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@Amos_Umwhat said:
Recent events reminded me of something that happened long ago. My H.S. girlfriend and I used to go out to the Lampasas River in Central TX and go skinny dipping in a deep pocket in the river. One day, we were out there after school, and the river suddenly rose by about 4 feet in about 5 minutes. Her clothes were swept away, I managed to throw my shorts and T-shirt and our wallets and car keys to shore and we climbed the bank and watched in awe as the water rose. Nice sunny day, we were dumbfounded.

I gave her my T-shirt to wear, put on my shorts, and we drove back to her house. All the way there I was really hoping that her Dad wasn't home. Good luck, he wasn't. Whew! I was imagining having my butt kicked while wearing nothing but cut-off shorts.

Richard Nixon was President at the time. It never occurred to us to blame him. Missed opportunity, I guess.

Yeah, these sort of things amaze me. Floods, hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes…they’ve all been happening since the beginning of time. They also tend to happen in the same general areas over and over. In the case of water, it has to go somewhere. It’s going to go somewhere. Rivers and canyons and such have been naturally carved out because water had a direction to go. People want someone to blame but the one thing they don’t want to blame is “progress”. The more concrete put on the ground, the less room there is for water to soak into the ground and be channeled where it naturally wants to go. Things get built on natural flood planes and direct water towards something or someone else. “Unprecedented damage” numbers are so large because there’s more and more being put in the way to get destroyed.
Water is gonna go whether people want it to or not. Like with most things, it’s society and so-called progress that are the problem.

I'm back, baby! Now with home grown beefsteak tomatoes.