A heat wave baking the eastern United States in record temperatures is set to continue on Sunday after deadly storms killed at least 12 people, downed power lines from Indiana to Maryland and left more than 3 million customers without power….
Utilities in Ohio, Virginia and Maryland described damage to their power grids as catastrophic.
Driving north Friday, the temperatures kept getting hotter. John C. Griffin recorded these temperature signs, used here by permission. Friday 29 June 2012:
Record heat wave with triple digits in Macon, Georgia on Riverside Drive at Arkwright Road Photography by John Griffin (c) 2012 All Rights reserved
I can attest it was still over 100 in Macon after dark Friday.
And it only got worse Saturday 30 June 2012:
Arkwright Road at Riverside Drive – I-75 Exit 169 – Macon, Georgia Record Heat Wave Photography (c) John Griffin All Rights Reserved
Nearly 4 million homes lost power early Saturday across the Midwest as a fierce line of thunderstorms and winds pounded the region after record-setting temperatures.
The storms moved east from Indiana through Ohio and into West Virginia, according to utility companies. Virginia was hit with power outages to more than 1 million homes.
The outages come as tens of millions in the central and eastern United States are battling a sweltering summer.
Thirty years ago the Internet demonstrated distribution and decentralization is the way to avoid widespread outages. That's what a smart grid would give us. I can say by experience that if many of those homes and businesses had solar panels with batteries, they could weather 10 hours or more of no grid power with no problem. My solar panels and batteries have done that for my house for years. Yours could too, and you could be selling excess power to people and businesses that don't have panels, if Georgia Power would let us change state law to let us.
And hey, with wind power, in a storm you'd have more power!
Temperatures Friday soared past 100 degrees Fahrenheit from Kansas to Washington, with scorching conditions expected to continue through the weekend and beyond.
It was 107 degrees in Macon, Georgia yesterday at 7:30 PM. So what's Georgia Power doing about solar power in Macon? Still studying it, according to Josephine Bennett in NPR a year ago:
Georgia Power's Carol Boatright says for 18 months researchers will collect data and then ask the following questions.
How about this question, Georgia Power and the Southern Company and Oglethorpe Power and all the EMCs: Will you wait until Georgia is without power until you deploy solar power, or get out of the way so we can do it ourselves?
Our high schools and college graduates mostly have to go somewhere else, because jobs here are few and many of them don’t pay enough for a decent living. Should we not care enough about our families and our community to come up with strategies that grow existing businesses and attract new ones that will employ local people?
We need discussions and strategies that involve the whole community, going beyond just the usual planning professionals, to include all groups and individuals with information or opinions, whether they got here generations ago or last week: for fairness and for freedom.
The Industrial Authority focus group meeting I attended Wednesday was refreshing, because their consultants asked the opinions of people some of whom previously had to picket outside. The previous day, VLCIA Chairman Roy Copeland said this strategic planning process was a long time coming. I agree, and while nobody can say what will come of it at this point, I hope it does produce a real Economic Development Strategy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Videos
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission, (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 13 March 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
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.
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.
CWIP rate hikes for power nobody’s getting yet: it’s not just for nukes for Georgia Power and Coal for Mississippi Power, it’s for Florida Power and Light’s Turkey Point nuke boondoggle! Let Ed Asner explain.
Ed Asner asks why not put that $35 billion to better use:
