Life goes on (1/13/2024)

It has been a while and is time to give you all an update. Retirement is still going smoothly, but I am a busy beaver, that is for sure. So, let’s have a little bit of an update. What has been going on since the beginning of January (yes, I promise that I will write more frequently).

For one, my church (the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Peninsula or UUFP) has decided that we need to move in order to grow more (have more members). During the past years we have had discussions about growth and is so how to do that. It was decided that we needed to move to larger facilities since the decision was made that we wanted to increase our membership, and we could not do that at our current location. After an exhaustive search for over two years, we found a place. When I toured the place, it was obvious that there were flooding issues at the church. Guess what, the church has a stormwater expert, me. And that is where the bulk of my time went.

What was wrong? Somehow, it became evident that there were and probably still are engineers who still think that water can be made to flow uphill. It seems that the church expanded in the past and as a result created an alleyway or what we call a breezeway. Whatever the name is, this breezeway is located between two huge expanses of roofs which all drain into a gutter system that does not work. In other words, the breezeway floods. The problem is that this breezeway has no outlet or what is thought to be the outlet is higher in elevation than the breezeway itself. In other words, water must flow up hill to get out of the area. Well, good luck.

Here I came into the picture. I analyzed the problem, spent some time in the alleyway and the entire property during rainstorms, developed a conceptual idea on how to solve the issue, get an idea of how much a solution would cost, so we can use that in the negotiations with the seller, and finally present my findings to the church members. Maybe soon I will detail what my ideas are in this blog.

In addition to all this, I am working on the tiling of our powder room. It is almost done; I still need to do some grouting. Don’t worry, pictures will follow of my masterpiece. On top of all this, we are having work done on the gazebo. It desperately was in need of a gutter system as well, and this was done this past week. But I had to take the string lights off, put them back on and buy a rainbarrel.

I present a class at the end of February, and I need to finalize that course. In other words, it looks like retirement is busier than employed life.

Yes, we take it easy as well. We settled into a schedule of going to bed around 11:30 and waking at 7:45. No, we do not set an alarm. Coffee, breakfast and dog walking takes us to 11:30 and then life starts in earnest.

I have started an excel spreadsheet where I track all our expenses and income. Our financial advisor told us that in addition to our retirement check we needed a set amount of money from our savings to keep the standard of living we had before retirement. This amount would keep our nest egg intact, based on some assumptions. However, we have no idea what we were spending our money on and how much. In addition, we don’t even know if the assumptions are correct. As you can see retired life is exciting, but I would not want to miss it one bit.

This is a photograph of the breezeway.  The staining on the concrete shows the lowest point in the system.  The sandbags indicated to us that there were flooding issues.

Work in progress at home.

20 to 7-year storms (7/30/2021)

There was a report in one of the professional publications that I read that predicts that what we call in our profession 20-year storms are shifting and becoming 7-year storms. Now that is an interesting concept that I teach in my classes on stormwater, in particular in the class entitled “Where the Water Goes.” The class has a subtitle Hydrology for ESC and SW Inspectors. ESC stands for Erosion and Sediment Control and SW for Stormwater.

So, what does a x-year (24-hour) storm means and what do these values mean? I tell my students that those famous 100-year storms do not occur only once every 100 year. I remember well that in 2003 we had two 100-year storms in one week, followed the next week by hurricane Isabel, which dumped another 100-year storm in our area. As you can imagine that September the ephemeral ponds behind our home were full to the brim, a thing that usually only occurs in February. They are usually dry in the month of September. Those two 100-year storms in a row actually created a major issue during Isabel; the soil was saturated, and the trees were extremely unstable because of this. Trees were falling all over the place during the hurricane. I lost 13 trees in my back yard that day.

In a simple explanation, I tell my students that the concept of so many year storms is based on statistics. For example, a 100-year storm tells us that the storm has a likelihood of 1% (or 100%/100) of occurring any day of the year. A 20-year storm has a chance of occurring 5% (100%/20) any day of the year, and so on. Somehow, NOAA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, could not find a better name for this phenomenon than calling it a so-many-year storm. In particular, since if it occurred today, it has the same probability of occurring again tomorrow. So, although rare what happened in 2003 having three 100 year storms in two weeks, it was statistically explainable.

