Anchor Struck

I hope that we’ll all soon look back on the unprecedented water cutbacks just announced by California Governor Jerry Brown as the wake-up call for the climate change crisis that clowns like Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma try to dismiss by presenting a snowball in Congress in February.  Inhofe’s willful — nay, blissful — ignorance is understandable because he’s in the back pocket of Big Oil, but it gets more inexcusable with every new report about accelerating global warming.

We’re even sweating it here in the Pacific Northwest.  Our community had a scare in March.  It’s one of our rainier months, the rainiest before it starts tapering off until mid-September.  After a nice 17.8 mm (about 2/3rds of an inch) March 1st, we went 17 days without a drop or a flake of snow.  Our neighbour Paul, a forester, was worried about a particularly dry fire season.  Jude and I were worried that we might lose the water level we need in the creek to feed our micro-hydro system, months before we usually do in July.

Fortunately, it rained copiously the rest of the month, leaving us with nearly nine inches, close to our average the nine years we’ve been keeping records here.  Today we’ve had 42 mm of the wet stuff so far.

When we get a lot of rain in a short time, the peninsula that juts out into the pond our creek feeds is briefly inundated. Here it is a few days ago:

Here it is a rainless day later:

And here another rainless day later, back to its normal flow:

We’ll be watching the peninsula the rest of our lives, hoping for its regular disappearances.