History > 2011 > USA > Weather / Nature / Environment (V)

Unidentified teens walk through the high water and waves

at the Mandeville, La. lakefront of Lake Pontchartrain from Tropical Storm Lee,

on Sept. 4.

The vast, soggy storm system

spent hours during the weekend hovering

in the northernmost Gulf of Mexico.

Its slow crawl to the north gave more time for its drenching rain bands

to pelt a wide swath of vulnerable coastline, raising the flood threat.

Ted Jackson/Associated Press/The Times-Picayune

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Too much of a basic human need

September 28, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/09/too_much_of_a_basic_human_need.html

One Casualty of Northeaster:

‘Trick or Treat!’

October 31, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

For all the attention it got for timing (early) and snow accumulation (astonishing) and — if there were a way to measure this — annoyance and aggravation, the freakish northeaster of October may well be remembered as the Grinch that stole Halloween.

From New Jersey to Massachusetts, towns called off trick-or-treating on Monday because downed power lines and fallen trees posed a danger in the dark. Other towns in New York and New Jersey suggested what amounted to curfews, urging the candy-seeking ghosts and goblins to ring all the doorbells they wanted — before nightfall.

“One, there’s still downed wires,” said Michael J. Rohal, the administrator of Glen Ridge, N.J., explaining the decision to postpone trick-or-treating until Friday. “We have traffic signals without power. We have a lot of tree limbs that are down. We have large amount of tree debris, making the sidewalks impassable.”

And, with electricity still out in much of the borough, children would have been wandering in total darkness.

Mayor Pedro E. Segarra of Hartford, where about 40 percent of the city still had no power, asked families to abstain from trick-or-treating. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy complied, issuing a statement that said no candy would be handed out at the Governor’s Residence.

And Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey pleaded with parents to pay close attention to children making the rounds as trick-or-treaters, lest they stumble onto live wires in the dark.

But despite the safety concerns, the reaction in many households could be reduced to four words: Good grief, Charlie Brown.

“Prepare to be egged, silly towns that cancel,” a woman declared on Twitter, using the name JeannetteSeward.

“It’s pretty ridiculous,” said Maria Lomuscio of Fairfield, N.J., who took eight children trick-or-treating. “You can’t cancel Halloween. The kids are all hyped up. They had no school because there’s no power and this and that.”

With many towns in North Jersey rescheduling the festivities for later in the week, she added, “if they do it again on Friday, we’ll do it again on Friday.”

Friday will be a problem for Craig Rubinstein, 36, of Livingston, N.J., who said his sons — one 3, the other 6 months — had been all set to dress up as characters from “Toy Story” when he received word from the Police Department that trick-or-treating was being postponed. The problem is, Friday is his wedding anniversary.

“We were going to swap and do our anniversary dinner” on Monday, he said. “But there’s not a lot open.”

If there was a silver lining for school-age trick-or-treaters, it was that Monday became an unusually early snow day, to their delight and their parents’ chagrin. Many communities in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire said they expected schools to remain closed for several days.

The cleanup continued in New York City. In Central Park, as many as 1,000 trees may be lost — eight times the damage suffered after Tropical Storm Irene two months ago. The New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, said more than 2,200 trees in the city’s largest remaining old-growth forest had sustained damage.

The storm also delayed or stranded many suburban commuters, as railroads assessed problems with frozen switches and snowdrifts on the tracks.

“You’re talking about much more significant damage to the rail system than we had during Irene,” Governor Christie said at a news conference.

The scenes on Monday were like a latter-day Currier & Ives print, but lacking that midwinter cheer. Streets were covered with snow, snow blowers sent up plumes of white and utility crews struggled to repair broken lines — but winter is still 50 days away. At nightfall on Monday, more than a million electricity customers remained in the dark from New Jersey to Maine.

“We are in full restoration mode,” Marcy Reed, president of National Grid Massachusetts, told The Associated Press, as crews cleared branches that had snapped under the snow.

In New York, Consolidated Edison’s Web site promised the power would be back on in Westchester County communities by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, almost five days after the storm hit.

Sherry Padva, 57, of Irvington, N.Y., in Westchester, said the power had been out from 6 p.m. Saturday to 4 a.m. Monday. She said that “residual heat” had carried her through the night Saturday and that on Sunday she put lawn chairs on the patio and listened to the Giants game on a battery-powered transistor radio.

But by Sunday night, she said, “things were getting pretty rugged.” She said she tried to reserve a hotel room nearby, but too many others had beaten her to it: the no-vacancy sign was up.

She was not the only one who had shivered through the weekend indoors. In Ridgewood, N.J., the assistant assessor, Chris Hayes, said it was 47 degrees at her house. “I thought I’d come to work to warm up,” she said, but there was no power at Village Hall, either.

The lights were on in a jewelry shop nearby, but the owner, Moral Medzadourian, said her Internet connection had been out since Saturday, so she could not process orders or answer e-mails.

Many restaurants remained closed, and they will have to discard food in freezers that has been thawing for lack of electricity.

Bonnie Manning of Sherman, Conn., prepared to fire up a grill at the school that was doubling as a shelter. Ms. Manning, who runs a catering business nearby, said residents could bring their melting frozen food.

“Everything’s defrosting,” she said. “Everyone has a freezer that isn’t working.”

Everyone, that is, except Ms. Manning.

“I took everything to my shop in New Milford,” where the power stayed on, she said. “All that’s in my freezer at home now is defrosting Popsicles.”

With school canceled in Lexington, Mass., Matthew Moschella, 11, and his family were clearing storm debris in his front yard. Above them, a tree limb, loosened by the storm, balanced ominously on a power line.

Matthew said he was surprised that Halloween had been canceled — he had not realized it was possible to cancel a whole holiday — but he had a plan: “Buy some candy and eat it myself.”

His mother, Amy Wrigley, raking leaves and twigs, shrugged: “Yeah, sure, why not?”

Others in Lexington were not cowed by the cancellation; they simply planned to go elsewhere.

John Tweeddale said his 13-year-old daughter, Emma, was going trick-or-treating in Bedford, Mass., a town where the holiday was still on. If Lexington rescheduled its Halloween, he figured that she would get a second bite of a candy apple.

“Or she’ll stay and hand out candy,” he said. “Which is kind of funny for a kid who really doesn’t like candy.”

Reporting was contributed by Elizabeth Maker from Connecticut, Jess Bidgood from Massachusetts, Daniel Krieger and Nate Schweber from New Jersey, Jennifer Preston from Pennsylvania, and Matt Flegenheimer from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 31, 2011

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect snowfall total for West Milford, N.J.

    One Casualty of Northeaster: ‘Trick or Treat!’, NYT, 31.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/nyregion/1-million-still-in-dark-after-destructive-weekend-storm.html

In Central Park,

Snow That Collected

on Still-Leafy Branches

Fells Even Hardy Trees

October 30, 2011
The New York Times
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

The storm struck trees of all ages and sizes in Central Park: oaks and elms outside the boathouse, birches and dogwoods near Belvedere Castle, magnolias and mulberries beside the obelisk.

The damage was spread across about half of Central Park’s 840 acres, making it the worst devastation that Douglas Blonsky, president of the Central Park Conservancy, had seen in his 27 years there.

In all, as many as 1,000 of the park’s trees may be lost to the freak October snowstorm; in contrast, Tropical Storm Irene — which work crews only recently finished cleaning up after — cost the park 125 trees.

“It’s like a bomb blew off,” Mr. Blonsky said, as he conducted a site survey of the park on Sunday. He looked out his car window at a 70-foot oak tree, near the park’s southeast entrance. Only a jagged stump remained.

“Boom,” Mr. Blonsky said softly.

Though the snowfall in the city might have been considered mild by winter standards, a confluence of factors contributed to what Mr. Blonsky called unprecedented damage. Snow became suspended on leaves that had not yet fallen for winter, tugging at limbs and, in some cases, felling entire trees. And because temperatures hovered near freezing, and not well below, the snow was often damp and heavy, creating additional pressure on fragile branches.

A new round of restorations could take months, though workers are already scrambling to ensure that the New York City Marathon can proceed as planned on Sunday.

“Couldn’t have been rain, huh?” Neil Calvanese, vice president for operations of the conservancy, said from the back seat of Mr. Blonsky’s car.

“Couple degrees,” Mr. Blonsky said.

Mr. Calvanese sighed. “Fall colors were just starting to kick in,” he said.

Even the most durable trees struggled to cope. The broad, rough leaves of a London plane tree, Mr. Calvanese said, made it particularly vulnerable to snow accumulation and, consequently, branch fractures.

“It’s a resilient tree,” Mr. Calvanese said, sounding like a coach defending his players after a difficult loss. “They really do hold up well.”

Most of the damage occurred in the area south of 86th Street, where the park receives its highest concentration of visitors. Though the park was open on Sunday — and quite busy, given the improved weather and curiosity about the damage — Mr. Blonsky expressed concern that “hangers,” limbs detached from their trees but still suspended overhead, could prove dangerous if visitors ignored the conservancy’s caution tape. “You’ve got people pushing strollers underneath trees,” he said.

The city’s storm damage was not confined to the park. By 4 p.m. on Sunday, the city had received more than 2,000 calls reporting tree damage. About half had come from Staten Island, and a quarter from the Bronx, said Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the city’s parks department. “We’ve never seen a storm like this in October, when the trees are still mostly in full leaf,” Mr. Benepe said. “I’ve never seen such widespread damage.”

Christine Cea, from Emerson Hill, Staten Island, said a quick drive through surrounding neighborhoods revealed the storm’s leafy detritus, strewn along the roadways. “It was disappointing for a green borough,” she said.

For Central Park, the only comparable episode in recent years was a brief but powerful thunderstorm in August 2009, which resulted in the loss of 500 trees. In that case, as in this one, the damage did present a silver lining: the opportunity to improve park aesthetics by examining whether affected areas look better without so many trees. On Sunday, Mr. Blonsky noted that a reduction in trees in the southwest corner of the park, near Columbus Circle, was allowing more sunlight to the area.

But optimism dissipated quickly as Mr. Blonsky approached a contracting crew near Fifth Avenue, where fallen limbs were being loaded into a wood chipper. “You’re going right to the core of what Central Park is about,” he said of the park’s more than 23,000 trees.

Mr. Calvanese dropped his head, as the crew hauled another branch toward the machine.

“I’m not ready for this,” he said.

    In Central Park, Snow That Collected on Still-Leafy Branches Fells Even Hardy Trees, NYT, 30.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/nyregion/in-central-park-storm-may-claim-1000-trees.html

Lessons From New Orleans

October 15, 2011
The New York Times


Before Hurricane Katrina, more than 60 percent of children in New Orleans attended a failing school. Now, only about 18 percent do.

Five years ago, less than a quarter of the children in a special district set up by the state to manage the lowest performing schools scored at or above the “basic” level on state tests. Now, nearly half do.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the progress made by New Orleans’s school reform effort in the six years since Hurricane Katrina has been “stunning.” And there are many reasons for optimism about a system that is overwhelmingly made up of poor and minority students — just the sort of place where optimism is in short supply.

There are three important things to consider about the New Orleans experience: Many of the structural changes occurred because the hurricane essentially destroyed the old system, allowing the city to begin fresh. Charter schools, while a foundation of the system now, did not by themselves improve achievement. And finally, New Orleans has done the hard work of changing the school culture while embracing new instructional methods.

The city has put in place a system for steadily ratcheting up school performance requirements. It has also been helped by state education reforms passed in recent years. Louisiana, which has historically ranked near the bottom nationally in student performance, mandated teacher evaluations that take student achievement into account. It also created an innovative system that evaluates teacher preparation programs based on how their graduates go on to improve students’ work in important areas, including reading, math and science.

By the time of the storm, the state and the city were fully intent on strengthening the teaching corps. With its schools empty, New Orleans took the extraordinary step of laying off the entire teaching force, requiring basic skills tests for those who wished to return to their jobs. By some estimates, only about 20 percent of the original force returned to work.

Meanwhile, schools that had been failing for years came under the control of the Recovery School District, a state entity that opted out of collective bargaining agreements with teachers’ unions. The district, which now oversees an overwhelming majority of the city’s schools, streamlined the central bureaucracy, and pushed money and policy authority down to the school building level. It also recruited new talent from around the country, making New Orleans a magnet for young school leaders.

Three-quarters of the city’s schools are charter schools, which are given broad latitude to attack educational problems as long as they meet rigorous state improvement criteria. Nationally, charter schools — which are publicly financed — are often accused of siphoning off scarce resources and taking the best students from traditional schools. That is less of an issue in New Orleans, where most schools are charters with open enrollment, and where school officials are monitoring to make sure schools stay open to all comers.

Charters around the country are often no better than traditional schools, and are frequently worse. In New Orleans, they appear to be better on average than charters elsewhere. They generally have a longer school day and a longer school year than most schools. They spend a great deal of time teaching study and time management skills, and plan each student’s development. None of these attributes are particular to charters, but they have helped turn the schools around.

New Orleans still has a long way to go to become a uniformly good school system. But by bringing in fresh ideas and strong instructional methods, it is showing that even a system with a long history of failure can improve.

    Lessons From New Orleans, NYT, 15.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/lessons-from-new-orleans.html

Is Wind Power Right for Vermont?

