streams and flooded homes. The storms apparently wind down tonight and then we'll have a dry period, so things should start improving. Until the next band of weather comes through, anyhow. In Southern California, though, there will be no rain until October at the earliest and probably not until November.

If we get any rain in November. If the El Nino is setting up as reported, it will be even drier from what I understand. I've noticed in the last 2-3 years here in Santa Monica that it's even hotter than it used to be right at the ocean.

from the states that are flooding? Jobs? At least if it leaks no real harm done.

altogether, rapid convert to solar and wind and move the water. In fact, the Government should imminent domain their asses and take over the pipelines for the security of the Nation.

I 29 north will be shut down..

It is soppy soppy wet. here.. as I know you are.. we have family in the cities getting ready to man the sump pumps for the basement

Between the tornadoes, the hail (yep a new roof will be needed) the water.. it is adding up to be an interesting summer..

Stay dry MM.. stay dry

They were going nuts just sitting in the house.

Here in St. Paul, we're a lot better off than our neighbors in southern MN and Iowa and South Dakota. The whole region is waterlogged. Good news is that it looks like this wet period ends today, and things will begin to dry out.

My thoughts are with those who lost homes and more in the recent storms. My problems are really minor compared to theirs.

but my Mother and brother are in SD.. and the Sioux will crest tomorrow.. and crest right past their house... I think they are going to be okay.. sandbagging going on.. and they are closing the freeway to then try and divert the river..I wish I could help but I had the knee replaced in December and there is no way I can sandbag this time.. keep your fingers crossed.

I will keep a good thought for your folks in California..maybe we can shift some of our abundance of the wet stuff west

Rock Rapids is getting hit really hard MM.. the whole county got shut down (Iowa here).. the dam north of them in Minnesota gave way, and then the levees gave way in IA.. Hopefully things well crest and start to go down tomorrow, but we have rain predicted for the next four days..

feast or famine.. it was drought in May..

Global climate change has jumped on us with both of its big old feet..

been in the Sioux Falls area many times. They're all having a tough time this year in SD.

Mom and my brother are down past Vermillion.. Its the Big Sioux.. I think they are closing the freeway between Vermillion and the North Sioux City turnoff.. they are releasing water down at Gavins Point to take some of pressure off the Missouri.. does not seem to be any issue with it this year.. but the Big and Little Sioux.. the worst flooding ever..

downstream, here in the KC area.

Stay safe!..

more like 2010 or 2006. But hopefully not even that high, becuase I have storage buildings in the flood plain.

right in the road of the flood water. Fortunately they put a new bridge in and more water can pass through it quicker. Hopefully the house will not get flooded. Have to call him right away.

Blue Mounds State Park.

I couldn't find anything about the dam you mentioned being in trouble, though.

I was under the impression that Ocheda, Okabena, and Lake Bella were really low and this rain would be welcomed. (I grew up in that area.)

water we are talking about here. Our home acreage is there. I lived there most of my life.

if the Ocheydan is still in its banks. The odd thing about all the rain down there is that there was a great need for the rain, just not all at once.

Is your brother brother farming at the home place? How are his crops making out?

original farm that my dad farmed. Us other children own the acreage and he takes care of it as good as he can. I will ask him about the neighbors crops also. I wonder if we know each other? I am in my early 70s and lived in that area. If you are interested I will pm you.

I grew up in Nobles County. I did azlot if waterfowl hunting on Lake Ocheda as a youth.

I remember how low the lake levels were in the mid '70s. It all came back in the 80s.

include the Ocheyedan River and the Little Sioux. Nothing about the area we are talking about yet.

If TPTB think that they gain a monopoly with sufficient profit then your suggestion for a system to distribute water would grab hold. At that time people will be outlawed from doing simple things such as catching rainwater from their roofs for irrigation purposes. Public water systems will also become privatized.

While I use plenty of consumer products and use public transportation, I can live a lot more easily without a barrel of oil than I can without a barrel of water.

gets fought over, as in Texas and New Mexico. Other places have an unwanted surplus. It may well become necessary to create an Interstate Water System, if climate change continues to worsen.

However, if you are capitalist at all costs, then an interstate water system is grounds for another civil war.

