Category Archives: Weather

TS Debbie and south Georgia extreme drought —Ashley Tye @ LCC 2012-06-25

Lowndes County Emergency Management Agency Director Ashley Tye correctly predicted no tornadoes and quite a bit of rain for when Tropical Storm Debbie made landfall. He also mentioned our chronic drought, and Commissioner Richard Raines was surprised about that.

Raines asked:

What kind of conditions would it take for us, because you and I talked a couple of weeks ago, and I was I was surprised when you said that. I guess there’s a difference between drought and extreme drought. What kind of rain conditions would we need to get out of that, I guess in terms of inches, for the water table….

Tye answered:

For them to officially declare us out of the drought, the latest numbers I’ve seen were about 15 inches over the next 30 days, or over the next 3 months, it would have to be like 25 to 30 inches. So we still need a lot of rain. But every little bit is going to help. With the rain we’ve got recently we’re better off than we were, but we’re still technically classifed as in extreme drought.

Here’s the video:

TS Debbie and south Georgia extreme drought —Ashley Tye
Work Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE), Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 25 June 2012.

Readers of this blog know we were already in drought more than a year ago. According to U.S. Drought Monitor, we’ve been in a protracted extreme drought since then. According to USGS, our groundwater levels are all red, as in extremely low. Extremely low as in at historically low levels, as in they’ve hardly ever, if ever, been this low.

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Internet speed and access —John S. Quarterman @ LCC 2012-05-08

At a recent Lowndes County Commission meeting, I said:

I was interested to learn two weeks ago that my neighbor Timothy Nessmith was interested in getting DSL on Hambrick Road.

He said you can get it as close to him as Quarterman Road. I can attest to that because I have 3 megabit per second DSL, due to being just close enough to Bellsouth’s DSL box on Cat Creek Road, but most of Quarterman Road can’t get DSL due to distance. There are some other land-line possibilties, involving cables in the ground or wires on poles.

Then there are wireless possibilities, including EVDO, available from Verizon, with 750 kilobit per second (0.75 Mbps) wide area access from cell phone towers.

Verizon’s towers could also be used for WIFI antennas, for up to 8 Mbps Internet access, over a wide scale.

Then there’s metropolitan-area Internet. Chattanooga has the fastest such network, with 1 Gbps (1,000 Mbps). But hundreds of communities around the country have such networks, including (continued after the video)…

Internet speed and access —John S. Quarterman
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 8 May 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).

…Lafayette, Louisiana, Bowling Green, Kentucky, Lagrange, Georgia, and Thomasville, Georgia. They use it for public safety, education (Wiregrass Tech, VSU), and

It attracts new industry. If you want knowledge-based industry, they’re going to be expecting Internet access not just at work, but at home, whereever they live.

Other uses include Continue reading →

Better cities and counties make better watersheds

Want jobs, low taxes, and less flooding? Help maintain our watersheds with good local planning.

What’s a watershed? Kaid Benfield wrote for Atlantic Cities today, The Cost of Sprawl on Clean Water:

Watersheds are topographic areas where all the rain that falls eventually ends up in a namesake steam, river, lake, or estuary.

These are our local watersheds. Purple is the Little River Watershed, blue is the Withlacoochee Watershed, and Valdosta is where the Little River flows south into the Withlacoochee. Green is the Alapaha watershed, and Tifton is where all three meet. Every drop of rain or used well water or wastewater overflow or pesticide runoff or soapy shower water or clearcut mud that runs downhill into one of these rivers is in their (and our) watersheds.

Becoming greener doesn’t just mean a municipality’s adding a pleasant new park here and there, or planting more trees, although both components may be useful parts of a larger effort. How a town is designed and developed is related to how well it functions, how well it functions is related to how sustainable it really is, and how sustainable it is, is directly related to how it affects its local waters and those who use those same waters downstream.

Compact, mixed-use, well-designed in-town growth can take some of the pressure off of its opposite on the outskirts — or beyond the outskirts — of towns and cities. We know that sprawling growth is generally pretty bad for maintaining environmental quality in a region (air pollution from cars that become necessary in such circumstances, displacement of open land, water pollution from new roads and shopping centers that are begot by such growth patterns).

We also know, as UGA Prof. Dorfman told us several years ago,

Local governments must ensure balanced growth, as
sprawling residential growth is a certain ticket to fiscal ruin*
* Or at least big tax increases.

Kaid Benfield explains how town planning is related to watersheds:

Continue reading →

Videos @ LCC 2012 03 13

Here are videos of the entire 13 March 2012 Regular Session of the Lowndes County Commission (LCC).

See separate items on the appointment of Sheila Cook to the Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities, and Addictive Diseases Region Four Planning Board and “We expect you to run a clean, quiet establishment” —Ashley Paulk.

Other notable parts of this meeting were when staff said conservation status was a small detail and and Commissioners proceeded to get rid of it in a rezoning.

At the end of the meeting, County Manager Joe Pritchard didn’t listen to Commissioner Powell’s request and proceede to recount details of road paving property signatures until Chairman Paulk nudged him that the question was about tornadoes, after which Pritchard gave a recap of Ashley Tye’s tornado report of the previous morning.

Here’s the agenda. Here’s a playlist:


Videos
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission, (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 13 March 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).