October 5, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “The Not-So-Green Mountains,” by Steve E. Wright (Op-Ed, Sept. 29):

The Green Mountain Power wind project in Lowell, Vt., has unprecedented support. Vermonters overwhelmingly want wind: 75 percent of voters in the town of Lowell supported the project, and 90 percent of Vermonters support wind, 74 percent strongly.

After years of intensive oversight, state and federal agencies have determined that this project, sited on a commercially logged mountain, will meet high standards in protecting water quality, wildlife and local ecosystems. To mitigate the effect of the 175-acre development, more than 2,000 acres of prime animal habitat will be conserved.

Of the federal tax credits the project will receive, 100 percent go directly toward lowering the cost of power to our customers.

When completed, this project will be the most significant renewable project in Vermont, producing clean, affordable, local electricity. It will be part of Vermont’s working landscape, and the benefits will flow to Vermont’s environment and economy for years to come.

DOROTHY SCHNURE
Manager, Corporate Communications
Green Mountain Power
Colchester, Vt., Sept. 29, 2011



To the Editor:

Steve E. Wright warns that wind turbines on Vermont’s ridges will deter tourists who come to enjoy the state’s natural beauty. Given how many of these tourists come to ski down mountain slopes stripped of natural forest, this fear seems far-fetched.

Landscape effects of wind farm development are localized, but the clean-energy gains are momentous. Nearly three-quarters of Vermont’s electricity comes from the 39-year-old Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station.

Since early last year, more than 335,000 gallons of tritium-contaminated groundwater have been pumped from wells surrounding this plant, and many Vermonters are justifiably concerned about broader health hazards as this facility continues to age.

Mr. Wright says wind power in Vermont reflects “a misunderstanding of what a responsible society must do to slow the warming of our planet.” Do “green” Vermonters really prefer continuing reliance on nuclear to the development of readily available renewable power?

PHILIP WARBURG
Newton, Mass., Sept. 29, 2011

The writer is the author of the forthcoming book “Harvest the Wind.”


To the Editor:

As a lifelong Vermonter, I totally agree with Steve E. Wright’s analysis of the large-scale wind project under construction on the Lowell Mountains of our state. This project represents the triumph of big money, provided primarily through overly generous tax credits, over a creative and balanced approach to meeting our energy needs.

Electrical generation through large-scale wind projects should not be promoted as a one-size-fits-all approach. In a state with limited wind energy potential, tearing off the tops of scenic ridges to erect the tallest structures ever constructed here will have limited impact on our ability to provide carbon-free electricity, at a huge environmental and economic cost.

Vermont has a 50-year history of restricting development of pristine mountain ridges, but now, under the direction of a governor with close financial ties to the utility company that is developing this project, we are at risk of throwing away the scenic beauty that is one of our most valuable resources.

JEFFREY RAND
South Burlington, Vt., Oct. 1, 2011



To the Editor:

Steve E. Wright’s article is in denial of reality; he disregards the real effect of Vermont’s importing almost 90 percent of its energy.

It’s not an issue when it’s not in your backyard. But let’s be clear about what it means to oppose clean energy produced locally: it means mountaintop removal in Appalachia, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, the extraction of tar sands and transcontinental pipelines, and uranium mining and nuclear meltdowns.

That’s not even mentioning the global effects of climate change and the effects we are already seeing, including the record flooding destruction our state felt just a month ago.

As a lifelong Vermonter, I am proud that Vermonters overwhelmingly support carefully developed wind farm projects and their role in our working landscape. Our Green Mountains will remain green in the future only with the right decisions now.

DAVID BLITTERSDORF
Chief Executive, AllEarth Renewables
Williston, Vt., Oct. 4, 2011



To the Editor:

Steve E. Wright questions the building of a wind farm on Lowell Mountain in Vermont. He describes this ridgeline as if it were deep wilderness; it isn’t. Lowell Mountain has repeatedly been logged. But with the falling price of lumber, the family that owns it is trying to harvest wind instead of trees.

The people of Lowell, Vt., voted overwhelmingly to support this project at a town meeting. I think this is because they view this as land to be used, like a farm or a wood lot.

Admittedly, not every ridgeline should be made into a wind farm. But what is the alternative? A coal-powered plant? And to fuel that, we will lose the mountaintops of West Virginia.

Energy is everyone’s problem, and the people of Lowell are to be commended for facing this, doing something and saying yes to energy in their backyards.

TIM SMITH
Hanover, N.H., Sept. 30, 2011

The writer is an assistant research professor in physics and environmental studies at Dartmouth College.

    Is Wind Power Right for Vermont?, NYT, 5.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/is-wind-power-right-for-vermont.html

In Texas,

Extending the Miseries

of Hurricane Ike

October 1, 2011
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

ANAHUAC, Tex. — The hurricane that swept through this East Texas town battered Shirley August’s house. Pieces of plywood cover the blown-out windows. Window screens, twisted by the winds, resemble abstract art. The shack in the backyard, her father’s old shoe-repair shop, appears ready to topple with one strong shove.

But the damage was done three years ago, in September 2008, when Hurricane Ike devastated a wide stretch of Texas with 110 m.p.h. winds, killing dozens of people and causing more than $12 billion in damage in what is considered to be the costliest storm in state history.

The storm was the first insult, delivered suddenly by nature. The second, greater insult, Mrs. August and others say, is all man-made, delivered over these many months by a state bureaucracy that has paid out roughly 10 percent of the $3.1 billion in federal aid that it has received.

“We got three years from a hurricane, and we’re still sitting here waiting?” said Mrs. August, 48, who works at a video arcade and says she cannot afford to rebuild her uninsured house on the $1,800 that she and her husband make each month. “It’s like they have their foot on our neck and they’re saying, ‘You’ll get up when I say get up.’ ”

The $3.1 billion allocated for Texas in three rounds by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development was intended to repair and reconstruct single-family homes for poor and moderate-income families, among other projects. Chambers County, where Anahuac is the county seat, and other jurisdictions agreed to rebuild or repair 3,537 hurricane-damaged homes using the first round of money. Of those, only 712 have been completed, with an additional 766 under construction.

State officials originally expected to have the $3.1 billion spent by 2013, but they have now pushed that date to December 2015.

Delays are inevitable whenever a natural disaster causes widespread damage to homes and businesses. But housing advocates and local officials said a series of missteps by state leaders created an extraordinary backup in getting projects financed and approved, stalling work on thousands of homes.

State officials repeatedly changed the rules and guidelines that cities and counties had to follow after the local agencies had already processed applications, forcing residents to redo their applications and the cities and counties to reprocess them.

The state’s attempt to develop a new formula for allocating the second round of money to local jurisdictions caused a delay of months. The formula would have distributed money based on weather conditions instead of actual damage, was criticized by housing advocates as steering money away from minority areas and was ultimately rejected by federal housing officials.

In addition, those federal officials expressed concerns about the two state agencies that had overseen the program — the Department of Housing and Community Affairs and the Department of Rural Affairs. In a June report, federal officials found that the state housing agency had not developed written procedures for processing the applications it received from local jurisdictions. The report also found that the rural affairs agency had spent more money on administrative expenses than on actual work projects, spending 98 percent of its administrative money from the first round — $12.3 million — but only 17 percent of the money designated for projects.

“It’s taken us all an inordinate amount of time to get where we are, but we are now building houses and repairing houses,” said David Turkel, the director of the Harris County Community Services Department, which has completed 76 of 395 houses. “Had our department been dealing directly with HUD like we do on millions and millions of dollars every year, and not had to go through this state housing agency up in Austin, we would have been finished and have had all the homes repaired and built two years ago.”

State officials began an overhaul of the program this summer. Gov. Rick Perry took oversight of the program away from the state housing and rural affairs agencies and put it in the hands of another agency, the General Land Office. Earlier this year, the executive director of the housing agency, Michael Gerber, resigned, and the executive director of the Rural Affairs Department, Charles S. Stone, retired.

“We don’t want to speak to the past,” said Jorge Ramirez, the director of disaster recovery for the General Land Office. “We’re going to work diligently to get these moneys to those people that need it. I would say that three years is a long time. Obviously, we want to do better.”

Roughly half of the $3.1 billion has yet to be released to Texas, because the state has not submitted plans for how local governments intend to distribute the second-round money. A spokeswoman for Mr. Perry, Lucy Nashed, said that although about 10 percent of the total $3.1 billion had been spent, the state had paid out 22 percent of the available $1.3 billion in first-round money. She added that the total spending rate of roughly 10 percent did not reflect hundreds of millions of dollars that had been awarded to local communities for projects still in the pipeline and not yet completed.

“The state was working through two lead state agencies, but our office was unhappy with the pace of expenditures and determined that placing the responsibility for recovery under a single agency headed by a statewide elected official would lead to efficiencies the two agencies had not been able to achieve,” Ms. Nashed said in a statement.

Though state officials say they are improving the disaster recovery program, the early problems at the state level continue to reverberate at the local level.

Officials in Houston, discouraged by the delays, used a combination of city and other federal money to pay for the work on 18 homes and to bypass dealing with the state. But the city’s efforts have gone so slow that a crowd of homeowners and supporters packed a City Council meeting on the third anniversary of the hurricane last month to demand answers. Out of 242 homes, city officials say that work on 20 has been completed and that 47 are under construction.

Other jurisdictions have moved even slower; Brownsville has completed none of the 16 homes it agreed to rebuild or repair.

In Chambers County, officials said state delays were the main reason they had completed only 22 of 180 homes. The work on homes cannot begin until the state approves each county’s guidelines on how they intend to run their programs, and the state did not approve Chambers County’s guidelines until July 2010.

Cities and counties have had their own difficulties managing their repair programs.

Houston officials held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in August to unveil one of the first homes they had completed using the federal money, but a state inspector later found that a subcontractor had failed to install insulation.

In Anahuac, Mrs. August turned to lawyers with the nonprofit Lone Star Legal Aid for help, but she has yet to get a clear answer from the county about the status of her application.

The air-conditioning in Mrs. August’s house stopped working, and she and her husband have spent about $1,000 of their own money making ad-hoc repairs, patching holes in the ceiling and replacing floor tiles. She said she was told last year that she was eligible for a four-bedroom house.

“It don’t have to be a mansion,” she said. “Just give me something different, something that’s livable.”

    In Texas, Extending the Miseries of Hurricane Ike, NYT, 1.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/us/extending-the-miseries-from-hurricane-ike.html

The Not-So-Green Mountains

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVE E. WRIGHT

Craftsbury, Vt.

BULLDOZERS arrived a couple of weeks ago at the base of the nearby Lowell Mountains and began clawing their way through the forest to the ridgeline, where Green Mountain Power plans to erect 21 wind turbines, each rising to 459 feet from the ground to the tip of the blades.

This desecration, in the name of “green” energy, is taking place in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom on one of the largest tracts of private wild land in the state. Here and in other places — in Maine and off Cape Cod, for instance — the allure of wind power threatens to destroy environmentally sensitive landscapes.

Erecting those turbines along more than three miles of ridgeline requires building roads — with segments of the ridgeline road itself nearly half as wide as one of Vermont’s interstate highways — in places where the travel lanes are now made by bear, moose, bobcat and deer.

It requires changing the profile of the ridgeline to provide access to cranes and service vehicles. This is being accomplished with approximately 700,000 pounds of explosives that will reduce parts of the mountaintops to rubble that will be used to build the access roads.

It also requires the clear-cutting on steep slopes of 134 acres of healthy forest, now ablaze in autumn colors. Studies have shown that clear-cutting can lead to an increase in erosion to high-quality headwater streams, robbing them of life and fouling the water for downstream residents, wild and human.

The electricity generated by this project will not appreciably reduce Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions. Only 4 percent of those emissions now result from electricity generation. (Nearly half come from cars and trucks, and another third from the burning of heating oil.)

Wind doesn’t blow all the time, or at an optimum speed, so the actual output of the turbines — the “capacity factor” — is closer to about one-third of the rated capacity of 63 megawatts. At best, this project will produce enough electricity to power about 24,000 homes per year, according to the utility.

Still, wind does blow across Vermont’s ridgelines. The Vermont Public Interest Research Group, for instance, has suggested that wind power could provide as much as 25 percent of the state’s electricity needs, which would require turbines on 29 miles of ridgeline. Other wind advocates, notably David Blittersdorf, the chief executive of a wind and solar power company in Williston, Vt., has urged that wind turbines be placed along 200 miles of ridgeline in the state.

But it is those same Green Mountain ridgelines that attracted nearly 14 million visitors to Vermont in 2009, generating $1.4 billion in tourism spending. The mountains are integral to our identity as the Green Mountain State, and provide us with clean air and water and healthy wildlife populations.

Vermont’s proud history of leadership in developing innovative, effective environmental protection is being tossed aside. This project will set an ominous precedent by ripping apart a healthy, intact ecosystem in the guise of doing something about climate change. In return, Green Mountain Power will receive $44 million in federal production tax credits over 10 years.

Ironically, most of the state’s environmental groups have not taken a stand on this ecologically disastrous project. Apparently, they are unwilling to stand in the way of “green” energy development, no matter how much destruction it wreaks upon Vermont’s core asset: the landscape that has made us who we are.

The pursuit of large-scale, ridgeline wind power in Vermont represents a terrible error of vision and planning and a misunderstanding of what a responsible society must do to slow the warming of our planet. It also represents a profound failure to understand the value of our landscape to our souls and our economic future in Vermont.

