It’s Getting Hot In Here

As the Beijing Olympics approach, a whole lot of people are thinking about breaking records. Shaving off one-one hundredth of a second of a record race time, for example. But I’ve got a few different kinds of records on my mind - precipitation and flooding.

This year, Delhi broke records with its rainfall in May, ending up with more than ten times the average rainfall for the month. That’s not a small task - from 10.7 mm average to more than 110 mm this May. But that’s still, well, within the range of what someone could have predicted. But in Cedar Rapids, the flooding has broken all possible records — flooding the city that “never floods”. As the NY Times puts it:

By Thursday afternoon, the Cedar River was about 29 feet deep, or 17 feet above flood stage, according to the National Weather Service. The water was expected to rise another three feet by Friday morning, and reach a record crest, 12 feet higher than the previous record, set in 1851.

Breaking a record by a few inches, or even a foot say, is a pretty big deal. But breaking a record by 12 feet!?! 12 feet and counting, no less, as the floods continue to rise and the storms continue. Already, 8,000 are homeless and 5,500 more are without electricity. Power failures have also meant that the city’s water treatment plant has been reduced to 25 percent capacity. Truly, water water everywhere without a drop to drink. Thousands that were left homeless had some very similar stories - that no one thought this would ever happen…

Demenick Ankum drove to his house on 19th Avenue to save anything he could. By the time he finished packing, his car was underwater. He had to pay a neighbor, Louie Brundidge, $10 to rescue him from the house in Mr. Brundidge’s red aluminum boat. All that Mr. Ankum could carry with him was one blue plastic tub of clothes and a few framed photos of his children. Everything else was gone. “I never even thought about flood insurance,” said Mr. Ankum, 33. “They said this place would never flood in 500 years.”

And while I hate to sound like a broken record (sorry!), it’s clear that we’ll be seeing a lot more record-breaking this summer and in the months and years to come. Some that we can predict (hotter! wetter! drier! less ice on the poles! on our glaciers) and some that we’ll only recognize when we’re 12 feet under… Meanwhile, I’m considering the climate change guinness books for this summer — the biggest climatic record breaks??