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The Lowndes-Lanier County EF3 Tornado —NOAA

The tornado was an F2 in Lowndes County and an F3 in Lanier. It went west to east, wrote the NWS in Tallahassee. The pictures we posted that day were apparently where it first touched down, and even then it ripped limbs off of trees and broke some off and threw them.

According to the National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office in Tallahasse, Severe Weather & Flooding Event of March 3, 2012; Lowndes-Lanier Co. EF3 Tornado,

The most significant damage of the severe weather event in south Georgia and north Florida was caused by a tornado that moved from just northwest of Moody Air Force Base to near Lakeland, Georgia. The damage was assessed by a survey team from the National Weather Service in Tallahassee. Most of the damage was consistent with an EF1 or EF2 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. However, the most severe damage — near Boyette Road and Highway 122 — was consistent with an EF3 rating on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. Maximum wind speeds were estimated to be around 140 mph at that location.
As you can see by NOAA’s map, the tornado was an EF0, EF1, and EF2 while it was in Lowndes County, (as Ashley Tye told the Lowndes County Commission this morning), rising to an EF3 in Lanier County, peaking at 140 mph winds.


View Larger Map

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Tornado report —Ashley Tye @ LCC 2012-03-12

No injuries or loss of life from the March 3rd tornado, but no disaster declaration and thus no government financial assistance, said Ashley Tye in a long report to the Lowndes County Commission this morning. Such reports are not normally repeated at the Tuesday evening regular sessions, so if you weren’t there, here is the only place you will see it.

Ashley Tye remarked:

The good news is that there were no reported injuries or no loss of life.
There was a lot of property damage. He said the National Weather Service determined it was an F2 tornado, and once it got to Walker’s Crossing it had winds of about 100 miles an hour. He said 34 homes were affected, of which 19 were destroyed, meaning uninhabitable.

He’s checking types of assistance that might be available.

Unfortunately, financial assistance is unavailable; it requires a federal declaration. And while the level of damage is obviously devastating to us in Lowndes County, it didn’t reach the level that would meet the threshold that would cause the governor to request a federal declaration.
He said there had been a tremendous outpouring of volunteer support. And insurance might pay off, although some people may not have enough insurance.

He added that the county’s code red emergency system worked well, and probably had something to do with there being no loss of life. I know I got at least six county code red messages that day before my message box filled up (I was in a building with no signal).

Commissioner Richard Raines asked if FEMA had to have a declaration for GEMA to respond. Ashley Tye answered: Continue reading →

Tornado damage, Cat Creek and Quarterman Road, Lowndes County, Georgia, 3 March 2012

There was a twister in Lowndes County today. The only property damage we saw was to this house on Cat Creek Road, which now has a pine tree draped across it. The house roof appears undamaged.

There are no reports of anyone being hurt. Everyone is accounted for.

Then the tornado came through the woods to Quarterman Road: Continue reading →

I am very concerned about a community that would purchase an armored vehicle over weather radios —Sharon Flory

Received 17 February. -jsq
My name is Sharon Flory and I am the Sales Representative for Alert Works Products, the company who was working with Lowndes County to distribute roughly 3,500 weather radios to the community. After working for about 8 months with Ashley Tye we were both ecstatic when the grant came through only to be shot down by the newly appointed commissioner. I could not believe what I read below.
She quoted Lowndes County priorities: tanks and lunches for Commissioners, but no lunches for seniors? -jsq
I am very concerned about a community that would purchase an armored vehicle, that would only protect about 5 people at a time, over purchasing weather radios that would protect upwards of 10,000 people when you consider the families that live in each home.

I am a sales rep and my job is to sell radios BUT my job is also my passion. I live in Ohio and have been affected by storms all of my life. I have been down right scared to death from storms and feel that the politics in this town is not moving in the right direction.

I see that you have the same feelings and hope that you can make a difference. Thank you for caring and keep up the good work. Someone will listen!!!

-Sharon Flory
Alert Works
419-779-8132

Hazard mitigation public hearing 6PM today

Found on the Lowndes County government website:
Hazard Mitigation Public Hearing (10/17/2011)
PUBLIC HEARING ON
HAZARD MITIGATION
MONDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2011
6:00 P.M.
ADMINISTRATION BUILDING
327 N. ASHLEY STREET
COMMISSION CHAMBERS – 2ND FLOOR
For more information please contact EMA Director, Ashley Tye, at 671-2790.
SO I called Ashley Tye, who said: Continue reading →

Many small ponds for flood control and irrigation

So Valdosta’s ponds for flood control idea is a good start on local water issues. Rather than a few big antiseptic ponds, how about many small distributed ponds, like the Georgia Soil and Water Conservation Commission’s Ponds Program:
Because of increased irrigation from existing ponds in Southeast Georgia due to saltwater intrusion into groundwater aquifers and moratoriums on well drillings along Georgia’s coast, GSWCC, in cooperation with NRCS, developed the Ponds Program. By helping landowners to construct new and renovate existing ponds for irrigation, the Ponds Program has been able to take advantage of rain harvesting to increase landowners’ irrigation capabilities while simultaneously reducing withdrawal from our aquifers, protecting and improving water quality, capturing sediment to reduce downstream transport, and providing wildlife habitats.

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