 

Steve E. Wright, an aquatic biologist,

is a former commissioner of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department.

    The Not-So-Green Mountains, NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/opinion/the-not-so-green-mountains.html

Flood Victims

Getting Fed Up With Congress

September 25, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

TUNKHANNOCK, Pa. — Standing in the living room of their house, now full of mud, slime and debris, Helen and Peter Kelly cannot believe that Congress is bickering over disaster aid to people like them.

The roaring waters of the Susquehanna River burst into their home more than two weeks ago. “Water — you work with it every day, and then it destroys your whole life,” Mrs. Kelly said.

Her husband, still looking shell-shocked, said: “We lost everything. Stove, washer, dryer, TV. Hot water heater, clothes, dishes, refrigerator. Everything, just gone.”

The Kellys also lost confidence in government and politicians.

“I wish they would understand that people like us are really in need of assistance,” Mr. Kelly said, pointing to a bathtub filled with mud and to the blades of a ceiling fan twisted out of shape by torrents of floodwater.

A few miles away in Falls Township, Pa., houses were upended, lifted off their foundations and carried a few hundred feet downstream. Huge piles of rubbish, furniture, mattresses, carpets and clothing line the streets.

Michael J. Golembeski and his family spent the weekend cleaning up. Mr. Golembeski offered a sardonic take on the fight that has brought the federal government to the brink of a shutdown, a dispute between Republicans and Democrats in Congress over money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides aid in disasters.

“Neither side wants the other side to get credit for doing anything good,” Mr. Golembeski said. “Elections are coming up.”

With just five days to go before the start of a new fiscal year, the Senate is scheduled to take a test vote on Monday on a stopgap spending bill that includes money for disaster relief. The Senate action seems unlikely to resolve the impasse with the House, where the Republican majority wants to offset some of the cost with cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.

People here in northeastern Pennsylvania, already traumatized by the loss of their homes, were further disheartened by word that FEMA’s disaster relief fund was running short of money.

“Members of Congress are playing with people’s lives, not just their own political careers,” said Martin J. Bonifanti, chief of the Lake Winola volunteer fire company. “While they are rattling on among themselves down there in Washington, people are suffering.”

Mr. Bonifanti said his politics were simple: “If they are in, they should be out.”

Pennsylvanians were just recovering from Hurricane Irene when they were hit by Tropical Storm Lee. The Susquehanna overflowed, as did tributary creeks and streams dammed up with fallen trees.

The firehouse in Falls Township was filled with five feet of stinking river water, mixed with diesel fuel, sewage and pesticides. Before using it again, firefighters need to decontaminate the site and replace the cinder block walls.

Across the street is a house that exploded on the night of the flood, apparently as a result of a leak in a propane gas line.

“We are basically homeless at this point,” said the owner of the house, Kenneth S. Eisenman, who had been planning to retire after 31 years as a driver for United Parcel Service.

Mr. Eisenman said he was not unsympathetic to the Republicans’ argument that Congress should partly offset the cost of disaster relief by cutting lower-priority programs. Some programs, he said, are as useless and wasteful as providing “treadmills for seahorses.”

Eugene J. Dziak, director of the Wyoming County Emergency Management Agency, in Tunkhannock, said he knew of 61 families that were homeless and needed temporary housing. He also needs help hauling off rubble and cleaning out buildings where mold has formed and could cause health problems.

FEMA provides money to eligible individuals and households to help pay for home repairs, temporary housing, replacement of personal property and other serious needs related to a disaster. In the absence of action by Congress, the agency’s disaster relief fund could be depleted by midweek, federal officials said.

Darlene Swithers, a home health nurse in the Wilkes-Barre area, said that she had received a few thousand dollars from FEMA, but that it would cost far more to repair structural damage done to her home by seven feet of water.

For two weeks, Ms. Swithers had no electric power. She still has no furnace or hot water. When she wants to bathe, she fills her tub with water heated in her microwave oven.

“We are too busy trying to get our lives back together to think much about Congress,” Ms. Swithers said. But she has opinions.

“Members of Congress are intelligent, but they have no common sense,” Ms. Swithers said. “They fight too much. They should be put in a corner and take a timeout and start working together as a team. I’m so sick of hearing Republicans this and Democrats that.”

Ms. Swithers said Congress should set spending priorities, just as she does in paying household bills. The government, she said, would have more money for disaster assistance if it spent less on inessential amenities: “a park where people sit to watch the river and eat lunch; a playground in the middle of an empty field.”

Members of Congress from both parties say they want to speed help to disaster victims and pass a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open after Sept. 30. But first they must make a few points.

On the CNN program “State of the Union” on Sunday, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said “Tea Party Republicans” in the House were largely responsible for “the spectacle of a near government shutdown.”

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, had “manufactured a crisis” over disaster aid.

Uprooted and desolate, hard-working people in this part of the country expect a bit more from their government.

“I’m an ex-Navy Seabee,” Mr. Eisenman said. “I paid my dues. I’ve worked since I was 10 years old. I never asked for anything from anybody.

“Now I’ve been sitting here for more than two weeks with nothing,” he said. “I’m very frustrated.”

    Flood Victims Getting Fed Up With Congress, NYT, 25.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/us/flood-victims-getting-fed-up-with-congress.html

Climate Change:

Science vs. Skepticism

September 19, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Is It Weird Enough Yet?,” by Thomas L. Friedman (column, Sept. 14):

I agree strongly that “we need to take steps to mitigate climate change — just in case Governor Perry is wrong.”

The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, in what has become known as Pascal’s wager, suggested that even people who did not believe in God should act as if they did, since being wrong could be catastrophic.

I would say to the climate skeptics: If you do not believe in climate change but act as if you did, even if you are right, the result would be a society with clean, sustainable jobs, less dependence on Mideast oil and healthier lives. But if you are wrong and we do not act immediately, the results would be catastrophic.

PHILLIP GOTTSCHALK
Montville, N.J., Sept. 14, 2011

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman is obviously correct to point out that Gov. Rick Perry’s and Representative Michele Bachmann’s views on climate change are wrong. But it’s clear that they won’t have their minds changed simply by showing them more scientific data or by explaining to them that 97 percent of the most published climate researchers — the group of people on the planet most knowledgeable about the subject — agree that human activities are causing rapid climate change.

The problem is that their denial of reality is a byproduct of a culture that marginalizes the scientific method as a way of thinking and promotes faith as a virtue, even if it is in direct opposition to the facts. Changing their minds about climate change will take more than presenting the evidence for it. It will require a seismic shift in the way they choose to understand reality.

MARK BESSOUDO
Toronto, Sept. 15, 2011

To the Editor:

Like many people, I don’t know if the climate is actually changing or, if it is, whether or not it is caused by carbon emissions, agricultural practices, solar activity or even cow flatulence. I do know, though, that like most people who want to breathe clean air and have a healthy planet, I strongly support realistic, comprehensible and well-enforced regulations that will protect our environment without stifling economic growth.

I think it is called common sense.

VAUGHN GILBERT
McKeesport, Pa., Sept. 14, 2011

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman claims there is dispositive scientific proof of climate change. The fires in Texas are a result of droughts, caused by the hottest Texas summer on record, which was caused by climate change, which was caused by manmade carbon emissions.

There’s just one little problem. The previous temperature record was set in 1934. This raises the question, if hot weather and droughts today are a result of climate change caused by increased manmade carbon emissions, what were the hot weather and droughts (remember the Dust Bowl?) in 1934 caused by? Maybe the science isn’t so irrefutable.

FREDRIC MORCK
Redwood City, Calif., Sept. 14, 2011

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman suggests that Representative Michele Bachmann and Gov. Rick Perry are crazy for denying the existence of global warming. They’re not crazy; they are ideologues. After all, it’s nearly impossible to deny that the planet is warming. The only real debate is whether global warming is caused by humans.

Mr. Friedman says America needs to implement a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system to mitigate the emission of greenhouse gases, which cause global warming. I agree, but now is not the time for that regulation. For the 14 million Americans who are currently unemployed, Washington has one job and that’s getting American workers back to work. Increased environmental regulation would only add to the uncertainty of economic conditions, discouraging corporate investment in job creation.

MIKE BROST
Eau Claire, Wis., Sept. 14, 2011

To the Editor:

I can’t help but note that politicians like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, who demand absolute scientific proof that climate change is real, are the same ones who treat as undisputed fact the assumption that tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs for the unemployed.

BRUCE HARVILLE
Madison, Wis., Sept. 14, 2011

    Climate Change: Science vs. Skepticism, NYT, 19.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/opinion/climate-change-science-vs-skepticism.html

Is It Weird Enough Yet?

September 13, 2011
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Every time I listen to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota talk about how climate change is some fraud perpetrated by scientists trying to gin up money for research, I’m always reminded of one of my favorite movie lines that Jack Nicholson delivers to his needy neighbor who knocks on his door in the film “As Good As It Gets.” “Where do they teach you to talk like this?” asks Nicholson. “Sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”

Thanks Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann, but we really are all stocked up on crazy right now. I mean, here is the Texas governor rejecting the science of climate change while his own state is on fire — after the worst droughts on record have propelled wildfires to devour an area the size of Connecticut. As a statement by the Texas Forest Service said last week: “No one on the face of this earth has ever fought fires in these extreme conditions.”

Remember the first rule of global warming. The way it unfolds is really “global weirding.” The weather gets weird: the hots get hotter; the wets wetter; and the dries get drier. This is not a hoax. This is high school physics, as Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist in Texas, explained on Joe Romm’s invaluable Climateprogress.org blog: “As our atmosphere becomes warmer, it can hold more water vapor. Atmospheric circulation patterns shift, bringing more rain to some places and less to others. For example, when a storm comes, in many cases there is more water available in the atmosphere and rainfall is heavier. When a drought comes, often temperatures are already higher than they would have been 50 years ago, and so the effects of the drought are magnified by higher evaporation rates.”

CNN reported on Sept. 9 that “Texas had the distinction of experiencing the warmest summer on record of any state in America, with an average of 86.8 degrees. Dallas residents sweltered for 40 consecutive days of grueling 100-plus degree temperatures. ... Temperature-related energy demands soared more than 22 percent above the norm this summer, the largest increase since record-keeping of energy demands began more than a century ago.”

There is still much we don’t know about how climate change will unfold, but it is no hoax. We need to start taking steps, as our scientists urge, “to manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.” If you want a quick primer on the latest climate science, tune into “24 Hours of Reality.” It is a worldwide live, online update that can be found at climaterealityproject.org and will be going on from Sept. 14-15, over 24 hours, with contributors from 24 time zones.

Not only has the science of climate change come under attack lately, so has the economics of green jobs. Here the critics have a point — sort of. I wasn’t surprised to read that the solar panel company Solyndra, which got $535 million in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy to make solar panels in America, filed for bankruptcy protection two weeks ago and laid off 1,100 workers. This story is an embarrassment to the green jobs movement, but the death by bankruptcy was a collaboration of the worst Democratic and Republican impulses.

How so? There is only one effective, sustainable way to produce “green jobs,” and that is with a fixed, durable, long-term price signal that raises the price of dirty fuels and thereby creates sustained consumer demand for, and sustained private sector investment in, renewables. Without a carbon tax or gasoline tax or cap-and-trade system that makes renewable energies competitive with dirty fuels, while they achieve scale and move down the cost curve, green jobs will remain a hobby.

President Obama has chosen not to push for a price signal for political reasons. He has opted for using regulations and government funding. In the area of regulation, he deserves great credit for just pushing through new fuel economy standards that will ensure that by 2025 the average U.S. car will get the mileage (and have the emissions) of today’s Prius hybrid. But elsewhere, Obama has relied on green subsidies rather than a price signal. Some of this has really helped start-ups leverage private capital, but you also get Solyndras. The G.O.P. has blocked any price signal and fought every regulation. The result too often is taxpayer money subsidizing wonderful green innovation, but with no sustainable market within which these companies can scale.

Let’s fix that. We need revenue to balance the budget. We need sustainable clean-tech jobs. We need less dependence on Mideast oil. And we need to take steps to mitigate climate change — just in case Governor Perry is wrong. The easiest way to do all of this at once is with a gasoline tax or price on carbon. Would you rather cut Social Security and Medicare or pay a little more per gallon of gas and make the country stronger, safer and healthier? It still amazes me that our politicians have the courage to send our citizens to war but not to ask the public that question.

    Is It Weird Enough Yet?, NYT, 13.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/opinion/friedman-is-it-weird-enough-yet.html

Firefighters Make Progress

on Washington Wildfire

September 10, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

GOLDENDALE, Wash. (AP) — Nearly 650 firefighters gained the upper hand Saturday on a roughly 4,200-acre blaze in the tinder-dry forests near Washington state's Satus Pass, allowing authorities to lift evacuation orders for many of the roughly 200 threatened homes.

The fire burning 20 miles north of the Columbia River and about 10 miles north of the city of Goldendale was 30 percent contained. The fire has burned through more than 6 square miles, fire incident spokesman Dale Warriner said.

The blaze has burned 64 buildings. Fire officials have confirmed that nine of those structures are homes, but that number is expected to rise upon further investigation.

Authorities could not give an estimate as to how many people were allowed to return home Saturday night, but said orders were lifted for three-fourths of a 29-square-mile area that initially had been evacuated.