So, I looked at the data for my home. A 20-year 24-hour storm at my home dumps around 6.5 inches of rain or 165 mm in those 24 hours, according to NOAA. In the good old days, a 7-year storm drops 5 inches or 127 mm in the same 24 hours. In other words, as a result of climate change the 7-year storm at my home would increase 1.5 inches or almost 40 mm of rain. Surprise, this is something we are all experiencing, thunderstorms are increasingly getting stronger and more severe.

I realize this is only an example for one place, but in the past weeks we have seen similar examples in Germany, Belgium, Arizona, and China just to name a few where we are seeing that storms are getting increasingly severe and dumping more water. Naturally this is not helped by all the development around us and the imperviousness that we are creating in our watersheds. It all means more runoff and flooding. The problem on top of this is the imperviousness that we appear to have created and are increasingly creating in neighborhoods of disadvantaged racial minority groups.

Some of these things going on with our climate and our earth are most likely very difficult to reverse. We will have to learn to live with them and adapt to them. That is part of the job I do professionally. I am part of a group that teaches stormwater management. We teach designers, developers, and regulators that it is best to try to infiltrate all that stormwater, by minimizing the impervious areas such as parking lots and roads. We also tell them that they need to preserve the soil, not compact it, so that water can infiltrate. Plant trees and shrubs, minimize lawns. Trees and shrubs intercept rain in their canopies and often only 40% of the rain makes it down to the ground. Are my students listening? Some, few are. But we keep working on them. But we don’t get discouraged, it is the right thing to do.

This is a picture I took a few years ago of a rain garden/bioretention area in Charlottesville, Virginia.  We teach students that the placement of ponds like these help with the infiltration and cleanup of stormwater and hopefully reduce the flooding danger.

Bugs (7/24/2021)

I currently have Japanese beetles in my bonsai, white fly, wooly aphids, and potato leaf hoppers, just to name a few. Pesticides that wipe out all of them will also kill the beneficial ones like spiders, so I rather patiently pick them off then get out the killer chemicals. Actually, I can shake off the Japanese beetles, relocate the caterpillars, and often use a strong spray of water on the other bugs. I seldomly use soapy water and on a rare occasion some neem oil. I’m sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I am somewhat obsessed about the idea living with as few pesticides around the house as possible since we have bees in the back yard.  In addition, learning about environmental estrogens and alike has gotten me even more against the use of chemicals. Watching people fighting bugs all around us, sometimes with little success, I am afraid that it will wipe out the useful ones such as the honeybees and other important pollinators.

Parts of one of my Siberian elm have been completely denuded by caterpillars.  These elms seem to be favored by leaf eating bugs. 

I am trying to let my crape myrtle trees grow to thicken up the trunk.  But this year the Japanese beetles had a different idea.  I need to go out every morning and shake the bushes.

It is interesting trying to compare the human species to bugs roaming the earth. You have good ones, and you have detrimental ones. Pesticides are somewhat like the natural disasters that might could wipe out humans indiscriminately whether these humans are good the earth or bad. This begs the question, does nature really care we are here? In other words, do we humans really matter? Interesting question, isn’t it? Are we just one of the many bugs on the face of this earth that are annoying her? So, is she sending hurricanes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, you name it in an effort to exterminate this terrible bug that annoys her? Are they natures soapy water or fly swatter?

It has been quite a week, hasn’t it? Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands flooded. Oregon, California and parts of western Canada are burning. Moreover, they are suffering in sweltering heat. We on the East Coast are breathing in the polluted air from the wildfires. Japan, where the Olympic games have started has a heatwave, and we are predicted to have another one here in the U.S.A. next week. Covid-19 is still difficult to get under control, although this is probably mostly caused by human stubbornness, plain stupidity of some of the bugs (I mean humans), and misinformation. But as I mentioned before, the earth, nature, is angry.

I intent this to be a short post, most of you know where I am coming from. I do not want to bore you. However, I do think it is important to register the flooding in Europe and the wildfires in the west in this post. Yes, it is in the news, but experiencing the smoke here in the east and feeling it in our breathing is really amazing. It is a great example of how interconnected this world is and it shows that what we do here might affect someone else in another place. Something intelligent bugs like bees and ants that live in large colonies have figured out a long time ago.

Meditation and frogs (9/16/2018)

Living next to a nature preserve, a natural area, woods, or whatever you want to call it, has its positive points and negatives. For one, we will never have any development behind our home. Secondly, I have a place to practice my forest bathing; if not just by standing in our yard and meditatively stare into the woods, I can just disappear into it. I also have a lot of material for my classes; especially the wetland class I teach. In addition, I take a lot of pictures in those woods and my Instagram page is replete with them. Finally, they are a rich source for some of my blog posts.

