It's Getting Hot in Herre (01 Apr)

No Foolin'

There's more flooding going on in the US--just not in the continental US. Hawaii has suffered six weeks of pounding rain, which has culminated several disasters that are certainly smaller in scale than Katrina, but nonetheless damaging. First, there was the breaking of a 115-year old dam which had held back the Ka Loko Reservoir on the island of Kuai:

When it collapsed, an estimated 420 million gallons of water careered down what had been an idyllic tropical stream. A 20-foot wall of water deluged the smaller Morita Reservoir, flowed over the lone road north and barreled into two dwellings downstream. Seven people died in the flooding that followed, although only three bodies have been recovered. The rest have presumably washed out to sea.

And the main business of Hawaii--tourism--is under attack with 41 days of rain closing many attractions and golf courses, as well as closing down the beaches of Waikiki because of a giant sewage spill.

A sewer line on the back side of Waikiki broke March 24, and the city had to divert the wastewater to the Ala Wai canal until Wednesday, some 48 million gallons over the five and a half days, instead of allowing it to back up into homes, hotels and businesses, said Bill Brennan, a spokesman for the City of Honolulu. The canal leads to the ocean near Waikiki Beach.

"If wastewater backed up into those areas, it would have been catastrophic and certainly devastating," Mayor Mufi Hannemann told reporters at a news conference on Thursday.

The Hawaii Department of Health is testing the ocean water daily for fecal bacteria levels, some of which were recorded at levels thousands of times higher than acceptable, said Kurt Tsue, a department spokesman.

Below is a photo forwarded by my Mom, a Honolulu resident, of the intersection of Fern and Hauoli streets (which is about a mile from her residence).



As the world warms up, we'll be experiencing more and more natural occurrences (including disasters of varying scales) that will make the modern life we take for granted come crashing to a halt. This dovetails nicely into a NYTimes op-ed piece from this morning by environmental provocateurs Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (who wrote the much-discussed essay, The Death of Environmentalism), who call for a Global Warming Preparedness Act.

Those of us who live in California have long prepared ourselves for "the big one." Many of us buy earthquake insurance, bolt our houses to their foundations and set aside emergency food and water. Local governments create evacuation plans with first responders and make sure emergency generators are in place. Schools have created plans to house families whose homes are damaged.

But nothing like this exists nationally. Under a preparedness act, it would. The law would give the Federal Emergency Management Agency the task of coordinating a national global warming preparedness plan with other government agencies. For instance, coastal and Gulf states would be required to demonstrate effective evacuation procedures to deal with rising sea levels and more severe hurricanes, as well as to assess the risks of new construction in low-lying areas. And Southwestern and agricultural states would be required to determine their capacity to cope with future droughts.

After its Hurricane Katrina failures, this would be a great opportunity for the management agency to rehabilitate itself. And to make sure that the agency does the job right, Congress should see to it that all of the agency's plans are made open to public debate and scrutiny.

[...]

Insurance companies should be the first to advocate for greater clarity and transparency. As Hurricane Katrina showed, insurers (and the federal government) are going to increasingly be in the position of paying for global warming disasters.

But the law should find other supporters, too. Federal and state legislation on global warming preparedness and disclosure will help firefighters, paramedics and police officers get the information they need to prepare for natural disasters.

We can agree to disagree on the causes of climate change. What we all must agree on, though, is that it poses a risk — one for which we are woefully unprepared.

Other news tidbits on the enviro tip:

• Authorities across eastern Europe declared flood alerts on Thursday amid fears that rivers swollen by a sudden spring thaw could spill over in a repetition of the disastrous east European inundation of 2002. [TerraDaily]
  
  
• Australia's remote north-west shore was lashed by 80 mph winds as a severe tropical cyclone began crossing the coast today from the Indian Ocean. Onslow, a fishing town of more than 800, was likely to bear the brunt of the cyclone's force. [The Independent]
  
  
• Carbon dioxide emissions in Britain have risen for the third year in a row, and are the highest ever under Labour. A government review of climate change policies this week provoked concern over the political will to tackle the issue. About 157.4m tonnes of carbon were released into the atmosphere in 2005, a 0.25% rise on 2004. [Guardian]

[See previous Hot in Herre post]