The fire started Wednesday along U.S. Highway 97 near a Greek Orthodox monastery. From there, it burned southeast of the highway through steep forested canyons and flat areas with dry grasses and thick stands of Ponderosa pines.

The fire remained under investigation, but it was believed to be human-caused.

Washington is experiencing a fairly late wildfire season after a winter of heavy snow and a cool spring, but the hot, dry conditions of summer have continued well into September — and were expected Saturday.

"The good news is that the winds are light, and firefighters are able to focus on putting the fire out rather than keep it from spreading," fire spokesman Chuck Turley said.

Concerns about wind were expected to pick up again Sunday afternoon when a front is expected to blow through the region, Turley said.

Fire officials were working with local law enforcement, using GPS coordinates, to try to identify whether homes or outbuildings had burned.

Longtime resident Monte Isaacs spent 20 years building his two-story cabin out of salvage lumber. At a public meeting about the fire Friday evening, he recounted watching his home burn as firefighters in the area failed to protect it.

"I'm 61 years old," he said. "I'm not a young man. I don't know where to start over. I don't know if I can."

    Firefighters Make Progress on Washington Wildfire, NYT, 10.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/10/us/AP-US-Wash-Wildfires.html

Flooding Persists

in Southern Tier of New York

September 9, 2011
The New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — Stacey Gould, 43, and her son, Aidan Ehmke, 7, stared at their charming two-story home on the banks of the roiling Susquehanna River on Friday as rushing, muddy waters engulfed the house.

“In 2005, we had the 100-year flood, and in 2006, we had the 500-year flood,” she said. “What-year flood is this?”

Aidan had a question of his own: Where was his backyard swing set? Claimed by the river, his mother explained.

The boy took the news better than Jim and Patty DeClercq, after being told by the authorities that they could not return to check on their ranch house in nearby Johnson City, which was also flooded by the swollen Susquehanna.

“We couldn’t afford flood insurance, and now we think we lost everything,” Mr. DeClercq, who relies on a Social Security check, said.

The stories of loss go on and on here in the Southern Tier of New York, west of the Catskills along the Pennsylvania border. The area was inundated by record-high floodwaters on Thursday and Friday, as the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee dumped rain across the Northeast, closing major highways and reflooding regions still reeling from Tropical Storm Irene.

Rivers washed onto roadways and into neighborhoods, creating what some residents labeled a once-in-a-generation flood, with rain pushing waterways to historic levels in places like Deposit, Owego and Vestal.

In many areas, houses were submerged up to their eaves, and cars went under water. Some residents were plucked from rising waters by boat or from rooftops by helicopter, and many major roadways and bridges were blocked off by National Guard troops.

Farther south along the Susquehanna, which flows from upstate New York to the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, flood waters were submerging communities in Pennsylvania, where at least five people had died because of the recent storms.

At least 10 sewage treatment plants had become inundated, causing floodwaters in Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett said Friday. “If you don’t have to be in it, keep out,” Mr. Corbett said of the water, warning of a public health catastrophe.

The governor had asked nonessential state workers in the capital, Harrisburg, and in Reading and Scranton not to report to work on Friday.

In Wilkes-Barre, Pa., the Susquehanna reached a record 42.66 feet early Friday, about two feet higher than the National Weather Service had predicted.

In the Binghamton area, about 20,000 residents were ordered to evacuate on Thursday as the Susquehanna set records by cresting higher than 25 feet that night and flowing over the city’s retaining walls. Local officials called it the worst flood in Binghamton since the walls were built about 70 years ago. Merchants rushed to move merchandise and equipment to higher floors or higher ground, as downtown Binghamton was evacuated on Thursday.

The Chenango and Unadilla Rivers and Oneida Creek were among the other high-rising waterways. A number of electric substations were shut, as was natural gas and water service to scores of houses and businesses.

The area around an emergency shelter in Nichols became so flooded that National Guard airmen in Blackhawk helicopters made three separate drops of food and blankets to the shelter Thursday night.

In a flooded residential neighborhood in Apalachin, firefighters were unable to reach a burning house on Marshland Road. Next door an infirm 93-year-old woman had to be airlifted to a hospital, officials said. Master Sgt. Jules Roy of the 103rd Rescue Squadron of the New York Air National Guard, based in Westhampton, was lowered from a helicopter by cable to secure her in its wire rescue basket.

As part of a multiagency response, the New York Fire Department pitched in, sending nearly 100 firefighters and several boats to the region to help with rescue efforts.

At Binghamton University, college officials, American Red Cross workers and others set up 1,800 cots for evacuees in a field house roughly the size of a football field, and the space was filled to capacity by Thursday afternoon. University students — working 100 to a shift — provided evacuees with water, meals and hygiene kits, and a college jazz band even entertained them.

“This was an overnight explosion of water,” said Craig Cooper, a Red Cross spokesman at the shelter, one of 17 in the area. “These people had nowhere to go.”

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo traveled Friday to Binghamton and surveyed the damage across the Susquehanna Valley region by helicopter.

Afterward, Mr. Cuomo told reporters he saw “houses submerged over the roof, houses off their foundations, mobile homes pushed into other homes.”

“When you see the extent of the damage, that no one lost their life, it really is a small miracle,” he said. “And that is the silver lining.”

Mr. Cuomo told reporters that President Obama quickly approved his request on Thursday to declare the flooded region a major disaster area, which cleared the way for the federal government to provide financial assistance and resources to the state and local governments. “The federal government is very engaged in the partnership,” the governor said.

Philip E. Parr, a federal coordinator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that municipalities would be partially reimbursed for emergency operations and that homeowners could apply for financial assistance to help repair flood damage to their houses. FEMA helped supply 100,000 liters of drinking water to the area, as well as meals and cots and blankets.

“My guess is that there will be thousands of homes that will have sustained damage,” said Mr. Cuomo, who urged evacuees not to return home until officials gave notice to.

“This is not over yet,” he said. “It’s not yet time to go home. The waters have not yet receded.”

The DeClercqs stared down a water-covered street toward their house, as a merchant rowed a boat along it to check on his used-car business.

On Wednesday, the DeClercqs had lugged belongings up from their basement to the first floor. Then they packed a bag and repaired to a bed at a local church, praying that their toilets would not back up, as they did in the flood of 2006, spewing sewage and forcing them to throw out their furniture and carpets and begin a laborious and costly process of disinfecting their home.

“We took two days worth of clothes with us,” Ms. DeClercq said, “and now that’s all we have left to our name.”

 

Matt Flegenheimer and Timothy Williams contributed reporting.

    Flooding Persists in Southern Tier of New York, NYT, 9.9.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/nyregion/ny-region-in-triage-mode-as-flooding-persists.html

Northeast Is Soaked Again,

Forcing Evacuations

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

As the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee deluged states across the Northeast on Thursday, rivers that had overrun their banks after Tropical Storm Irene were again swelling past the breaking point, prompting officials to order the evacuation of at least 120,000 people while surging waters threatened major population centers.

The Susquehanna River, which stretches more than 400 miles from upstate New York to Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, reached record flood levels, forcing many residents still recovering from Tropical Storm Irene to abandon their homes once again.

In the Binghamton, N.Y., area, 20,000 residents were ordered to evacuate and all roads in the city were closed to traffic as the Susquehanna rose 11 feet above flood level, sending water toppling over retaining walls and into the downtown area. Some buildings at Binghamton University were being used as shelters.

The city’s location between two flooding rivers, the Susquehanna and the Chenango, left it particularly vulnerable. Theodore Champney, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Binghamton, said the recent spate of extreme weather left him struggling to find a precedent.

“This is worse than anything I’ve seen,” Mr. Champney said. “I’ve worked here over 20 years.”

South of Binghamton, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., waters were expected to crest at nearly 41 feet by early Friday, more than 18 feet above flood stage.

Officials issued mandatory evacuation orders for about half of the city’s 40,000 residents and asked businesses to close by midday Thursday. It was unclear how many left, but a spokesman for Mayor Thomas M. Leighton called Wilkes-Barre a “ghost town.” Another 80,000 people were ordered to evacuate from areas surrounding the city.

At least five deaths in Pennsylvania were potentially attributed to the storm, but none were confirmed, the state Department of Health said.

In New Jersey, the Passaic River, which flooded surrounding towns last month, returned to flood stage. But this time the waters of the Delaware River, which did not flood during the earlier storm, were also rising, closing roads in the southern part of the state.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo surveyed the flood damage on Thursday in sections of Broome County, which includes Binghamton, directing additional emergency resources to western New York. He also asked the federal government to expand the major disaster declaration issued as a result of Tropical Storm Irene to include more counties.

In an interview later, Mr. Cuomo estimated that the most recent flooding would affect more people than Tropical Storm Irene had.

“You’re fighting Mother Nature, and it’s ultimately a war you’re going to lose,” the governor said. “The only question is with how many casualties and how much damage.”

At the state’s request, members of New York Fire Department were sent to Binghamton on Thursday afternoon to assist in rescue operations.

In flood-prone areas of New Jersey, residents expressed frustration with a seemingly perpetual siege on their properties. Shpendim Rizvani, 58, from Pompton Lakes, said flooding from Tropical Storm Irene had forced her to seek shelter at her son’s home nearby. But his home was now flooded, too. Several feet of water filled the backyard, and two feet of water seeped into the finished basement.

“I feel sorry for the kids,” Ms. Rizvani said about the three children of her son, Timmy. “They lost everything. Their backpacks, their shoes — everything.”

Roy Stevenson, 72, a neighbor in Pompton Lakes, watched on Thursday as water inched across his backyard, toward his home. He motioned toward the tops of a stand of trees, whose trunks were submerged in water, swaying in the stream.

“I got a family of great blue heron in there,” he said. “I have no idea what they’re doing now.”

The Weather Service issued flash-flood warnings in and around Albany, Philadelphia and other large cities.

With areas still recovering from the effects of Tropical Storm Irene, the Northeast appears to be in the midst of what one meteorologist called a “weather period” with atypical flooding.

“These floods used to be once in a decade or 20 years,” said the meteorologist, Hugh Johnson, who works at the Weather Service office in Albany. “Here we are with another one after Irene.”

Red Cross offices in upstate New York prepared shelters for evacuees. In Chenango County, three centers began taking in families on Wednesday night, said Michael May, supervisor for the county’s Red Cross office. Though early attendance was sparse, Mr. May said he expected many more evacuees to arrive on Thursday night.

“This is definitely worse than Irene,” he said. “The ground was already saturated.”

Mayor Leighton of Wilkes-Barre said the city had opened shelters in several schools, and he called for residents of evacuation zones to leave their homes by 4 p.m. on Thursday. Officials were cautiously optimistic that the levees would protect the city from significant damage.

In Binghamton, water tumbled over the city’s retaining walls about 10 a.m., and businesses in the area hurried to move their products to higher ground.

Along Riverside Drive downtown, some basements were submerged, with water flowing into the first floors of homes. Some cars almost disappeared from view. In the swimming pool area behind an apartment complex, only floating umbrellas and the tops of lampposts were visible.

Mark Whiting, owner of Foland’s Lumber and Building Supplies, said flooding was worse than in 2006, when a deluge submerged much of the city.

“We get a double whammy here,” Mr. Whiting said, noting the confluence of the area’s two rivers. “It’s a washout.”

 

Reporting was contributed by Alexandra Abel, Dan Bilefsky, Thomas Kaplan,
Sarah Maslin Nir, Noah Rosenberg and Timothy Williams.

    Northeast Is Soaked Again, Forcing Evacuations, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/nyregion/remnants-of-tropical-storm-soak-an-already-battered-northeast.html

1.4 Million Lose Electricity

in Area Around San Diego

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — A power failure swept through Southern California on Thursday afternoon, leaving more than a million people without electricity in an area that extended from the coast east to Arizona and south into Mexico.

San Diego Gas and Electric, which supplies power to much of the region, said that the exact cause was unknown, but that the system may have been overwhelmed by a heat wave. Officials said the blackout was not the result of terrorist activity.

All of the company’s 1.4 millions consumers were without power on Thursday, as the failures, centered in San Diego, stretched as far north as Orange County, south into Mexico, and east into Arizona. On its Web site, San Diego Gas and Electric said the blackout could continue into Friday and urged residents to exercise care in driving and stay home at night.

San Diego residents described a chaotic scene after the power went out around 4 p.m. Police officers were sent to busy intersections to direct traffic. Without the Internet, lights or any idea when power might return, workers headed home, only to turn back to the office after sitting in traffic even worse than usual.

All outbound flights from San Diego International Airport were stopped. Some inbound flights were allowed, but Rebecca Bloomfield, an airport spokeswoman, said many were diverted to other airports.

Jason Bump, who turned 38 on Thursday, had hoped to head home early to celebrate his birthday. But he was stranded in the parking lot of his office in Carlsbad, Calif., throwing a football around with co-workers.

“I almost took the day off for my birthday,” he said. “I probably should have.”

San Diego Gas and Electric said the blackout seemed to have originated in northern Arizona. It said it was working to repair the two lines that had been “tripped off,” resulting in the failure throughout the region, but made no estimate of when service would be restored.

Late in the afternoon, the San Diego Police Department reported many calls about the blackout, but no other major problems related to the power failure.

