Living where it is nice

All of my adult life I have have lived on a hill, mountain, or a slope except for a brief period when we lived in Columbia, MD.

Perhaps it has something to do with the still vivid childhood memory of the time when were had to excavate the Outer Banks and drive through water that at times was up to the axles of our car.

I'm certainly not afraid of water.  In fact I absolutely love it.  In the winter I often swim one half to three quarters of a mile regularly as long as the pool chemicals don't get to my sinuses.  For years I had a kayak which I used to love to take to Carven's Cove for fishing. There's nothing I can think of that I enjoy more than fishing off the beaches around Morehead, North Carolina or standing in the surf fishing on Cape Hatteras.

I do respect water, for I have seen first hand the power of water.  I can remember the small Yadkin River flooding when I was a child.  This spring I once again witnessed some of the annual flooding that is so common here in Roanoke.  I wrote a post, "Spring Flooding," about it.  It was by no means the worst flooding we've seen in Roanoke.  In fact I think we had worse flooding last summer.

I can only remember being scared once in a flood. In 1974 we were driving from our home in Saint Croix Cove, Nova Scotia to visit friends who had just moved to north of Fredericton, NB.  There's an area just east of Fredericton, called Jemseg.  In the Jemseg area it is hard to find high ground there between Grand Lake and the Saint John River.  We got caught on a section of the Trans Canada highway that was flooded.  We ended up driving for miles in what seemed like a surreal water world where we could see no dry land for miles.  Fortunately we were driving in the wake of a large tractor trailer, but it seemed to take us forever to get to high ground.  I found a CBC story, "Water levels falling in Fredericton area," about flooding that took place in the same area this spring.

We actually ended up buying a farm probably forty or fifty miles from there, but you can rest assured most of the drive from the flooded area to there was uphill.  Even there on our hillside in Tay Creek, I saw the power of water as the spring runoff blew a culvert sixteen feet long and three feet in diameter 25 yards down into the woods.  It couldn't handle the water flow so mother nature made a new channel.

It was last summer that I saw the new channel that was opened on the Outer Banks on Hatteras Island.

So why do I want to get off a relatively safe mountain top (except when ice coats the street) and have a second home near the water?  I guess I've weighed the risk and found it to be acceptable.  The desire to be near salt water out weighs the risk.  There is no place that doesn't have some risk from drought, fire, earthquake, flood, winds, or water.  According to the "The Week" magazine, Conneticut and Rhode Island are the safest places to live.  I figure that's true only if there isn't a disaster in New York or Bost.

If you were able to live life without any kind of risk, it would be pretty boring.

There is an interesting debate going on regarding whether humans have changed the climate enough to cause more dangerous storms.

There's a good article in the Toronto Star (registration required), "Why humans don't leave dangerous cities."

"Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more severe," warns Pelling. "As the hazards change, the vulnerabilities change."

But one thing stays the same — in personal security as in real estate, location is everything.

Here in the Roanoke Valley, we can see just about anything in the way of disasters.  If some of the predictions of hurricanes becoming more intense and slower moving are correct.  Living up on this mountain might not be such as bad idea.  I also found this article, "Are we in for something worse than Juan?," interesting.  It talks about the category 2 hurricane, Juan, that managed to hit Halifax, Nova Scotia in September 2003.  Having a hurricane hit that far north is a little scary.  Halifax is just to the east of the "101" of this google map.

It seems that planning, demographics,  and luck make a huge difference in the amount of suffering that a hurricane can bring.  We've seen that in Katrina and Rita.  The Nova Scotia perspective on Juan is enlightening.

But we were lucky with Juan in two ways, says Charles O'Reilly, a tidal expert for the Canadian Hydrographic Service.

"Here's where it could have been far more deadly," he said last week. "If it had come in at highest tide, it would have been much worse, and it missed it by two hours. And here's the other killer - and I mean it quite literally - if that storm had occurred in the daytime when everybody was at work, there would have been hundreds of people killed."

Many parts of the province are vulnerable to storm surges, says Mr. O'Reilly. There are sections of the Bedford Highway that may have to be rerouted eventually. Much of Truro is on a flood plain, and many of the old dikes that protect agricultural land around the province can't cope with much in the way of a storm surge.

"Everything's pointing at things at least being as bad or maybe getting worse," he said. "Nobody's saying things will get better. So that's a heads-up to the planners and engineers," says Mr. O'Reilly.

If you are looking for some more interesting articles to read on this foggy day,  I can suggest, "Bring Back Warren Harding," which requires a NY Times Select Subscription, and "Why Baton Rouge Is Still Bush Country," which requires a free registration with the Washington Post.

I think we have a real challenge in this country besides where people live.  Our election campaigns are media circuses which do little to really define leadership qualities of our presidential candidates.  People assume that people who project the qualities of a nice guy can also be a leader.   I actually wrote about that yesterday in "The Good Guy Syndrome."  There's more to it than that though, I believe government policy has become so hard to understand that a number of people have given up on it, and just vote for the person with whom they can most closely relate. That puts guys like John Kerry in a difficult position when trying to reach those voters.  That in essence is what Jennifer Moses said in "Why Baton Rouge Is Still Bush Country.

You can read the articles with the knowledge that the drizzle and fog have somewhat lowered the forest fire risk so you take a breather from worrying about where you live today if you live in the Roanoke Valley.