You're right about the situation with Texas though. The Metroplex area has been trying to tap the spigots of Oklahoma for at least a decade.

with no profit motive available. I'm not optimistic that such a thing will happen, though. My philosophy is socialist. My political life is based on pragmatism, though. I must deal with reality, not theory.

Perhaps with the Army Corps of Engineers planning and supervising?

Or would everyone working on it be a government employee working with government owned equipment?

The key thing is - NO DRAINING OF THE GREAT LAKES just because people can't look at a map and move somewhere that naturally has water.

Want some Great Lakes water? Move here. If not, people need to learn to accept the consequences of their bad choices instead of creating even more environmental catastrophes.

when it gets to Texas it just goes out into the Gulf and the Ocean.

here in St. Paul, and it's picking up more water as it goes south. Most of that water will, as you say, run into the Gulf of Mexico, even though some of it gets diverted for other uses along the way. The Mississippi has always sent a huge amount of water from Minnesota to Louisiana. Always. There's just no system available to distribute much of that water very far from the river, generally, so most of it ends up in the Gulf. Still, that water is part of a complex ecosystem. It's very complicated, indeed.

it's length. St. Paul's water supply comes from it, as does the supply in Minneapolis and many suburbs. The same is true all along the length of the Mississippi. None of those populated areas have any shortage of water. Still, an enormous amount of water still reaches the Gulf.

Thanks for the thread, MineralMan.

of the seminal environmental books, published in 1949. We seem not to have learned the lessons that were visible even then. Will we ever? I don't know.

I think that makes it a total of about 5-1/2" since last weekend.

I grew up in SW MN and there is a water lipeline system down there because of a lack of aquafers. My town has only a fwirly shallow wellfield and depends on groundwater.

I've seen several collection ponds being pumped into sewers because they were overflowing. Let's send all this water where it will do some good.

the Mississippi River, one way or another.

Like the human race will be extinct in 30 years? What would that news do to our civilization now? So they keep it secret.

decisions need to be made. But, we're not going to be extinct in 30 years. Uncomfortable, perhaps, and dealing with strange weather and other things, but not extinct. The scientists aren't keeping anything secret, but you do have to go look for the information. The news media isn't talking about it much.

If a scientist found info on his supercomputer that shows life will be impossible for larger mammalian species in 30-50 years. I doubt they would release it.

I wouldn't worry about that possibility.

all bets are off.

Things are changing, of course. But, it's too early to start predicting TEOTWAWKI just yet. In the end, there's little we can do about the course of things as individuals. We can only live in the best way we can.

But I hope that optimism wont keep us from taking major action....... before its too late

It's something else. Commerce takes a short view of everything. Next quarter's profits take precedence over just about everything else. Dealing with climate change, if it's even possible, is going to cost a helluva lot of money, and the corporations already know where they want money to go, and it's not to deal with long-term global problems. Corporations don't care about long-term problems.

I'm not optimistic about corrections being made. However, I think the real issues won't become critical until the next century and beyond. That appears to be the overall view of climate scientists, too. There will be shorter term issues, of course, but the real crunch is down the road farther than you might think.

We'll see. Or, I should say, others will see. I'm 68. I won't be around to see the crisis.

We're getting a thunderstorm yet again today. Most of the rain has gone to the north of us but the run off will still come downstream. Dreading having to get out in the garden. Lordy, it's dark outside right now.

Stay dry!

Again.

You stay as dry as you can too.

Prediction is for fair weather for the next week, which should let us dry out somewhat. More rain tonight and early tomorrow, but that's it for a while.

next Tuesday. My husband has been manning the pumps around electrical substations this week. Hopefully we won't get a repeat of 2008.

I've had several bites in the past couple of weeks. While I was building the new chain link fence around my back yard, I was food for them for quite a while. I hate it when they bite through your T-shirt, right in that spot between your shoulder blades where you can't scratch!

I asked if the Lake had ever flooded when we were up there last year. My SIL said he had actually checked into that and said it hadn't.

The reason I asked is that in the past 2 decades there has been a weather pattern where storms keep rolling over and over the same area. It happened here in southern Iowa in '93 and then again in '08 (I think). In both cases the rains started in the fall, turned to heavy snows and then back to heavy rains. Not that we can do anything.

the Lake is out of its banks for the first in memory. We were up two weeks ago and it was really scary. Just inches in many spots from the highly traveled road around the Lake. If it gets up over the road it could do some serious damage. Water is so destructive.