Here it sounds that I am using the woods for selfish reasons; but that is far from the truth. While I am still debating whether to allow advertising on my blog, for right now I don't make a penny by writing it. My objective was and still is educational and sharing some of my photographs, my thoughts, life experience, philosophy and love for the natural world. Isn’t that what the internet was intended to be, a free exchange of ideas? But then, who could not use some extra money.

But I digress. To me there is almost nothing better than to step out of our back door on a Saturday morning after my morning coffee and reading the newspaper, to walk to the edge of our very small plot of land and just stand there for maybe five minutes and take it all in; to absorb it all. I may even walk 30 or 50 steps into the woods to this small hill, most likely a remnant of a redoubt that was constructed by Washington’s troops during the Revolutionary War. It is at this point where everything I experienced the past week starts making sense. I look up at the top of the trees and watch the warblers hunting among the leaves in the top of the canopies. I listen to the calls of the blue jays which sometimes sound like a hawk; the calls from cat birds which, you guessed it, sounds like the meowing of a cat; the towhees that invite me to “drink your tea”; red-bellied woodpeckers; and chickadees.

“Oh”, you might say, “isn't that a selfish reason, dumping all the weeks thoughts, worries and troubles in the woods and on to those poor birds?” I promise you they can handle it. Nature is much more resilient than us human beings. They are not faced by me standing there and taking it all in. Actually, the chickadees sometimes get pretty annoyed with my presence and they are the first ones to let me know that, in particular when I bring my dog Jake with me to just take it all in. They’ll come to a branch close to us and sound their nasal alarm, as in “we see you; now go away.” Jake knows the weekend routine. He gets up and walks to the back door the second I am done reading the newspaper and get up; it is time “to walk the grounds” or “explore the out-back” as I call it.

This past Sunday the “out-back” was amazing. But I must take a step back. In a previous post, I mentioned that the weather Gods have it out for me. Well, they must have known that we were at a concert in Williamsburg on Saturday night and that I was driving back. The skies opened up on the way home. I could not see a thing while driving. The way I drove was from dashed line on the highway to dashed line, saying out loud: “there is the next line” and keeping those lines under my left tire. A neighbor with a rain gauge told me later that we got 5 inches of rain that evening. All that rain must have fallen in maybe an hour or so; our neighborhood was partially flooded. 

This is what the woods looked like in the morning.  Part of the yard were flooded.  In the far left you can see the bee-hive we have in our yard

We walk our dogs in the evening before going to bed. We could already hear what was going on. Frogs had come out of hibernation immediately! It was amazingly loud. Later, even with the windows closed you could hear them inside our home. The next morning, we saw why. Our back yard was still under water. The noise was amazing (I made a recording and will try to imbed it <here>). This was one of the few times that it was so loud in the 18 years we have lived in our home. The interesting part is that the next day it was quiet again behind our home. The frogs had either gone back to bed or done their thing and were exhausted after a night and morning of debauchery. They are so opportunistic.

Nature is wonderful, the wetlands or Grafton ponds behind our home are a unique ecosystem. This is why the area was designated as a nature preserve. It protects the endangered Mabee salamander and a sedge. Obviously, the frogs do not mind this arrangement. At night we have them on our windows and sliding door, waiting for unsuspecting insects to fly by, attracted to the bright interior.

But let me also come full circle and get back to the start of this post. As I mentioned there are positives and negatives of living next to these woods. The possible negatives of living where we live include deer, ticks and mosquitoes. At times we have enough of them, but for right now the positives still outweigh the negatives, especially those evenings and mornings when there is a cacophony of frogs, or when I can go and explore the out-back.

The Weather Gods are angry (8/21/2018)

At one point in my my life I must have angered the weather Gods. I am not sure when I did this, but from what it looks like, it must have been some time ago. They have been on my case for some time!  Of late, the weather Gods seems to try to sabotage whatever (family) plans I (or we) have. Take for instance this past weekend.