San Diego residents called friends around the country for updates on the blackout, as rumors flew about what was going on. Some people lucky enough to make it home organized neighborhood gatherings. Carrie Sandys bought the last of the ice from a corner store and planned a barbecue with her neighbors to use up their produce, now that their refrigerators were out.

They had meat and beer on ice, but still, they could not turn on the opening game of the National Football League season.

 

Rob Davis contributed reporting from San Diego.

    1.4 Million Lose Electricity in Area Around San Diego, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/09power.html

Going Green but Getting Nowhere

September 7, 2011
The New York Times
By GERNOT WAGNER

YOU reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things.

Good.

Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming. The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action.

You refuse the plastic bag at the register, believing this one gesture somehow makes a difference, and then carry your takeout meal back to your car for a carbon-emitting trip home.

Say you’re willing to make real sacrifices. Sell your car. Forsake your air-conditioner in the summer, turn down the heat in the winter. Try to become no-impact man. You would, in fact, have no impact on the planet. Americans would continue to emit an average of 20 tons of carbon dioxide a year; Europeans, about 10 tons.

What about going bigger? You are the pope with a billion followers, and let’s say all of them take your advice to heart. If all Catholics decreased their emissions to zero overnight, the planet would surely notice, but pollution would still be rising. Of course, a billion people, whether they’re Catholic or adherents of any other religion or creed, will do no such thing. Two weeks of silence in a Buddhist yoga retreat in the Himalayas with your BlackBerry checked at the door? Sure. An entire life voluntarily lived off the grid? No thanks.

And that focuses only on those who can decrease their emissions. When your average is 20 tons per year, going down to 18 tons is as easy as taking a staycation. But if you are among the four billion on the planet who each emit one ton a year, you have nowhere to go but up.

Leading scientific groups and most climate scientists say we need to decrease global annual greenhouse gas emissions by at least half of current levels by 2050 and much further by the end of the century. And that will still mean rising temperatures and sea levels for generations.

So why bother recycling or riding your bike to the store? Because we all want to do something, anything. Call it “action bias.” But, sadly, individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action, and it doesn’t add up to enough. Self-interest, not self-sacrifice, is what induces noticeable change. Only the right economic policies will enable us as individuals to be guided by self-interest and still do the right thing for the planet.

Every ton of carbon dioxide pollution causes around $20 of damage to economies, ecosystems and human health. That sum times 20 implies $400 worth of damage per American per year. That’s not damage you’re going to do in the distant future; that’s damage each of us is doing right now. Who pays for it?

We pay as a society. My cross-country flight adds fractions of a penny to everyone else’s cost. That knowledge leads some of us to voluntarily chip in a few bucks to “offset” our emissions. But none of these payments motivate anyone to fly less. It doesn’t lead airlines to switch to more fuel-efficient planes or routes. If anything, airlines by now use voluntary offsets as a marketing ploy to make green-conscious passengers feel better. The result is planetary socialism at its worst: we all pay the price because individuals don’t.

It won’t change until a regulatory system compels us to pay our fair share to limit pollution accordingly. Limit, of course, is code for “cap and trade,” the system that helped phase out lead in gasoline in the 1980s, slashed acid rain pollution in the 1990s and is now bringing entire fisheries back from the brink. “Cap and trade” for carbon is beginning to decrease carbon pollution in Europe, and similar models are slated to do the same from California to China.

Alas, this approach has been declared dead in Washington, ironically by self-styled free-marketers. Another solution, a carbon tax, is also off the table because, well, it’s a tax.

Never mind that markets are truly free only when everyone pays the full price for his or her actions. Anything else is socialism. The reality is that we cannot overcome the global threats posed by greenhouse gases without speaking the ultimate inconvenient truth: getting people excited about making individual environmental sacrifices is doomed to fail.

High school science tells us that global warming is real. And economics teaches us that humanity must have the right incentives if it is to stop this terrible trend.

Don’t stop recycling. Don’t stop buying local. But add mastering some basic economics to your to-do list. Our future will be largely determined by our ability to admit the need to end planetary socialism. That’s the most fundamental of economics lessons and one any serious environmentalist ought to heed.

 

Gernot Wagner is an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund
and the author of the forthcoming “But Will the Planet Notice?”

    Going Green but Getting Nowhere, NYT, 7.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/opinion/going-green-but-getting-nowhere.html

Bad News Is Now Official

for Scorched Texas Town

September 7, 2011
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

BASTROP, Tex. — It was one simple line of text, one out of 243: 112 South Buckhorn Drive. Bettye Porterfield found it on Wednesday as she ran her finger over a piece of paper taped to a window. She and her husband, Ken, had lived at that address for nearly nine years — they called it their little cottage in the pines — but now her home was gone. The list made it official.

Tears welled up in her eyes as she turned from the list attached to the windows of the Bastrop convention center. Her husband put his arm around her shoulders. The quilt his mother had made by hand, the Bible that had been in his family for generations, the coconut carved up like an owl that their daughter had given him — they lost all of it.

“When you see it in writing, it kind of makes it more real,” said Ken Porterfield, 73.

The scale of the disaster that has devastated this Central Texas town of 7,200 can be measured in absence. Texas Kiln Products, a lumber mill at the edge of Bastrop State Park, is gone, and so are 116 Nugget Lane and 256 Kelley Road and 112 Timberline Lane and 259 Cattlemens Drive and 101 North Mockingbird Lane. “It’s all surreal,” said Deborah Shelton, 63, whose husband and brother-in-law owned Texas Kiln Products, which specialized in native Texas woods. “Everybody’s saying that and it’s true. I feel like I’m watching this on a television show or a movie, because I haven’t actually touched the ground where the ashes are.”

On Wednesday, firefighters were able to beat back some of the flames of the most destructive wildfire in the history of Texas — a 24-mile-long blaze in Bastrop County that has killed two people, burned 34,356 acres and destroyed 576 homes since it started Sunday afternoon. But for many residents what should been the fourth day of the fire was really the first: County officials released a list of the houses that they have confirmed have been destroyed so far.

Shortly before 11 a.m. Wednesday, the list — 12 sheets of paper taped into a large rectangle, with 243 addresses total — was posted on the glass entrance of the convention center, which has become an emergency command post. It was like a list of the dead that is often released at the scene of major disasters, except there were addresses and Zip codes instead of names and ages. People stood in front of the sheets of paper throughout the day, recognizing their own and their neighbors’ addresses. The pain was communal.

“This was our friend across the street,” said Mrs. Porterfield, 71, as she pointed at 109 South Buckhorn Drive, the address above theirs on the list.

Bastrop is a small-town everytown to the east of Austin with a Best Buy and a Main Street, a place both historic — its timber industry supplied Austin with lumber in the 1840s — as well as scenic. It bills itself as the “Home of the Lost Pines” with its pine-covered hills, large swaths of which are now blackened, and is home to an eclectic mix of ranchers, retirees, white-collar professionals and blue-collar workers. One of the two bodies discovered on Tuesday was identified by the authorities as that of Michael Troy Farr, 48, an electrician for the City of Austin who was found outside his residence in the nearby town of Smithville.

The fire has touched virtually everyone, and every thing. Public schools have shut their doors for the week. Hundreds of people have been sleeping overnight at emergency shelters, while other evacuees have rooms in local hotels or are staying with friends or relatives. The Hills Prairie Livestock Auction building became a kind of emergency shelter for evacuated horses and cattle. Since the wildfire began, ranchers seeking a safe haven for their animals have housed about 400 cows and 80 horses there.

Nearly 21,000 fires since last November have destroyed more than 1,500 homes throughout the state, according to the Texas Forest Service. The Bastrop fire has been the worst so far, and as of Wednesday evening, the forest service said, it was still only about 30 percent contained.

Residents were told it was still too dangerous to check on the condition of their homes, so before the list was posted, many of them had no idea if their houses had survived. Still others remain uncertain because their house was not among the 243 listed. The county’s top elected official, Judge Ronnie McDonald, said he expected the number of destroyed houses to double.

Emotions have been running high for residents unable to see the damage for themselves and frustrated by a lack of information. One woman was arrested by state troopers for disregarding a barricade to get to her property.

“It’s a tough time,” Judge McDonald said. “People are either anxious, nervous, upset — all the range of emotions. They lost personal belongings, memories, all those things. The main thing we have to focus on is safety. It’s tough telling someone they can’t get into their house.”

    Bad News Is Now Official for Scorched Texas Town, NYT, 7.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/us/08wildfire.html

Obama Blocks an Air Pollution Rule

September 7, 2011

The New York Times


To the Editor:

Re “Obama Abandons a Stricter Limit on Air Pollution” (front page, Sept. 3):

How terribly shortsighted and reckless of President Obama to reverse a regulation that protects against the scourge of polluted air.

As the author of a book about the late Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the principal founder of Earth Day, I am aware of how tirelessly he and others worked to secure legislation that would protect our air, water and land. The Clean Air Act is a prime example.

To reverse a regulation intended to cut down toxic emissions is to tamper with the health, safety and quality of life of present and future generations.

To quote Senator Nelson, “As we think about the richness of the world in which we live — its forests, its clear blue waters and all of its varied life forms — we must understand how our actions affect all of them.”

SHEILA T. COHEN
Madison, Wis., Sept. 6, 2011

To the Editor:

I am heartbroken and horrified by President Obama’s refusal to update smog standards. Updating the standards is long overdue, and such updates would have a highly beneficial effect on health care costs as well as pushing corporations to invest in the kind of essential technology and infrastructure needed to reduce pollution and create jobs.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the president’s action is that he appears to believe, and act on, the lies disseminated by the right, particularly members of the Tea Party, about the prohibitive cost of environmental protection, rather than acknowledging the truth: that the cost of not protecting the environment is overwhelming and irreversible.

What has happened to the passionate, committed man we elected?

EDWINA TRENTHAM
Moodus, Conn., Sept. 5, 2011

To the Editor:

“A Debate Arises on Job Creation vs. Environmental Regulation” (Business Day, Sept. 5) led with the recently withdrawn smog standard and then suggested that regulating now could be problematic in light of the economy’s weakness.

The withdrawn standard, however, would establish a goal for state air pollution programs and therefore produces no immediate costs at all.

Companies will incur costs only many years from now after states translate these goals into specific requirements for polluters. And if history is any guide, those costs will have a vanishingly small effect on employment, and some of that effect may be positive.

Environmental regulations account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of mass layoffs. An administration seriously concerned about unemployment, rather than appeasing polluters and their allies, would focus its attention elsewhere.

The recession does not justify sacrificing thousands of lives by suspending a crucial health-protective standard being carried out many years hence.

DAVID M. DRIESEN
Syracuse, Sept. 5, 2011

The writer teaches environmental law at Syracuse University.

To the Editor:

Re “Stung by the President on Air Quality, Environmentalists Weigh Their Options” (news article, Sept. 4):

I want to express my support for President Obama’s sound decision. Environmental issues are often played as trump cards when they should instead be weighed against other concerns.

Our air has become very clean over the last few decades (thanks to great work by environmentalists), so air quality issues no longer have the urgency they once had. This is not the time to be imposing expensive solutions to minor problems.

I’m an independent who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

MICHAEL SHERMAN
Mountain View, Calif., Sept. 4, 2011

To the Editor:

Re “A Bad Call on Ozone” (editorial, Sept. 3):

Those of us in “the reality-based community” can only shake our heads in disgust as President Obama betrays one more of his principles.

Perhaps he can save all of us a lot of grief by simply announcing the principles he will abandon in his quest for re-election.

Better to be disgusted all at once than to have to suffer through this numbing drip, drip, drip of disheartening news as he abandons all that we thought he stood for.

LARRY BARKAN
Tempe, Ariz., Sept. 3, 2011

    Obama Blocks an Air Pollution Rule, NYT, 7.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/opinion/obama-blocks-an-air-pollution-rule.html

With Calmer Winds,

Texas Firefighters

Make Progress Against Vast Blaze

September 6, 2011
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

BASTROP, Tex. — Bob and Margaret Austin stared at the hills in the distance, where towering plumes of white and black smoke stretched across the blue horizon Tuesday. They had survived the flames of a wildfire, but they had no idea if their house had been as lucky.

About 11 a.m. Monday, a state trooper told the couple that they had 15 minutes to evacuate. They filled their two vehicles with her grandmother’s jewelry, his firearms and their mortgage papers and photo albums, along with a puppy and a kitten. They realized later that they had left behind the urn with Mr. Austin’s mother’s ashes.

“Fifteen minutes is not a lot of time,” said Mr. Austin, 62. “You think of a thousand things after you’ve left.”

The couple had fled the most destructive wildfire in the history of Texas, a vast blaze that has destroyed 550 homes in Bastrop County in Central Texas and killed two people since it began Sunday, one of a series of wildfires that have broken out around the state in recent days.

By Tuesday afternoon, the Bastrop fire continued to burn as dozens of evacuated residents from outlying subdivisions sought aid at Bastrop Middle School, which officials had turned into a shelter.

“You look at people’s faces around here, and it looks like they’ve been in a war,” Mr. Austin said, leaning against a school wall as American Red Cross workers and evacuees walked in and out of the cafeteria. “I talked to an elderly couple in their 80s last night, and they got out with just their clothes and their dog.”