Hoping you guys get some relief soon.

Lake Minnetonka. Many dockszare underwater or close to it, but I am unaware of any homes with water getting into their basements.

that road looked to be in a bad spot.

[link:|

I hope your cousin does OK with that water. The house looks high enough to escape actual flooding, from that photo.

For the past few years in my area of the Southeast we've been having unusual torrential rain downpours. Two to three inches in a few hours which runs off our clay soil and causes flooding of our streams and low lying residential areas.

I've been thinking that if these torrential rains could be captured in yard cisterns we could do our own irrigation here in my area through the dry times. But, more importantly, why wouldn't it make sense for the excessively wet areas of our country to be able to collect that excess rainwater in huge cisterns, filtering out the mercury and other toxins and then ship it in tankers to the areas that do need it because of their harsh drought conditions.

Your idea of pipelines for transporting water instead of the crude tar sands oil would even make sense if we could rely on the climate change not to be sporadic. We don't yet know whether the drought will be permanent in certain areas of our country or if, as the polar caps continue to melt, that there won't be shifts back and forth between flooding and drought in areas as the wind and ocean currents shift with the varying amount of melting.

But, surely we should be planning how we can ease the situation by cooperation between states/regions to address this issue. And, we damned well shouldn't be replying on the corporate bottled water entities to do this for us. We could create our own "State/Regional Utility Cooperatives" so that fees could be kept reasonable and jobs offering fair wages could be created.

It will never happen given our current Corporate Controlled Government. But, wouldn't it be positive if something like that could happen? To be able use a resource, we are all entitled to, as Earth Inhabitants for the good of all rather than Coke and Pepsi and the rest who want all the ground water and underground water to use for their own profits. We no longer own our airwaves or even even our mineral rights to the property our homes sit on (as states use imminent domain to Frack) but at the least we should be able to still have the rights to our Rain Water and to share within our communities and without as we so choose.

in the are that is now flooding in SW MN, SE SD, and NW IA.

http://www.lcrws.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=42

tapping into an aquifer which might not be permanently sustainable. And, now they have flooding from rainfall. Maybe if that rainfall, in the future, could be captured in industrial sized cisterns which, if positioned in strategic areas, could help alleviate the run off in areas which are so prone to flooding?

I was talking about using filtered RainWater from areas getting excessive downpours which doesn't get absorbed into the local soil to those areas which don't have aquifers or bodies of water near enough to pipe that might be stressed by climate change in the future--i.e. trucking it or using tank cars in rail systems to transport across country then trucking it to the communities in the states that need it.

Your article shows a positive cooperative effort and thanks for posting it. 's

My father was instrumental in getting a dam built in the area this thread became focused on. My hometown relies on shallow wells for municipal water. A dam was built on a creek to form a lake and then wells were drilled there because of the ground water.

to Aquifers or Dams from Rivers who suffer would be grateful for water from other parts of the USA.

Just like when we have Electrical disruptions and the Power Companies unite and send their people out to help folks in areas hit by Hurricanes (Like Sandy, Katrina) and other storms (they come from all over the States closest to the scenes of disaster. The power companies still send their crews out to help restore power when extra help is needed and it's been a "tradition" that's been honored forever.

So if we could establish the same efforts to sharing dwindling resources to the really needed from those who have an excess of water....it might be worth expanding the discussion for those without access to the resources that you have..

My hometown of around 12,000 people uses almost 2.7 million gallons of water per day. Even with the utmost in conservation, the numbers don't add up.

to deal with a crisis situation. And....it would provide jobs.

than TAR SANDS from CANADA!

My plants are all sulking. Highs in the mid60s the next week, lows tonight at 39.

Crazy!

That the water inequity would have people wanting to pipeline water from Great Lakes to drought areas. Great Lakes Water Resources Compact became law in 2008 and would prevent that.
http://www.nwf.org/What-We-Do/Protect-Habitat/Waters/Great-Lakes/Great-Lakes-Compact.aspx

However, they are welcome to the 8 inches of water in my basement.

Apparently the short term parking area at MSP is flooded, too.