Our daughter is in town and so were friends. What better opportunity to go for a bike ride on the Capital Trail in Jamestown and end this at the Billsburg Microbrewery, followed by a dinner. Oh well, ominous clouds gathered and halfway driving to the starting point of our bike ride we were surprised by a downpour. When we arrived at the designated starting spot to meet our friends Val and Dave, thunder was cracking and rain was starting again. We decided to go to the microbrewery instead and wait out the rain. We got a little wet running in from the parking lot to the taproom, but so be it. In the microbrewery we sampled some delicious beers, experienced some great company, watched a magnificent lightning show, and a tropical downpour. From the looks on the radar, it was not going to stop so eventually we decided to go out to dinner. Suffice it to say, the weather Gods prevented us from exercise and our biking a thing we usually enjoy very much. Although we did try to make the best of it. But then, we beat the crowd to the restaurant; maybe the weather gods were actually looking out for us.

It always seems to go like this though. This summer, it seems to have rain on the weekends and and it is nice during the week. I have not been out sailing yet this year! I can blame the weather Gods for that, or maybe the (hurt) knee Gods, the college graduation Gods and all kinds of other scapegoat Gods. 

Take for instance the other evening, I was peacefully waking the dog (we do that every evening) and the clouds break open literally when we reach the furthest point removed from our home. I did not carry an umbrella or raincoat and the only thing I could do was walk home through what felt like a tropical downpour. The only thing missing was a good electrical storm; I guess I have not yet angered the Gods that much. By the time Jake the dog and I arrive home, 10 minutes later, nothing on my body was dry. We usually dry the dogs off before we let them in the house; this time I was also handed a towel to dry myself off outside, so I would not get the inside of our home wet. My wife took a rain check that evening and let me go walk alone. Her knee hurt she said. Funny how people’s joints can predict the weather. I now know what it means when people take rain checks. 

Earlier this week, I took a day off to enjoy some time with the family. Maybe some outing, beach time? Well, by two o’clock that afternoon we almost had 3 inches (7.5 cm) of rain that fell in about two to three hours time. On top of that we lost electricity. But it was a nice family bonding experience sitting in our gazebo watching the yard getting flooded.

This photo was taken during the height of the storm this past Monday.  The path in our back yard that leads to the woods behind our home was literally a flowing creek.

At points that day the water in our yard was ankle deep.  I was really wondering when the snakes were going to float by.

Weather has always played a large part in our lives. Two of my posts deal with some of the weather we experienced while living in Nepal. We went through one monsoon season and it was so bad, the one night we got almost swept away by floods. Two days later, we were crossing a stream and the wife of the same friends lost her footing and was swept away by a raging stream towards an even larger raging stream. If she would have entered that one it would have been the end of her. Somehow I was able to run after her and put my walking stick out which she was able to grab a hold of and I was able to pull her out of the stream. I really hate to think what would have happened if I (or she) would not have been able to do that. We crossed that stream all the time, it was less than 3 feet wide with stepping stones, but during the monsoon it had turned into this wild torrent of at least 30 feet wide and more than knee deep. It swept her off her feet. During that same monsoon we witnessed whole mountain sides collapsing around us and landslides everywhere. So we decided that the next monsoon we were going on vacation. But then I also wrote about getting dehydrated in a snowstorm in the mountains of Nepal. Those weather Gods are amazing!

Living in coastal Virginia for the past 18 years I have seen my share of tropical storms and other weather phenomena. I am just so concerned that with global warming or what some euphemistically call "climate change," things will get even more extreme. I think we are seeing that already; many old timers in my classes mention this, but as soon as I mention those words “Global warming”, they try to take it back and “oh no, the storms are really not getting more severe, they are just outliers.” The weather Gods are not getting angrier in their eyes; while we all know that they actually are, and that it is the result of all the stuff we do, the stuff we emit but try to deny and ignore!

Sea level rise (10/12/2017)

Sunday's newspaper had an interesting article on how the coastal communities in our area have been experiencing more coastal flooding in the past two decades than in the previous years.  We live in a crazy area; having a perfect combination of contributing factors to sea level rise and flooding events.  It seems that Dr. Tal Ezer a professor at Old Dominion University found that in each of the decades 1950-60, 60-70 and 70-80 there was only once that there was significant coastal flooding.  In the 1990 this increased to 5 times, between 2000 and 2010 it was also 5 times and between 2010 and 2016 we already have seen it 6 times.  This year is not different, hurricane Jose even caused some coastal flooding and it did not even come close.

