100504/BUSINESS01/5040345/TN-fl...

[Kathy]

Three-quarters of China's provinces have been plagued by flooding and 25 rivers have seen record-high water levels, the Flood Prevention Agency said.
Flooding this year has overwhelmed reservoirs, swamped towns and cities, and caused landslides that have smothered communities, including toppling 680,000 houses, Xinhua reported.
The water level in the massive Three Gorges Dam - the world's largest hydroelectric project which was also built to end centuries of floods along the Yangtze River basin - hit its highest level ever last week.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1298015/China-landslide-lea...

[Bean]

July 29 2010 "Hundreds of people are feared dead and thousands more are stranded after monsoon rains caused widespread flooding in Pakistan." reports Aljazeera.net

" "The scale of the devastation is so large that I don't think that even at the provincial level they will be able to cope with the efforts" - Muhammed Ateeb Siddiqui, Pakistani Red Crescent"

"A newly constructed part of a dam in the Charsadda district collapsed and crops have been destroyed by the raging waters, according to officials.".. sounds like another manufactured disaster.

"Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, said that an emergency situation was developing in the country. "The rain is not stopping, many bridges have been washed away and there are reports that 100-year records are being broken." "

"About 70 people were killed in flash floods in the southwestern Baluchistan province last week, which also uprooted nearly 100,000 people."

[Kathy]

Millions at risk as crops fail in central Africa
After years of drought, flash floods have destroyed harvests in Niger
By Andrew Johnson

Hundreds of thousands of children across central Africa are at risk of death from starvation and disease after flash flooding worsened an already chronic humanitarian crisis caused by drought.
Aid agencies warned yesterday that 10 million people are already facing severe food shortages, particularly in the landlocked countries of Chad and Niger, after a drought led to the failure of last year's crops. As many as 400,000 children are at risk of dying from starvation in Niger alone, according to Save the Children.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/millions-at-risk-as-...

[Kathy]

Pakistan Floods Destroyed $3.27 Billion in Crops

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Pakistan’s deadliest floods ruined crops worth 281.6 billion rupees ($3.27 billion), destroying rice, cotton and sugar, said Farm Minister Nazar Muhammad Gondal.

The country lost 2.39 million metric tons of rice and 10.4 million tons of standing sugar cane, the minister said in an interview today in Islamabad. The nation may also import 2.8 million bales of cotton, he said.

By ripping out crops, stores and 4,000 kilometers of roads, the floods boosted food prices and may push annual inflation to 20 percent, according to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. The inundations affected 20 million people, killing more than 1,800 and damaging 1.9 million homes, the government said. The losses helped push rice in Chicago to the highest level since May and boosted cotton to the most expensive in 15 years in New York.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-09-28/pakistan-floods-destroy...

[Kathy]

Benin Floods Kill 46, Leave 150,000 Homeless and Destroy Harvest Crops

By Serge-David Zoueme - Nov 10, 2010 8:04 AM ET T

A month of heavy rains in Benin has killed 46 people, left 150,000 without homes and affected key harvests of rice, sorghum and corn, the country’s Interior Minister said.

The West African nation appealed for $46.9 million in aid from international donors, Martial Sounton told reporters in the commercial capital, Cotonou, today.

Almost 400 people have been killed and 1.8 million affected by floods in Central and West Africa this year, the United Nations said Oct. 26.

Thousands in Togo, which neighbors Benin, were displaced last month after the Mono River overflowed its banks. At least 17 people were killed in northern Ghana in September after Burkina Faso released water from dams into tributaries of the Volta River, which runs through both nations.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-10/benin-floods-kill-46-leave...

[Kathy]

President: Colombia hit by 'worst natural disaster'

'It is as if our entire territory has been affected by a hurricane that came in halfway through last year and hasn't wanted to leave'

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42760219/ns/world_news-americas/

 

Crops swamped as Dawson River peaks

The Dawson River in the central Queensland town of Theodore has started falling after peaking yesterday.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/26/3200203.htm

 

[Kathy]

Army Corps decides to blow up Missouri levee

May 2, 7:49 PM (ET)

