Colorado’s Flooding Becomes A 1,000 Year Event As Rescuers Search For 500 Missing People

[babylonsister]

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/15/2621881/colorado-floods/

Colorado’s Flooding Becomes A 1,000 Year Event As Rescuers Search For 500 Missing People

By Katie Valentine on September 15, 2013 at 12:18 pm


snip//

“This is a heck of a storm,” Hickenlooper said Sunday. “If this had been snow, we would have had close to 15 feet of snow if it were a cold day. It’s a lot of precipitation.”

Hickenlooper said the federal government has been “incredibly responsive” to the disaster. The U.S. Transportation Department is providing $5 million in emergency funds to help the state repair roads and bridges, and U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told Hickenlooper earlier this week that was “just the beginning” of federal assistance. But the state’s cleanup costs are likely to be steep — Hickenlooper said earlier this week that road and bridge damage was extreme, with entire roadbeds washed away and bridges missing. Boulder county alone is expected to need $150 million to repair 100 to 150 miles of roadway and up to 30 bridges — a repair bill that’s “10 to 15 times our annual budget,” the county’s transportation director told CNN.

As we said earlier this week, no one weather event can be definitively linked to climate change. As Climate Central notes, it will take months of research before climate scientists can determine whether climate change played a role in making the Boulder flood more likely to occur. However, previous research has shown that extreme precipitation events are likely to become more common as the Earth warms, and the draft National Climate Assessment report released in this January found extreme precipitation events have already become more common across the U.S.

[malaise]

1. "...extreme precipitation events have already become more common across the U.S. "

Across the globe not just the US

[Katashi_itto]

2. "God hath spoken"...or something like that...we should be hearing from ol' Pat soon

[Initech]

3. It's way past time to tell the global warming deniers like Heritage Foundation to...

Fuck off, STFU, and get the fuck out.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. Repeat after me, this extreme weather

Has none to do with climate change....




Oh yes, for those who need it

[wandy]

5. And it's still raining. Anywhere from nice steady rain to just short of monsoon.........

Link to 9 News may give you an idea of what it looks like out here......
http://www.9news.com/dontmiss/355008/630/172-people-unaccounted-for-in-Boulder-

This is what the SW rout out of my neighborhood looked like Thursday.

Fortunatly I'm up an incline so it stayed above water here.
At the moment it's poring so I'm not about to get curious as to what it looks like now.

No not climate change, we have just angered the gods.

[Warpy]

7. I guess it's not the time for a Sunday drive, huh?

I'm on really high ground here in NM and I've had standing water in the back yard and a minor flood in the back door and it doesn't smell very nice in here because of the dampness but I'm counting myself very lucky. There has been one death here but mostly it's just been a soggy nuisance.

Oh, and I just looked out the window, we're ringed with thunderheads again, going to rain later and on through the night. Again.

[SheilaT]

6. I have a niece who lives in Longmont.

I spoke with her yesterday. Their home is okay, away from the flooding. But she was still stuck in Boulder, as she had been for a couple of days, at her nannying job there. Expected to get home later in the day.

[giftedgirl77]

8. This crap is out of control...

My cousin goes to CU but as shitty as it sounds my grandmother had a spill and broke her wrist & hip so he lucked out & had gone back over to the western slope to visit her right before this storm had hit.

Nope this is totally normal, just like the crazy rain we had here in SC back in June...

[gopiscrap]

9. Wow, last night it was 372 missing sure hope they locate everyone

[Uncle Joe]

10. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, babylonsister.