While you claim ' since water for residential suburban lawns is generally considered to be more important than water used to grow food' the reality is that 80% of CA water is used for agribusiness.

"California's water budget is skewed heavily toward agriculture. The conventional estimate is that 80 percent of the water used in California flows into the state's multi-billion-dollar agricultural sector.

The 20 percent left for urban use is split between homes, businesses, and government.

About 6 percent of the state's water is consumed by industries, commercial operations, and governments. About 14 percent is poured into bathtubs, toilets, and washing machines or sprayed over residential lawns."

http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/where-we-are/in-a-season-of-drought-where-does-the-water-go.html

Truly. The information in that brief news story doesn't really tell the whole story at all. Farmers in the Central Valley may not have access to water soon from the essential California Aqueduct. That water has the City of Los Angeles's name on it. In drought conditions, their claim to the water overrides the Central Valley's farmers' claim to it.

Reading the farm journals and the wine journals from California is very interesting this year. And I do read them. I'm afraid that if the drought continues, the requirements of the Los Angeles metroplex are going to eat up water that might have been used to grow the crops. It's a real threat. Which is not to say that the people living in the cities don't need the water, too. They do. There's just not enough to go around right now.

It is what it is. The vast majority of CA's water goes to agriculture, as it needs to. But when a business is already taking 80% of a resource, it is not correct to claim other minor uses are given priority. Because they are not.

As you wish.

Sorry if that upsets your rhetoric cart.

Your OP claimed that CA uses most of its water to water the lawn. That is the bit I take issue with, because it insults CA and because it is factually false. Agribusiness needs and uses much more water than any other segment of the CA economy. What they use it for is vital to all. Cooperation will be of the utmost importance.
This is why claiming that watering the lawn is given priority when it is not given priority is unhelpful. The entire household use in CA is 14% of the water supply.
The politics of this crisis will not be helped with hyperbolic snark at people who are actually not using much of the water at all. And agriculture will be a very high priority because the entire State depends on it for $$ as well as the entire nation for food.
In a crisis, it is really most helpful to stick with facts. It just is.

I have family in agriculture in the Central Valley, in Wine Country and in the far South part of the State friends of mine are in apples. This is part of why I know that agriculture takes the bulk of CA's water resources.
It's going to be very tough on lots of people all over CA if it holds out this way. No doubt about it. But the State and people of CA do not take most of the water to water the lawn and assume food appears in the market magically.

who need it. I don't think most of us could survive without our wonderful California Produce and Wine. In fact...we would be devastated because there are Organic Farms there, too!

So let's GET TO IT! Why couldn't this work? I'd be happy to send my Southeast Rainwater to California so that I could get the Produce that I want to consume and keep those farms and wineries in Business! California is our largest producer of the fresh veggies that I and others depend on that we still have some idea what they are sprayed with.....

Post # 42 on this Thread...

who need it. I don't think most of us could survive without our wonderful California Produce and Wine.

So let's GET TO IT!

The crops are completely ruined according to my farmer FIL. Looks like it'll be high prices for corn and soybeans for those who manage to get a crop harvested let alone started.

on Spring weather conditions, for sure. Especially in the upper Midwest, where the season is relatively short in the first place. Any delays in planting or flooded farmlands after planting can wreak havoc on those crops. It doesn't look good right now for Southern MN.

the soybeans can be replanted. The corn can be replanted and harvested as silage. I would like to see arial photos. I grew up down there and know there is a lot of high ground so not all of the crops have been lost to flooding. There was a lot of hail damage too.

Weather here in Pennsylvania has been a bit warm, and a bit wet (those weather systems of yours eventually drift eastward), but nothing extreme....yet.

nobody is paying $100+ a barrel for it at the other end of the pipeline, so there's no financial drive to build one.

without both interstate, interprovincial and international permission.



About 2/3 of Minnesota's surface water is within the Mississippi basin...including the water around Minneapolis-St Paul.

The US has control of that drainage and can do what it wants. Personally, I think it'd be an economic mistake of enormous proportions for the future of MN (or any other upper Midwestern state) to pipe it's surface water to the SW.

The water is owned by ALL the States surrounding them AND Canada. It was renewed by Shrub.

Pumping large volumes of water requires enormous energy inputs. It would make more sense to build desalination plants where needed.