Since wildfire season began in November 2010, nearly 21,000 fires have destroyed more than 1,500 homes throughout Texas, according to state officials. More than half of those destroyed residences — roughly 770 — have been lost since dozens of new fires erupted over the Labor Day weekend, fueled by high winds and the dry conditions created by the state’s worst one-year drought on record. Throughout Central Texas and other parts of the state, including Montgomery County near Houston, about 2,000 firefighters were battling wildfires that have burned more than 118,400 acres in recent days.

Gov. Rick Perry deployed the state’s elite search team to look for more possible victims in Bastrop County, following the discovery on Tuesday of two bodies. Officials said they had not yet positively identified the bodies and released few details about the circumstances surrounding the discovery, but they did say the victims appeared to be civilians and not emergency responders.

The search team, known as Texas Task Force 1, was in Bastrop on Wednesday morning to assist local officials in looking for additional victims. The team is made up of 100 members and nearly one dozen canines, and is part of the task force that the state sent to New York City after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The worst fire by far has been the one in Bastrop County, roughly 30 miles east of Austin. It has destroyed more homes than any other single wildfire in state history, gutting 550 residences and forcing about 5,000 people to evacuate as it has burned through 34,000 acres, according to the Texas Forest Service. Previously, the most destructive wildfire was one that broke out in April in Palo Pinto County, west of Fort Worth, that destroyed nearly 170 homes.

The flames in Bastrop have brought life to a virtual standstill. Public schools have shut their doors for the week. Residents of 20 subdivision neighborhoods were forced to evacuate. Many of those outside the city were under orders to boil their water. Hundreds of people have been sleeping overnight at emergency shelters, while other evacuees have rooms in local hotels or are staying with friends or relatives. There have been power outages and road closures as the fire reached within a few miles of the heart of Bastrop, a small city of 7,200 along the Colorado River.

Bastrop County’s top elected official, County Judge Ronnie McDonald, described the 24-mile-long fire as catastrophic. Mr. McDonald expected the number of destroyed houses to increase. “Bastrop is no longer the same,” he said Tuesday evening at the emergency command post at the Bastrop convention center. “You used to come through Bastrop and you saw the pine trees. Now all you see is tar.”

As of Wednesday morning the fire, which began Sunday afternoon, was still only 30 percent contained, though firefighters had made significant progress overnight, aided in part by the calmer winds, the forest service said.

Residents have been told that it is too dangerous to check on their homes, and officials said they were working on a re-entry plan as well as posting a partial list of houses that have been confirmed as destroyed. “I think it will give some type of relief to individuals who just don’t know,” Mr. McDonald said of the list.

The Austin family stayed overnight at a hotel, but they came to the middle school on Tuesday seeking information. Nobody was able to confirm for them if the house where they had lived since April in the Tahitian Village subdivision had survived.

Mr. Austin, a former volunteer firefighter in Oklahoma, stared at the plumes of smoke. He said the white plume was from the steam from the water being poured on the flames; the dark one worried him more.

“The black plume’s what you don’t want to see,” he said. It meant structures were burning.

    With Calmer Winds, Texas Firefighters Make Progress Against Vast Blaze, NYT, 6.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/us/07wildfire.html

Sacrifices and Restrictions

as Central Texas Town

Copes With Drought

September 6, 2011
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

LLANO, Tex. — When the people who run this small town in Central Texas put up hand-painted signs reading “No watering” in bold red letters, they really mean it.

Hundreds of lawns are dying in the 100-degree heat here, turning straw-colored and crunchy. The drought that has gripped much of Texas has forced Llano to adopt some of the toughest mandatory water restrictions in the state. Residents are prohibited from watering their lawns except for once a week early in the morning and late at night. The filling of swimming pools, the washing of cars parked outside homes, the use of automatic or detachable sprinklers — all have been banned since June, by order of the City Council.

Government has always had a hard time telling Texans how to live. But the ban on most types of outdoor watering has been embraced by people in Llano, where a kind of World War II-era rationing spirit has become a way of life.

This has been the season of extremes in Texas — too much fire and too little water. As towns and cities throughout the state have been coping with the extreme drought, dozens of wildfires that erupted over the Labor Day weekend continued to burn on Tuesday, destroying hundreds of homes and forcing thousands of people to evacuate.

To ease the drought-related strain on Llano’s water system, Bryan Miiller, the owner of a meat-processing company, cut back his production schedule to four days a week from five, reducing the water he uses to clean the equipment and work areas, though he was not required to do so under the restrictions. Restaurants are serving water only if a patron requests it, and a few residents and businesses, including local car washes, have gone through the trouble and expense of trucking in water from outside the city or from private wells. Terry Mikulenka, manager of the city-owned 18-hole golf course, has been spraying treated sewer water on the greens. One couple has been irrigating their backyard trees and shrubs with the run-off from their washing machine and the water they use to wash their dishes and take a shower, a conservation technique numerous other residents are doing as well.

“I think all of us are making sacrifices,” said the city manager, Finley deGraffenried. “People are changing their ways, changing their habits.”

In many ways, the drought that has devastated Texas has been measured on an epic scale. It is the worst one-year drought in recorded state history, costing Texas’ farmers and ranchers an estimated $5.2 billion. But the drought has also had a smaller, more intimate effect on how many Texans live and work. In Houston, the biggest city, the mayor recently ordered residents to limit the watering of their lawns to twice a week. The seaside city of Galveston banned all outdoor watering for five days in August but then eased the rules to allow twice-a-week watering.

In Llano, a town of 3,100 about a 90-minute drive northwest of Austin in the Hill Country, the river from which the town gets 100 percent of its water supply has been running at critically low levels. One recent afternoon, the Llano River was flowing at 2.3 to 3.4 cubic feet per second, down from 123 cubic feet per second, the median level for that date.

Amid so many yellow lawns, the handful of green lawns are a source of curiosity and suspicion, and property owners have had to post handmade signs explaining, in effect, why their grass is green. Some of the signs read “Well water,” meaning the water keeping them alive comes not from the river but from private wells, which are not subject to the restrictions. One resident with a sense of humor posted his own sign on his dying yard. It read, “Rain water.”

The yard outside the First Presbyterian Church has withered, as has the one around Laird’s Bar-B-Q. But the grass has been green at the State Farm Insurance office. The agent, Jeffrey Hopf, has had customers tell him that just because he used to be the mayor does not mean he can violate the water rules. Mr. Hopf has a simple explanation: His landscaper added a turf dye similar to the one used on professional football fields to turn his yellowed lawn green.

That landscaper, Flay Deats, used to mow five or six yards a day, but now does only about three a week, and he estimated that the drought has cost him at least $30,000 in lost business.

Residents and officials have concocted their own drought algorithms to decide what they want to save and what they will let die. During their once-a-week watering time, most people do not bother with the lawn but focus on saving the trees. The golf course, which spent roughly $3,000 obtaining a state permit allowing it to supplement the river water it uses with 3,500 gallons a day of treated sewer water, has kept the main greens healthy but has given up on the driving range and other areas, creating a polka-dot effect of yellow and green. The school district has let the baseball and softball fields go since those sports are in the off-season, but has spent roughly $15,000 to keep the football fields alive with well water as that season gets under way.

“I was talking to somebody the other day, and it’s almost like paradise lost,” said Dennis R. Hill, the schools superintendent. “Llano County is one of the most beautiful places anywhere, when it rains. We have wildflowers and fields of bluebonnets. But drive through the country and look at the pastures. There’s no grass. You keep thinking, ‘Well, surely it will rain, surely it will rain.’ And it doesn’t rain.”

The town’s sacrifices are having an impact. Water use has dropped considerably — in mid-May the city was pumping 1.2 million to 1.4 million gallons a day from the river, but one day in late August that rate was down to 497,000 gallons. One reason for the drop has been the restrictions and the threat of a fine of up to $500, but another has been the older longtime residents, many of whom vividly recall the extended drought of the 1950s. At one point in 1956, the river literally went dry — there was zero flow for a total of 88 days, town officials said — and Llano had to haul in water by train.

“A drought is an unusual animal,” Mayor Mike Reagor said. “You can’t run from a drought. You have to survive it. We’re a tough people. We’ll survive this, hopefully better than they did in 1956.”

The situation is not as dire as it was more than 50 years ago, though the dead landscaping, extreme heat and lack of rain — from January through July, 8.15 inches of rain fell on Llano, according to the National Weather Service — have taken a psychic toll.

Mr. Hill, the schools superintendent, drove around town the other day with a horse trailer — he was in the process of selling Peppy, one of his two horses, because the drought has made hay so scarce. Sue Houston and John Wedekind, the couple who recycle their dishwater, stare at the dying camellia shrub by the front door and hold back tears — Ms. Houston’s mother planted it in the late 1940s.

Mr. Hopf, the insurance agent, took a trip this summer to Wisconsin to see an air show with his wife. It rained on them three times. Mr. Hopf walked outside and let the rain soak him. “I just said, ‘I want to see what it’s like. It’s been so long.’ ”

    Sacrifices and Restrictions as Central Texas Town Copes With Drought, NYT, 6.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/us/07drought.html

In the Land of Denial

September 6, 2011
The New York Times


The Republican presidential contenders regard global warming as a hoax or, at best, underplay its importance. The most vocal denier is Rick Perry, the Texas governor and longtime friend of the oil industry, who insists that climate change is an unproven theory created by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”

Never mind that nearly all the world’s scientists regard global warming as a serious threat to the planet, with human activities like the burning of fossil fuels a major cause. Never mind that multiple investigations have found no evidence of scientific manipulation. Never mind that America needs a national policy. Mr. Perry has a big soapbox, and what he says, however fallacious, reaches a bigger audience than any scientist can command.

With one exception — make that one-and-one-half — the rest of the Republican presidential field also rejects the scientific consensus. The exception is Jon Huntsman Jr., a former ambassador to China and former governor of Utah, who recently wrote on Twitter: “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” The one-half exception is Mitt Romney, who accepted the science when he was governor of Massachusetts and argued for reducing emissions. Lately, he’s retreated into mush: “Do I think the world’s getting hotter? Yeah, I don’t know that, but I think that it is.” As for the human contribution: “It could be a little. It could be a lot.”

The others flatly repudiate the science. Ron Paul of Texas calls global warming “the greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years.” Michele Bachmann of Minnesota once said that carbon dioxide was nothing to fear because it is a “natural byproduct of nature” and has complained of “manufactured science.” Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, has called climate change “a beautifully concocted scheme” that is “just an excuse for more government control of your life.”

Newt Gingrich’s full record on climate change has been a series of epic flip-flops. In 2008, he appeared on television with Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, to say that “our country must take action to address climate change.” He now says the appearance was a mistake.

None of the candidates endorse a mandatory limit on emissions or, for that matter, a truly robust clean energy program. This includes Mr. Huntsman. In 2007, as Utah governor, he joined with Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the governor of California, in creating the Western Climate Initiative, a market-based cap-and-trade program aimed at reducing emissions in Western states. Cap-and-trade has since acquired a toxic political reputation, especially among Republicans, and Mr. Huntsman has backed away.

The economic downturn has made addressing climate change less urgent for voters. But the issue is not going away. The nation badly needs a candidate with a coherent, disciplined national strategy. So far, there is no Republican who fits that description.

    In the Land of Denial, NYT, 6.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/opinion/in-the-land-of-denial-on-climate-change.html

Wildfires in Parched Texas

Kill 2 and Destroy Homes

September 5, 2011
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

HOUSTON — Firefighters struggled to gain control of fast-moving wildfires that consumed tens of thousands of acres of drought-stricken areas of Texas on Monday, as high winds spurred flames that have killed a mother and her child, destroyed or damaged hundreds of homes and forced Gov. Rick Perry to cut short a presidential campaign trip to South Carolina and return to the state.

Over the weekend and into Monday, the Texas Forest Service responded to dozens of new fires throughout Bastrop and Travis Counties and other parts of Central and East Texas. The biggest fire was in Bastrop County, just east of Austin, where 25,000 acres had burned, nearly 500 homes had been destroyed and at least 5,000 people had been evacuated since Sunday afternoon, according to county and state officials.

“It is the worst fire season in the history of Texas,” said Justice Jones, a spokesman for the forest service, “and Sunday was the worst fire day in the state’s history in regards to home losses.”

In Bastrop County, school district officials canceled classes for Tuesday and transformed the local middle school into a shelter for evacuees. In a rural area in Gregg County in northeast Texas, a young woman and her child were trapped in their mobile home and unable to escape the flames of a wildfire that destroyed their home and four others on Sunday.

“The wildfire situation in Texas is severe, and all necessary state resources are being made available to protect lives and property,” Governor Perry said Monday in a statement. “I urge Texans to take extreme caution as we continue to see the devastating effects of sweeping wildfires impacting both rural and urban areas.”

Mr. Perry had been in South Carolina, where he was scheduled to take part in a forum with his Republican rivals. But he returned to Texas on Monday to monitor the situation and to appear at a news conference in Bastrop.

    Wildfires in Parched Texas Kill 2 and Destroy Homes, NYT, 5.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/us/06wildfire.html

Wind-Driven Fires Kill Woman,

Child in East Texas

September 4, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

GLADEWATER, Texas (AP) — Longtime Texas sheriff Maxey Cerliano says it's the fastest-moving fire he's ever seen.

Six homes were toppled within minutes, including a trailer where a woman and her 18-month-old daughter were killed because they couldn't escape in time.

Authorities say the fires were propelled partly by the high winds caused by Tropical Storm Lee. Thousands of acres were burned in eastern and central parts of the state.