The water was really high in the York River during our kayaking trip this past July 30th.  I think the weather service called for minor coastal flooding that day.  
Please remember the King Tide event will hit Virginia on November 5 this year that day we are having the astronomically highest tide and we are being asked to go out and take photographs of the event using a special app.  Check when such an event will happen in your area and participate!

So what are some of the factors?  The article mentions an interesting one: "The Gulf stream is slowing down!"  A fast Gulf stream pulls the water out of the Chesapeake Bay and when it slows down, it seems that the water is backing up into the Bay; interesting isn't it?  I am sure that helps with the rise of some of the water here.

On September 3, 2016 the coastal flooding was so severe thanks to a tropical storm that we could not get to our sailboat; as you can see the dock was flooded.

The article never mentions why the Gulf stream is slowing down.  My research shows that it could be caused by global warming.  I learned it may.  This article suggests it has to do with the salt content in the water; fresh water from the melting glaciers from Greenland are impacting the circulation and slowing things down.

Other factors that affect sea level rise include that we live in a subsidence area, and of course the famous global warming.  Lately, I have been at a few conferences where we are told not to talk about global warming, since that is such a polarizing subject, people stop listening  We should talk about sea level rise or coastal flooding, that isn't controversial, people can see and experience that without needing to know what causes it!  Maybe that will sink in and maybe they will act or react.  Global warming is such a politically charged subject.

It is an amazing world we live in, everything seems to be politically charged and controversial nowadays.  It has become us against them.  Politicians trying to undo what the previous guy try to enact in good faith, what they thought what was best for the country.  It feels more like undoing thing for the sake of tying to destroy a legacy than something that is carefully thought through.  

But here I go again, entering the slippery slope of politics.  I should really concentrate on writing about my first loves: the environment and nature.  While thinking about that, I recommend we should all take a deep breath, go out in nature and meditate on the beauty of it, regardless of religion, sexual orientation or political leaning (how is that for a transition?).  We should all concentrate on the peace and quiet it brings to be out there and bathe in nature.  We need to appreciate and understand how important it is that our children and their children can enjoy it as well in the distant future.

Have you hugged a tree today? 

My past travels in Nepal, weather extremes past and present (II) (3/23/2017)

As promised and trying stepping away from my anxieties about current-day politics, a trip down memory lane today. On the 12th of January this year I was prompted to write about an extreme weather event we were experiencing here on the east coast of the U.S.A. and that made me reminisce about a snow storm that I experiences in Nepal <click here to see that post>. That episode made me think of the comic book of my youth called “Tintin in Tibet.” But I never saw the Yeti, also known as the abominable snowman.

Well the weather extremes this year did not stop from occurring with that one event. In February we had 80 degree (27 degree Celsius) days and now in March we have seen snow (actually parts of the East Coast have seen one of the worst snow storms ever) and it has been very cold.  It has been a crazy year in many aspects.

But let's step away from that and as promised talk about our stay in Nepal (1981-1983).  Yep, that was a long time ago; it was way before many of us were talking about global warming or climate change, although we Europeans were somewhat aware that it was imminent, having been alerted to the possibility by a 1972 report published by the "Club of Rome."  But again, I digress.  

It was our first monsoon season 1982 (10 years after the publication of that report) and in our naivety we decided to stay in the country through the height of the rainy season.  Hearing this, our best friends planned to visit us, not knowing what we were into.  Well, monsoon means rain, and a lot of it!  When our friends left after two weeks they had seen one fleeting glimpse of the Himalayas (probably 15 seconds long), when during our trek (or hike) the skies finally opened up and they saw the Machapuchare or the Fishtail, a sacred mountain in Nepal.  Except for the hike through the foothills they really wondered if there were really 27,000 feet (8000 meter) plus mountains back there.

This is a picture I took of the Annapurna massive, with Annapurna 1 (26545 ft., the 10th highest in the world) sticking up.  You can barely make out Machapuchare to the right, the fishtail is just sticking out of the clouds.

Another view of the Annapurnas from Pokhara.  Machapuchera is now in the foreground and is blocking the view of Annapurna 1.  To the far left is Annapurna South and far right Annapurna 2.

During that monsoon season we had seen our share of landslides already, but we decided to take our best friends (who were visiting from Holland) to the village where we lived part of the time.  For us who were used to hiking it usually took us 2 days to hike to our home (eventually we could do it in 10 hours; we were in killer shape), but with them the trek took us 3 days.

