River Flood Threat

If it isn't one thing, it's another. As I have discussed in earlier articles, northern central Florida has had a problem in recent years with very dry weather and resulting widespread forest fires. This year, it looked for a while as if this would happen again. And it still might, but right now we're experiencing a hazard on the opposite end: the Santa Fe and Suwannee Rivers are rising to flood state, due to recent storms and torrential rains. And more rain is expected.

Although, from this I could conclude that our environment is "out of whack", it could simply be a case of what's really the norm for our area: alternating periods of flooding with dry spells and their concomitant fires. That this doesn't seamlessly fit in with the agendas of humans and human society doesn't necessarily mean that, environmentally speaking, this is such a bad thing. But it still is distressing.

I suppose that this sort of thing occurs just about any place that people set foot on and decide to stay a while. They may at first like the weather, but that's never the same. I remember the ending of Mosquito Coast (starring Harrison Ford and River Phoenix), when the fanatical father (played by Ford) decides that his family will live on an apparently idyllic-looking stretch of tropical beach. Only problem was that heavy storms, typical for that area, came in during the night and wiped out their new home, nearly wiping them out in the process.

I don't think there's any place on Earth immune from some sort of natural hazard or another. The temptation would be to assign a general cause for environmental disasters (air pollution, ozone layer depletion, acid rain, global warming). And sometimes this may be true. But sometimes "bad" things happen as a normality, not as an aberration.