Cerliano says the two people were killed Sunday near the East Texas community of Gladewater. It's about 120 miles east of Dallas and 60 miles west of Shreveport, La. A man survived from the trailer with minor burns.

Numerous homes were destroyed in the area as well as a church and parts of a cemetery.

    Wind-Driven Fires Kill Woman, Child in East Texas, NYT, 4.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/04/us/AP-US-Texas-Wildfires.html

Radio D.J. in the Catskills

Offered a Lifeline During the Storm

September 4, 2011
The New York Times
By SUSANNE CRAIG

WINDHAM, N.Y. — In these days of smartphones and social media, a small-town radio D.J. like Big Jay Fink may seem like an improbable source of emergency information.

But as the banks gave way and the power went down across wide swaths of the Catskill Mountains during Tropical Storm Irene, Mr. Fink served as a lifeline for thousands of people who were cut off from just about all forms of communication and information.

As floodwaters rose on the morning of Aug. 28, Mr. Fink interrupted the regular Sunday programming on WRIP-FM (97.9); instead of a classic Casey Kasem countdown, listeners found Mr. Fink — beginning what would be a 13-hour on-air marathon. He calmly fielded calls from people trapped by the surging waters and doled out information on makeshift shelters.

For many of the 49,000 people spread out over the 650-odd square miles that make up Greene County, Mr. Fink became the voice of the storm.

“The worst of it was the calls from Prattsville; people saying, ‘I am on the roof of my trailer,’ and asking where their rescue was,” he said.

Mr. Fink, 54, is an old-school radio guy who got his start at a university radio station. He was supposed to be on vacation when the storm hit; he could not afford to go anywhere, so he opted to just hang out at the radio station, which operates out of an old bowling alley not far from Windham’s main street.

On Saturday night, as the storm began to rain down, a friend dropped off a cot so Mr. Fink would be near the microphone if things took a turn for the worse. On Sunday morning, as the water kept rising, he began breaking into the station’s programs, giving updates throughout “Direct Connection,” a Christian radio show, and the Casey Kasem program.

About 9 a.m., power and a number of the region’s cellphone towers were knocked out, leaving thousands without any way of communicating. WRIP’s backup generator kicked in, and the phone, an old-fashioned land line, started ringing. It has not stopped since.

For days Mr. Fink, who was soon joined by his colleague Joe Loverro, played matchmaker, soothing stranded residents, taking down numbers to relay to rescue workers and passing on information about makeshift shelters and closed roads. The two personalities and other WRIP employees guided listeners through the arrival of the National Guard, carrying emergency supplies, to towns like Prattsville, and kept people apprised of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s trip on Wednesday to that community, which was devastated by the storm.

People listened, first from radios powered by batteries or generators, and later from their cars as they drove around to survey the damage, which may top $1 billion in New York alone, Mr. Cuomo has estimated.

“I don’t know any emergency numbers, and I really would love to know if anybody can tell me what is happening in Hensonville,” one frantic caller, Joan, said that Sunday. “My son I know is in his house, probably on the second floor, and the neighbors are in their house and I don’t know any number.”

Mr. Fink’s apartment is above a garage near the banks of the Batavia Kill, which overflowed and flooded much of downtown Windham. He said that on Sunday night, he fed his cat and rented a room nearby on higher ground.

Mr. Fink typically takes listeners through the day “playing the mountaintop’s best music mix, on ‘Midday in the Mountains.’ ” And even during the peak of the storm’s damage, Mr. Fink would play music between listeners’ calls, giving him time to try to find out what stranded residents could not.

He said he was careful in the music he selected. “I didn’t want sad songs; I didn’t want happy songs,” he said. “I wanted songs about being together.” He played tunes like Rick Springfield’s “Jesse’s Girl”; “Hold On,” by Michael Bublé; and the Four Seasons hit “December, 1963” (it begins with the lyrics “Oh what a night”).

This is not the first time people have recently turned to radio in times of disaster. After Hurricane Katrina, two radio stations temporarily combined operations, becoming the United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans. Nor is radio the only conduit for information; in the Catskills, the Web site Watershed Post, which provides news on the region, started a live blog, connecting residents and concerned New Yorkers alike searching for information.

But there is no doubt that Mr. Fink and WRIP— named after Rip Van Winkle, the Washington Irving character whose home was in the Catskills — served a need.

“This is just what we do,” he said. “We are not a big operation, but we are here, and right now that is what matters.”

    Radio D.J. in the Catskills Offered a Lifeline During the Storm, NYT, 4.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/nyregion/radio-dj-in-catskills-offered-a-lifeline-during-the-storm.html

A Bad Call on Ozone

September 2, 2011
The New York Times

President Obama’s decision not to proceed with stronger air-quality standards governing ozone is a setback for public health and the environment and a victory for industry and its Republican friends in Congress.

In a terse, three-paragraph statement Friday morning, the president said he did not want to burden industry with new rules at a time of great economic uncertainty, and he pledged to revisit the issue in two years. But since the proposed rules would not have begun to bite for several years, his decision seemed driven more than anything else by politics and his own re-election campaign.

Ozone is the main component of smog, a leading cause of respiratory and other diseases. The standards governing allowable ozone levels of ozone in communities across the country have not changed since 1997. In 2008, the Bush administration proposed a new standard that was a good deal weaker than the recommendations of the E.P.A.’s science advisers and were promptly challenged in courts by state governments and environmental groups.

This summer, Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, sent a new and stronger standard to the White House — igniting a fierce lobbying campaign by industry groups asserting that the standards would require impossibly costly investments in new pollution controls and throw people out of work. Industry has made these arguments before. They almost always turn out to be exaggerated.

The president sought to assuage Ms. Jackson by reminding her that a host of other environmental rules approved or in the works — including mandating cleaner cars and fewer power plant emissions of mercury and other pollutants — would do much to clean the air. All true. But there is still no excuse for compromising on public health and allowing politics to trump science.

    A Bad Call on Ozone, NYT, 2.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/opinion/a-bad-call-on-ozone.html

Obama Administration

Abandons Stricter Air-Quality Rules

September 2, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — President Obama abandoned a contentious new air pollution rule on Friday, buoying business interests that had lobbied heavily against it, angering environmentalists who called the move a betrayal and unnerving his own top environmental regulators.

The president rejected a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that would have significantly reduced emissions of smog-causing chemicals, saying that it would impose too severe a burden on industry and local governments at a time of economic distress.

Business groups and Republicans in Congress had complained that meeting the new standard, which governs emissions of so-called ground-level ozone, would cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The White House announcement came barely an hour after another weak jobs report from the Labor Department and in the midst of an intensifying political debate over the impact of federal regulations on job creation that is already a major focus of the presidential campaign.

The president is planning a major address next week on new measures to stimulate employment. Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail have harshly criticized a number of the administration’s environmental and health regulations, which they say are depressing hiring and forcing the export of jobs.

The E.P.A., following the recommendation of its scientific advisers, had proposed lowering the so-called ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, set at the end of the Bush administration, to a stricter standard of 60 to 70 parts per billion. The change would have thrown hundreds of American counties out of compliance with the Clean Air Act and required a major enforcement effort by state and local officials, as well as new emissions controls at industries across the country.

The administration will try to follow the more lenient Bush administration standard set in 2008 until a scheduled reconsideration of acceptable pollution limits in 2013. Environmental advocates vowed on Friday to challenge that standard in court, saying it is too weak to protect public health adequately.

Ozone, when combined with other compounds to form smog, contributes to a variety of ailments, including heart problems, asthma and other lung disorders.

Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, has pushed hard for a tougher ozone standard, telling associates that it was one of the most important regulatory initiatives she would handle during her tenure. But she found herself on the losing end of a fight with top White House economic and political advisers, who were persuaded by industry arguments that the 2008 ozone rule was due to be reviewed in two years anyway and who were concerned about the impact on state, local and tribal governments that would bear much of the burden of compliance.

The impact would have been felt heavily in a band of Midwest and Great Plains states that are not themselves major sources of ozone pollution and that will be critical 2012 electoral battlegrounds.

In a statement, the president reiterated his commitment to environmental concerns, but added: “At the same time, I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover. With that in mind, and after careful consideration, I have requested that Administrator Jackson withdraw the draft Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards at this time.”

In words of reassurance directed at Ms. Jackson and the agency she heads, the president said that his commitment to the work of the agency was “unwavering.”

“And my administration will continue to vigorously oppose efforts to weaken E.P.A.’s authority under the Clean Air Act or dismantle the progress we have made,” he said.

Ms. Jackson accepted the White House decision with a terse statement: “We will revisit the ozone standard, in compliance with the Clean Air Act.”

She pointed with pride to the administration’s record of establishing a range of other air quality safeguards for power plants, manufacturing facilities and vehicles that will also help to reduce ozone pollution across the country.

Ms. Jackson had made clear her intention to follow her scientific advisers and set a new standard within the more restrictive range by the end of this year. She has told associates that her success in addressing this problem would be a reflection of her ability to perform her job. The agency sent the now-rejected standards to the White House in July with the expectation that they would be issued by Aug. 31.

While some senior agency officials expressed disappointment with the decision, they also said they understood that it was their job to offer their best technical advice to the White House and that the ultimate decision rested with the president, who has to stand for re-election and consider other factors.

Reaction from environmental advocates ranged from disappointment to fury, with several noting that in just the past month the administration had tentatively approved drilling in the Arctic, given an environmental green light to the 1,700-mile Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Texas and opened 20 million more acres of the Gulf of Mexico to drilling.

Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said, “Today’s announcement from the White House that they will retreat from implementing the much-needed — and long-overdue — ozone pollution standard is deeply disappointing and grants an item on Big Oil’s wish list at the expense of the health of children, seniors and the infirm.” The center is a liberal research group with close ties to the White House.

Bill McKibben, an activist leading a two-week White House protest against the pipeline project which has resulted in more than 1,000 arrests, said that the latest move was “flabbergasting.”

“Somehow we need to get back the president we thought we elected in 2008,” he said.

Cass R. Sunstein, who leads the White House office that reviews all major regulations, said he was carefully scrutinizing proposed rules across the government to ensure that they are cost efficient and based on the best current science. He said in a letter to Ms. Jackson that the studies on which the E.P.A.’s proposed rule is based were completed in 2006 and that new assessments were already under way.

The issue had become a flashpoint between the administration and Republicans in Congress, who held up the proposed ozone rule as a test of the White House’s commitment to regulatory reform and job creation. Imposing the new rule before the 2012 election would have created political problems for the administration and for Democrats nationwide seeking election in a brittle economy.

Leaders of major business groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute and the Business Roundtable — met with Ms. Jackson and with top White House officials this summer seeking to moderate, delay or kill the rule. They told William M. Daley, the White House chief of staff, that the rule would be very costly to industry and would hurt Mr. Obama’s chances for a second term.

John Engler, a former governor of Michigan and chairman of the Business Roundtable, said Friday in a statement: “Creating U.S. jobs and providing more economic certainty for all Americans, especially on the heels of today’s news that the U.S. unemployment rate remains persistently high, is our greatest challenge. If President Obama’s speech next week is as positive as this decision was today, it will be a success.”

Representative Eric Cantor, the majority leader, said this week that the House would review the ozone rule, which he called the most onerous of all proposed regulations.

“This effective ban or restriction on construction and industrial growth for much of America is possibly the most harmful of all the currently anticipated Obama administration regulations,” Mr. Cantor wrote. He said that the impact would be felt across the economy and cost as much as $1 trillion and millions of jobs over the next decade.

 

Leslie Kaufman contributed reporting from New York.

    Obama Administration Abandons Stricter Air-Quality Rules, NYT, 2.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/science/earth/03air.html

Battered Vermont Looks First

to Its Roads

The New York Times
September 2, 2011
By MICHAEL COOPER

WARDSBORO, Vt. — Scattered around the smooth gray boulders of a burbling brook here, jagged shards of black asphalt — the double yellow lines still visible in places — are all that remain of a stretch of Route 100 that ran along the foothills of the Green Mountains.

Down the road, floodwaters ate away everything but a precarious sliver of the right lane, which teeters at the edge of a newly carved precipice like a donkey path on the rim of a canyon. A collapsed bridge in the nearby town of Jamaica looks like a beaver dam, buried under the fallen trees and branches that flowed down the Ball Mountain Brook and knocked the bridge down.

Of all the challenges facing Vermont as it tries to recover from the floods caused by the remnants of Hurricane Irene, there may be none more daunting — or vital to solve — than repairing and reopening the hundreds of roads and dozens of bridges that the storm knocked out. In many spots, the roads must be fixed before equipment can be brought in to repair everything from homes and businesses to the power grid, railroad tracks and water and wastewater systems.

It is a race against time: winter comes early here, and there are just two and a half months before snowfall and frozen ground typically halt the state’s short road-building season.

“I think for a lot of us this is going to be the challenge of a lifetime,” said Joseph Flynn, an official at the Vermont Agency of Transportation who is in charge of one of the new quasi-military incident-command centers that the state set up to coordinate the mammoth task. Several hundred National Guard troops have added muscle, running huge olive drab bulldozers and backhoes alongside the yellow equipment of state workers and contractors.

The topography in this mountainous state — where, for centuries, the easiest way to run roads through the mountains has been to locate them along the edges of the rivers and brooks that had already found a path through — left many roads vulnerable to flooding, and tough to fix.

