They got a week of rain in Chauvin but no flooding.
Most of Terrebonne Parish is swamp and marsh, which soak up rainfall. If you go by the satellite photos rather than the out-of-date "official" state maps handed out by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (last updated in 2000) my sister's house rests on a thin promontory of land stretching miles out into the Gulf of Mexico. (Louisiana is losing its coast at the rate of 20 square miles a year--the "boot" is a lie; see restaurant critic Brett Anderson's outstanding 2014 long form essay on the phenomenon at medium.com.)
There was flooding north of there, and as everybody knows, in Baton Rouge and Denham Springs. Lakes and rivers overflowed. Not a repeat of the Katrina disaster--New Orleans got off light--but yet another slow-moving nightmare. People never credit the power of water until they're in a situation where it is made manifest. If you've ever struggled in a couple of feet of whitewater maybe you can understand how SUVs get pushed off roads and down the river. But some people ain't skeered. Some people have a lot of undeserved confidence in their own abilities.
I don't follow the weather like some do because it's just one more thing I can't control. Maybe I'm just fatalistic, but when the sirens blow I feel more annoyed than anxious, hunkering in the safe place with Karen and the dogs, listening to the meteorologists get all excited. I don't run to our office windows when thunder booms. And unlike my wife, I don't enjoy walking the neighborhood as storms brew up. I feel the ions align and my instinct is to get inside, out of the sight of whatever petty god snipes the lightning.
Someone might contradict me, but I presume the eight days of rain we got was the dregs of the storm down south. It made me glad to live on the brow of a hill a couple of hundred feet above the Arkansas River. (If we ever need flood insurance, all of us will have much larger problems.) Maybe in 50 years there will be reason to rethink things, but I hope we're safe for now.
Some people deny that the weather is changing, and others simply resist the idea that we puny humans can significantly move the climatological needle. (On the other side of the tinfoil curtain are those certain the military uses the weather as a weapon, that one purpose of so-called "chemtrails" is the "manipulation of climate through modification of Cirrus clouds.") But we can seed clouds with silver iodide to increase the chances of precipitation or mitigate hail.
And in December 1915 the city council of a drought-stricken San Diego hired a rainmaker named Charles Hatfield to produce enough rain to fill the Morena Dam reservoir. They verbally agreed to a fee of $10,000 and Hatfield set up a "moisture acceleration" tower near the reservoir, some 60 miles outside the city. On Jan. 5, 1916, heavy rains began.
"Brush-covered hillsides, probably overgrazed, were saturated to the consistency of slush and the soil gave way in great slides," historian Thomas Patterson wrote in a 1970 article for the San Diego History Center that is archived online. "The scars permanently changed the contour of hills and disappeared only as new brush grew and the new contours became familiar. Springs previously unknown to the back country flowed for years afterward. Lower Otay Dam went out and loosed a flood that demolished everything in front of it. Many lives were lost.
"Old residents with an ingrained habit of hoping for rain remember today that for the first time they were fearful. It seemed the rains would never end and the damage would never stop mounting. On the high land of San Diego itself life seemed to be perched, wet and insecure, above raging disaster. The San Diego River was a mile-wide torrent covering Mission Valley from the Kearny Mesa to the mesa of the city and sending backwaters between the jutting fingers of both. Great trees tumbled root over branch. Sticks of lumber, railroad ties and parts of houses floated crazily. Out of the gullies from the east and south came droves of cattle, horses, sheep and goats."
After a month of rain, Hatfield told the press it wasn't his fault and, fearful for his life, left the area without collecting his fee. (The city refused to pay unless he accepted liability for the millions of dollars in damages the floods caused. He sued twice, and finally in 1938, a court ruled the floods were acts of God and that Hatfield was neither liable nor entitled to his fee. The 1956 Burt Lancaster film The Rainmaker was very loosely based on Hatfield's story.)
The floods didn't hurt Hatfield's professional reputation; he received several high-profile contracts to make rain before the Great Depression forced him to return to his former life as a sewing machine salesman. He never revealed his rainmaking secrets.
These days, most scientists believe Hatfield was both a charlatan and a gifted forecaster--that he was good at predicting rain, not producing it. Absent a convincing contradictory argument, that's what I believe as well.
But I'd also suggest we do things all the time that eventually result in unintended consequences. Louisiana's disappearing coastline is at least partially the result of the Army Corps of Engineers' attempts to tame the Mississippi River after the Great Flood of 1927. They couldn't, so the river jerked and flopped like an unmanned fire hose.
Levees erected decades ago in Minnesota and Missouri have affected the Delta, depriving it of the soil that once washed down into sediment. The coast erodes as the mud sinks and compacts against the bedrock. And perhaps the oil and gas companies operating along the coast haven't always been good stewards--recently the state has joined suits by private landowners to try and force the oil companies to pay to reclaim some of the lost land.
We did this, and maybe that allows some hope that we can repair at least some of the damage. But before we can start to do that, we have to believe in science.
------------v------------
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 09/06/2016