The first night out we stayed at a local hotel (hut and you sleep on the floor on a mat in a communal room, so the word hotel is a bit of a stretch).  As usual in the monsoon, it started to thunder and rain.  And it rained and rained.  We went to sleep and around midnight we were awoken by other guests by the words "Pani auncha" which can be translated as "water is coming."  We got up and stepped out of the hut and the rushing water was over our knees in the village.  So what do you do?  It is pitch black outside, rushing water down the streets and they tell you the water is coming?  It is already there, darn it! So it will probably be rising even higher and the only thing you can do is to make a run for it.  Our first instinct was to rush down stream with the water.  After a few steps, a person in the next hut tells us not to do that but to go up stream.  Easier said then done.  There are no paved roads but stone paths with steps that are now covered with knee-deep rushing water, you cannot see where you step and where the path is, it was a struggle.  Finally after some time we get to an area where the water is less high.  A good Samaritan sees us and invites us into their home and we all huddle around the fire drink hot tea and wait for the storm to subside and the water to go down.  Eventually we do sleep some there and by morning we go back to the hotel pick up our stuff and get on our way, tired but safe.

A picture of the Annapurna during the monsoon

What happened was that the village was at the mouth of a valley and this storm got stuck in the valley and dumped so much water in the watershed that evening and it all came rushing out.  Obviously, this had occurred before, because the people knew to go upstream and not downstream, where flooding would have been worse.  Our friend died a number of years ago and we saw him a few years before his death, but he still remembered those words "Pani auncha" and we reminisce about them. 

A typical monsoon day in Nepal, cloudy and heavy rains 

For us it was just a foreboding of what was to come during our trek to our home in the village, and I will write more about it in a subsequent post.

Yorktown ((9/27/2015)

The concept of global warming has been in the news the past week.  It started with the Papal visit to the east coast and when I posted a few pictures of the yacht club on my Facebook account, one of the first questions from one of my friends on the west coast was: "Global warming? "  At the same time a very conservative Facebook acquaintance posted something about the Pope being the Antichrist because of his opinion on the environment, evolution and homosexuality.  Boy it sure has been an amazing couple of days.  It is nothing I am going to solve in this blog, but it is also not something I wish to ignore.

Arriving at the yacht club around high tide Sunday morning it was evident that there was a coastal flooding issue. 

The water had retreated a little, but not enough for me to get on the finger pier and on the boat.

Blame a high pressure system over Maine and a coastal low off North Carolina, and there we had a stiff (20 to 30 mile per hour) easterly wind for the past couple of days.  Wind like that will pile the water up into the Chesapeake Bay.  With high tide it will push it in and even with low tide it will really not let the water out.  (This is a great website that shows you a comparison between the expected astronomic tide and the observed tide in the Chesapeake Bay, I assume there are other websites that do this for other places as well).  Thus with each successive tide water gets higher and higher.  Resulting in coastal flooding.  Yes, sea level rise increases the effect and we all know what causes sea level rise.  Or do we really?

High tide in the York River on Saturday

While you can't see it on this picture, the tide was still rushing in under the Coleman bridge at Yorktown.

We here on the east coast in particular in the Chesapeake Bay area are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to sea level rise, at least I am told.  We live in a subsidence area.  During the last ice age, our area was pushed up.  We were not covered by ice, but the oceans had retreated.  This made the land lighter, and with the ice pushing on the land further to the north, our land was pushed up.  Our countryside is currently sinking, making any sea level rise more pronounced.  On top of that we were pushed up by a meteor impact that fell in the lower part of the Bay and we live on the rim of the crater.  This rim is sinking as well.  Finally, out in the ocean, the Gulf Stream makes a bend towards Europe right near us, and that bend will push water our way as well.  So this is why they predict a larger sea level rise in our area while elsewhere on the east coast it likely to be less.

Seaside goldenrod swaying in the 20+ mph breeze at the beach

Yorktown and Seaford (7/22/13)

It has been a tremendously wet couple of days.  Sunday night a rain guage in our neighborhood recorded 5.5 inches of rain in 2 hours, and Monday evening it rained again.  It probably only rained 2 inches, but the soil was so saturated that it was flooding all over the place. We live in a neighborhood that was built in a swamp and you can really notice it.  But the fun thing about it is the frogs.  They came out like gang busters; sitting outside you could hardly understand each other, they were so noisy.