“We have areas where we have a mile or more of road that has disappeared into the water,” Mr. Flynn said. “And the upside of the road is all hill. So now you come from a forested hill to bare earth to the rivers. This is thousands of yards long, where you go from the hillside to where the road used to be right to the river.”

The repair work can be dangerous: two contractors shoring up a bridge in Clarendon found themselves cut off by a flash flood on Thursday, and had to be rescued by helicopter.

In some places, stranded residents have taken matters into their own hands. When a bridge was shut down in Royalton, isolating many residents, local fire and rescue workers cleared a path through a sunflower field at the Hidden Meadow Farm. Uprooting a tree that stood in the way, they cut a hole in a chain-link fence to allow residents to temporarily drive their cars right onto Interstate 89 on what may be the shortest on-ramp in the country.

“They’re calling it the Hillbilly Highway,” said Rachel Bigelow, who set up a little farm stand selling sunflowers, tomatoes and corn by the jury-rigged interstate entrance that now cuts through her farm. Evelyn Saenz, a Royalton resident who drove through it on Thursday, praised it as “Vermont ingenuity” and had another name for it: “Exit 2 1/2.”

Faced with so much devastation, state officials are taking a triage approach. The first order of business was restoring access to 13 towns that were isolated when the roads and bridges were washed out. They did this by building what state officials call “goat paths,” pouring gravel and sand and storm debris onto washed-out roads, and flattening them until they were strong enough for emergency vehicles to get over them.

Wardsboro was the last town to be reconnected, when the final link was finished Wednesday.

“I’ve been trapped for days,” said Norman Bills, 42, a rural mail carrier, as he stood at the ruins of his home on Wardsboro Brook. “We could go a half a mile that way and a half a mile this way. Now, hopefully tomorrow, I can get out of here and go back and try to do some work.”

Just this summer, Mr. Bills said, the brook was such a weak trickle that his children could hardly find a place in it to swim. But on Sunday it burst its banks and tore off the garage and dining room of his family’s home, which once belonged to his great-grandfather, washing away a venerable apple tree and sending his wood-burning stove downstream into a neighbor’s lawn.

“I don’t picture that there’s any coming back here, unfortunately, as beautiful a spot as it was and as enjoyable as it was to be on the river,” he said. “It’s done. But we’re all safe, and that’s all I care about.”

Now state officials are turning to other priorities: strengthening roads so they can handle repair trucks and easing the “you can’t get there from here” woes that the state charted on a Google map of road closings, especially the blocked east-west routes in southern Vermont. Trucks need to be able to restock the stores and gas stations that residents rely on. And with the state’s biggest tourism seasons approaching — fall foliage and winter skiing — there is plenty of work to do to get the roads ready for the tourists “from away.”

Brian Searles, the state’s transportation secretary, said that nearly half the closed state roads had already been reopened at least partly. “We will not be overwhelmed by this,” he said. “We will conquer the obstacles that exist.”

At the command center in Dummerston, Mr. Flynn tried to bolster his troops at a morning staff meeting by quoting a speech Calvin Coolidge gave when he returned to his native Vermont as president to help the state recover from the floods of 1927.

“I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate,” Mr. Coolidge said then, “but most of all because of her indomitable people.”

Mr. Flynn said later while holding a printout of an e-mail of the speech: “This may be corny, but it is something that was sent to me last night. It’s always been my favorite quote of Calvin Coolidge, but I never knew it was attributed to the flood of 1927. I think it says it all right there.”

    Battered Vermont Looks First to Its Roads, NYT, 2.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/us/03infrastructure.html

A Time of Drenching Rain,

Gusting Wind and Peculiar Crimes

September 2, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

Three guys robbed the office of a $10-an-hour, cash-only parking lot in the Bronx in the wee hours of Sunday morning. It looked like a nice, fat, golden goose, as the lot was full of cars, and there was no one around. But the thieves got away with just $46.

Why all the cars yet so little cash in the till?

The robbers struck as Tropical Storm Irene approached, her rain already whipping.

“We weren’t open for business,” said the manager, Michael Ventura, chuckling. “They never thought about that. They just saw there was nobody on the street, and the cops might be busy.”

There were about 30 arrests citywide for crimes committed between midnight and 7:30 a.m. during a police tour of duty that roughly matched the duration of the storm’s approach and arrival. (An earlier estimate of 45 arrests — described by the mayor as proving the inherent goodness of New Yorkers — included crimes committed earlier.) Last year, in the same period, there were about 345 arrests.

And so we sift through the police reports describing the crimes of Irene. They run the spectrum, from vicious to utterly bumbling, premeditated to random, clever to mundane.

The weather played a supporting role in many, especially if you believe hurricanes and drinking are linked. It played a direct role in some: When an officer in the Bronx said he saw Davian McCarthy, 28, carrying a revolver in his waistband, he noted, while arresting the man, that the gun had been carefully wrapped in plastic. And in Brooklyn’s Tilden Houses, a 23-year-old woman began beating a man over the head shortly after midnight, using a weapon of convenience: an umbrella.

It was a bad night for some couples to be trapped inside by bad weather.

Shortly before midnight, a Staten Island man choked his girlfriend, and was later arrested. A half-hour later in Brooklyn, a woman’s boyfriend punched her in the head. The hours passed with more punches and kicks, and shortly before 5 a.m., with sunrise soon to come, a Queens man beat a woman and shoved her down stairs before taking her cellphone so she could not call the police. But he was caught anyway, outside in spite of reported wind gusts of 60 miles an hour, when an officer saw him urinating on the street.

“Bad weather outside was no guarantee of good behavior inside,” said Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman.

Apparently, driving around in a hurricane seems not such a bad idea after a bunch of drinks. Geovany Ramos was arrested shortly before 3 a.m. after driving in the wrong lane of a tunnel near the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. “Bloodshot watery eyes, slurred speech, a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage,” the arresting officer noted in his report.

In Rockaway Beach, a man scratched a parked car, front to back, with a knife. In Ridgewood, Queens, Aurel Xhepexhiu told the police that Steven Garcia threatened him with a knife and pounded his door with a hammer. Mr. Garcia accused Mr. Xhepexhiu of the same thing. Officers locked them both up.

Some crimes had clearer motives.

“Check it!” Brian Emptage, 18, shouted to a man on East 182nd Street in the Bronx at 3:40 a.m., the police said. He spoke in a sort of mugger’s poetic verse:

“Look at the gun/You wanna die?/Don’t run.”

Later, the police said, he and others robbed two women — “Shut up and turn around!” — and “grabbed” one of them in the “buttocks area,” an officer wrote, which “caused her to experience annoyance, alarm and fear.” A block away and a half-hour earlier, someone else, perhaps fearing worse weather ahead, relieved a man named Jacques of his two-way Motorola radio.

At 4 a.m., a woman’s drunken father-in-law entered her Queens bedroom and took her purse. At the same time, a 16-year-old girl in Brooklyn was whacked in the head by her sister with a Corona bottle. And somebody stole 29 Apple computers from a building in Flushing.

The Around the Clock Deli on Staten Island did not live up to the promise of its name, and so somebody broke in and stole lots of cigarettes. On the other side of the island, a grocer boarded up his store on Sand Lane, but that did not deter Vincent Collazo and Jimmy Vargas, both in their mid-40s, from prying enough planks loose to slip inside, the police said. Neighbors called 911.

Mr. Vargas’s aw-shucks, gimme-a-break, there’s-a-storm-coming shrug seemed to lift right off the page of his arrest report. “I just wanted some cigarettes,” he said.

That might have worked, as a so-called hurricane defense, but the police said he was trying to steal $3,000 worth.

    A Time of Drenching Rain, Gusting Wind and Peculiar Crimes, NYT, 2.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/nyregion/a-look-at-the-crimes-committed-in-new-york-city-during-irene.html

For the Governor of Vermont,

a Crash Course

in Disaster Management

September 1, 2011
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

PITTSFIELD, Vt. — After helicoptering into this flood-ravaged town and delivering a pep talk to residents who had been stranded for three days and counting, Gov. Peter Shumlin asked if anyone had questions for him. It took a minute for anyone to speak up, and even then, the queries were polite to the point of apologetic.

“I keep pushing for generators,” said Peter Borden, the town’s emergency management coordinator. “I’m sorry, Governor.”

He may be lucky, skillful or both, but so far, Mr. Shumlin, the relatively new governor of a state unaccustomed to disasters, has encountered almost nothing but geniality as he has traveled the hardest-hit parts of Vermont, doling out hugs and reminding residents that “Vermonters are tough.”

Eight months into a two-year term he expected to be dominated by health care and economic issues, Mr. Shumlin, a 55-year-old Democrat, now faces a complicated and costly recovery effort that could well be the defining issue of his governorship.

Dozens of homes were destroyed or badly damaged across the state on Sunday by the flash flooding, which also closed a state office complex and left roads and bridges in tatters.

Mr. Shumlin and his staff are working to get plans in place before patience runs out, making big promises, like to restore power to most towns by week’s end, provide school buses to take residents of isolated towns to grocery stores and not let the widespread damage interfere with leaf-peeping season and all the tourists it draws here.

“We’ve got enough roads to get around, and we’ve still got leaves on our trees,” Mr. Shumlin told a group in Rutland on Wednesday, adding that he would tell tourists, “It might be goat paths instead of highways, but we can get you there.”

Chris Graff, a former journalist and longtime political observer in Montpelier, said that while Mr. Shumlin had so far made good on promises — getting at least crude roads open to 13 cut-off towns, for example — it would get harder as the weeks wore on.

“He has a tremendous can-do spirit, and sometimes that can get ahead of his ability to put the plans in place,” Mr. Graff said. “There is no doubt that the state government is fully engaged and well aware of all the problems in these communities, but it’s just a huge undertaking down the road.”

Mr. Shumlin, a thin, spry man from Putney with a folksy air, was president pro tempore of the Vermont Senate before narrowly winning the governor’s race last November. Until now, his top priorities have included creating something close to a single-payer health care system, the nation’s first, and shutting down Vermont Yankee, a nuclear power plant in the southeast corner of the state.

In an interview Wednesday, he said such goals would not fall off the radar.

“I’m the kind of person, the more balls I have in the air, generally the more I can land,” he said as a helicopter shuttled him to Rochester, an isolated, hard-hit town in south-central Vermont. “We’ll just work longer hours and longer days. We can multitask, absolutely.”

Mr. Shumlin has used the rare national spotlight to call attention to another of his priorities: preparing for climate change, which he said was a factor in the torrential rains that dropped as much as nine inches of rain on parts of Vermont as the remnants of Hurricane Irene moved through.

“Any objective scientist will tell you that as a result of climate change, we’re going to get more intense storms in New England,” he said. “We’ve got to rethink where you build houses, where you build schools, where you build highways and how you build them. We have to redefine our flood plains.”

He has proven an agile communicator in the early days since the storm, posting frequent updates on Twitter and sending agency heads to answer questions from callers on radio shows. And he has traveled to many of the most damaged towns, asking people what they need and saying, time and again, how proud he is of their resilience.

“From an image standpoint,” Mr. Graff said, “Peter has had a tremendous week.”

Bright sun this week has helped keep spirits up; they could flag when the weather turns darker and colder. The fast approach of winter will also pose challenges for rebuilding.

“We’ve got a very short construction season left, and the snow’s going to be flying,” said Tom Pelham, a former state housing and finance commissioner who has worked for both Democrats and Republicans.

“At some point, Peter is going to have to understand he can’t be all things to all people,” he said. “Some choices are going to have to be made, and he’s going to have to explain them.”

So far, one of the few negative responses that Mr. Shumlin has evoked this week came when he quibbled with a CBS News correspondent’s description of people “stranded” in flood-damaged towns.

“Stranded is a bit of an exaggeration, to be honest with you,” Mr. Shumlin told the correspondent. Word of the exchange got to residents of Rochester, and some were miffed.

“That frayed some tempers,” said Martha Slater, a resident. “Every way to get out of town is basically blocked off.”

While outsiders have questioned why Mr. Shumlin did not order evacuations before the storm, he has said it made no sense to do so. And while some Vermonters have complained that rescue workers gave them minutes of warning instead of hours as the waters were rising, few appear to be taking it out on Mr. Shumlin, at least so far.

“We’re used to storms,” the governor said. “We’re used to taking care of ourselves in the winter, living on top of mountains in the middle of nowhere. You know, we know how to tough it out here. You’re not going to talk a Vermonter out of their house.”

Here in Pittsfield, where residents have taken it upon themselves to try to patch roads with local equipment and to fetch urgent supplies using all-terrain vehicles, Ray Rice, a resident of 11 years, said he had not even begun to think about what Mr. Shumlin and state government could do for the town.

“Oh God, no,” Mr. Rice said. “We’ve been taking care of ourselves pretty good.”

That kind of ethos, typical throughout the state, is helping Mr. Shumlin for now.

“Vermonters are incredibly tough and realistic and practical,” he said. “They know the governor didn’t create the storm. They know we’re working hard to respond.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 2, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Vermont Yankee, a nuclear power plant that Mr. Shumlin wants shut down. It is in the southeast corner of the state, not the southwest.

    For the Governor of Vermont, a Crash Course in Disaster Management, NYT, 1.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/us/02vermont.html