By JIM SUHR and JIM SALTER

SIKESTON, Mo. (AP) - The Army Corps of Engineers planned to blow a nearly two-mile-wide hole in an earthen levee late Monday, unleashing a muddy torrent into empty farm fields in a desperate bid to save an Illinois town from rising floodwaters.
Engineers announced their intention to carry out the blast after spending hours pumping liquid explosives into the Birds Point levee near tiny Cairo, Ill. The first explosion was to happen not long after nightfall.
But doubts persisted about whether breaking open the levee would provide the relief needed. How much water would the blast really divert from the Mississippi River? And will authorities have to do the same thing at other trouble spots downstream?
Time was running short to find answers. Five more inches of rain fell overnight, further straining the floodwall protecting tiny Cairo, Ill. And still more was in the forecast.
The seemingly endless rain has overwhelmed rivers and strained levees, including one protecting Cairo, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
The Ohio River at Cairo had climbed to more than 61 feet as of Monday, a day after eclipsing the 1937 record of 59.5 feet.
The river was expected to crest late Wednesday or early Thursday at 63 feet - just a foot below the level that Cairo's floodwall is built to hold back - before starting a slow decline by Friday.
The high water has raised concerns about the strain on the floodwalls in Cairo and other cities. The agency has been weighing for days whether to blow open the Birds Point levee, which would inundate 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland.
Engineers believe sacrificing the levee could reduce the water levels at Cairo by about 4 feet in less than two days. Meteorologist Beverly Poole of the National Weather Service put the figure closer to five feet.
"These are uncharted territories, but it would be very fast," she said.
Carlin Bennett, the presiding Mississippi County commissioner, said he was told a 10- to 15-foot wall of water would come pouring through the breach.
"Tell me what that's going to do to this area?" he said. "It's a mini-tsunami."
Crews planned to begin the detonation sometime between 9 p.m. Monday and midnight. The first blast was expected to be the most intense. Two more series of explosions were scheduled, with the second one occurring sometime after 1 a.m. Tuesday and the third going off around midday.
The demolition was expected to cover about 11,000 feet of the levee.
Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh - the man ultimately responsible for the decision to go through with the plan- has indicated that he may not stop there if blasting open the Missouri levee does not do the trick. In recent days, Walsh has said he might also make use of other downstream "floodways" - basins surrounded by levees that can intentionally be blown open to divert floodwaters.
Among those that could be tapped are the 58-year-old Morganza floodway near Morgan City, La., and the Bonnet Carre floodway about 30 miles north of New Orleans. The Morganza has been pressed into service just once, in 1973. The Bonnet Carre, which was christened in 1932 has been opened up nine times since 1937, the most recent in 2008.
"Making this decision is not easy or hard," Walsh said. "It's simply grave - because the decision leads to loss of property and livelihood, either in a floodway or in an area that was not designed to flood."
Officials in Louisiana and Mississippi are warning that the river could bring a surge of water unseen since the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
The corps has said about 241 miles of levees along the Mississippi River between Cape Girardeau, Mo., and the Gulf of Mexico need to be made taller or strengthened.
George Sills, a former Army Corps engineer and levee expert in Vicksburg, Miss., said the volume of water moving down the river would test the levee system south of Memphis into Louisiana.
"It's been a long time since we've seen a major flood down the Mississippi River," Sills said. "This is the highest river in Vicksburg, Miss., since 1927. There will be water coming by here that most people have never seen in their lifetime."
He said the Army Corps has warned residents that waters levels in Eagle Lake, an oxbow lake of the Mississippi River, will rise exceptionally high, and that could stress a federal levee with a history of problems.
"They're taking some extreme measures to save it," he said.
But few measures could be as drastic as the one at Birds Point.
Bob Holmes, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said using such levees as relief valves can be vital, likening swollen rivers to traffic bottlenecked to one lane in freeway construction zones. Remove the barricades, he says, and things flow more freely.
"I can tell you that when you can open up the flow path and have additional conveyance, you're going to lower the elevations upstream," he said.
Holmes declined to talk specifically about the Birds Point matter, saying the corps was more versed in the computations used to decide the levee's fate.
"For me to make any kind of a guess would be irresponsible," he said. "All this extra rain threw a monkey wrench into it."
Missouri's legal bid to block the breach was rejected by federal courts including the U.S. Supreme Court, which on Sunday refused to intervene.
Missouri officials said the incoming water would crush the region's economy and environment by possibly covering the land under sand and silt and rendering it useless.
Bob Byrne, 59, farms 550 acres below the Missouri levee and called news about the pending break "devastating."
"It's a sickening feeling," he said. "They're talking about not getting the water off until late July or early August. That knocks out a whole season."
Rep. JoAnn Emerson, who represents the southeast Missouri area in Congress, said Monday she had spoken to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who told her that farmers with crop insurance would be treated the same as if the flood were a natural disaster.
There were other trouble spots Monday, both on the Mississippi and elsewhere in southern Missouri, where rains last week overran a levee protecting the town of Poplar Bluff.
In Olive Branch, about 17 miles northwest of Cairo, the Mississippi River overtook a levee, further drowning the tiny outpost where locals spent recent days erecting walls of sandbags around homes.
In the southern Illinois communities of Metropolis and Old Shawneetown, voluntary evacuations were under way. State officials went door-to-door by boat in some places telling people to leave.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20110502/D9MVK5SO0.html

[Kathy]

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/03/us/03levee_map.html

[Kathy]

Farm Bureau pegs Missouri River losses at $207M

Missouri River floods this summer caused an estimated $207 million in lost crop sales and related economic activity in six western Iowa counties that border the river, according to a new study commissioned by the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation.

To read more...

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2011/10/04/farm-bureau-pegs-missouri-river-losses-at-207m/

NASA: it rained so hard the oceans fell

According to this NASA report, worldwide rainfall and snowfall were so extreme, in so many places last year, that sea levels fell dramatically.

Last year 182 floods affected 180 million people, almost double the annual average for the last decade.

To read more....

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/climatesnapshot/2011/09/27/nasa-it-rained-so-hard-oceans-fell

[Tristran Hepburn]

Weird weather again.

Here in Truro, Cornwall, SW England the BBC has forecast thunder and lightning for this coming Wednesday.

Even last night there was a storm that knocked out the electrical grid in Redruth, 10 miles away.

What is weird is that its early spring. Storms like this were rare even during the hottest month on July, some 20-30 years ago.

Now more lightning is forecast for this coming Wednesday.

i thought it would coincide with the Temple of Baal in Trafalgar Square and Times Square. However, according the recent reports, the Times Square portal has been scrapped and the Trafalgar Square is now going to be the Arch of Triumph of Palmyra.

i am not sure if this is just as spiritually bad as the Bel one.