Posted on 12/23/2019 8:22:17 AM PST by Olog-hai
Patricia Kambach couldnt bear to watch a crew demolish her longtime neighbors home this month, so she went inside her own house in Woodbridge, New Jersey, where she has lived since John F. Kennedy was president.
I lived here 56 years, and its hard, said Kambach.
Hard but not rare. The state has bought and torn down 145 homes since 2013 in Woodbridge, with eight homes demolished this month alone. Dozens more are slated to be torn down in the near future.
Its all part of an effort to get ahead of climate change. Some neighborhoods in this town of over 100,000 residents just off the bustling New Jersey Turnpike are projected to be partly or fully underwater in coming decades as global sea levels rise. [ ]
The goal of the state buyout program, Blue Acres, is twofold: To remove people and property from the danger of future floods, and to use the vacant land left behind as a buffer or sponge to help absorb the water from those floods.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
These people in question in my area are illegal aliens; they can’t buy & register cars anyway, but if they were legalized they still wouldn’t be able to afford the costs.
I assume the weather in your area is much better suited to bicycling; ours isn’t so much. Few people use convertibles or motorcycles as their primary transportation.
The town I live in , on the coast, south of Boston, has had many existing houses raised up 8-12 feet, an set atop pilings , directly facing the Ocean.
I talked to one of those residents who live there year round , and asked him this.
Your house might survive the breaking seas , but you cannot protect your car from flooding, so what do you do?
His answer was : That"s easy.
I take the car with me when I go to a motel to ride the storm out. - tom
North Florida here. I rode MCs exclusively for thirty+years including going across Wyoming mostly at night at -10. You just gotta dress right.
It isn’t the temperature that is a problem here - it is the moisture (stability of the bike). There is some form of precipitation at least a day or two each week, all year.
It was snowing in Wyoming that night, not hard but definitely snowing.
I couldn’t imagine handling a bike in snow; I don’t ride at all anyway. I do remember going on vacation in upstate NY when we were younger, and if it rained on the Thruway or Northway you’d see all the bikers sitting on the side of the road under the overpasses...
Meanwhile Obama in his $11 million oceanfront mansion laughs at these people.
“In actuality, the state is buying up houses that are not on the coast and never should have been built in known flood zones that have been flooding since rain was invented.”
That sounds like the buyout in Wayne NJ - and nobody ever mentioned “global warming” or “climate change” when it started decades ago. They knew it was because the homes should never have been built there - it is all freshwater flooding (as salt water can’t get north of the Paterson Falls anyway).
I had complete rain gear. I did sleep under an overpass or two, though.
When I was commuting once a week from Panama City Fl to Jacksonville sometimes there would be torrential rain. I would get behind a semi just close enough I could see the tail lights and we would be going at 75 or so. All the other traffic was off the road. I let the semi’s tail lights tell me if there was another vehicle ahead.
I just don’t know how the bikes handle in the rain/on wet pavement.
Wear good tires. I’ve gone down a few but never in the snow or rain.
Didn’t know that made a difference; I learned something new!
The water’s edge in Hoboken and the tail-south end of Manhattan are nearly at Sea Level (by just a few feet).
River floods don’t begin at the mouth of the river where it meets a large body of water, like an ocean or lake. The Hudson River enters New York Bay which is connected to the Atalantic Ocean. When the Hudson Floods it does not begin at that point. It begins up stream, and then the collective additional rain and run off from the land at each point adds to waters already in the river.
And the Hudson River is only so wide. The water has to go somewhere.
Ah, but then they “brilliantly” started filling in the Hudson River on the Manhattan Side (WTC & Battery Park City), displacing tons of water, and the river’s space for that water. They also filled in more land on the lower east side of Manhattan, displacing waters of the east river and narrowing it’s channel between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Then they finally got one of the rare but not unnatural storms that brought down in a short time a lot more water than storms usually do. And lower Manhattan flooded - surprise, surprise.
On the Jersey side they got rid of acres of swampy green space, building the sports complex right where wet lands used to help shelter places along the Hackensak River like Little Ferry. Surprise, surprise when Sandy hit and Little Ferry was flooded maybe worse than before.
My question is how do we make PUBLIC officials pay for the consequences of THEIR actions.
Someone! Quick!
Let Mitt Romney, Al Gore, and Barack Obama know about this!
They have all built or bought YUGE oceanfront mansions in the past few years! They probably don't KNOW about the Climate Crisis!
Oh, please! Get them the news before it's too late!
Everybody understood why the flooding occurred; there is a reason there is little to no housing in the Meadowlands. In the 1950s a storm broke through the dike holding the Hackensack River from the actual “meadows” (which were grass fields with trees); you can still see many sections of the dike wall from the county park in Secaucus, and at low tide you can still see the tree stumps poking out of the mudflats. Before that, they really were “meadows” instead of a swamp.
My town built a Wal-Mart in the swamp; I’m glad they did. We got to use bad land, and it isn’t in a residential neighborhood.
You are right, I should not have implied all the meadowlands were swampy, much of it was not.
But, yes, as you say, it was green space, and when great storms flooded the Hackensack the waters had somewhere to go besides peoples houses and businesses. Take that green space and any sort of natural flood plain away and you occupy it at your own risk. Also, letting others you don’t care about to occupy it at their own risk, does not change the natural fact that the surrounding area also needs it as green land, not parking lots with all their non-abosorbtion and run off.
A great benevolent dictator (LOL) would have made the meadowlands, all of it if not more, a NJ state park, maybe the largest in the state. “Development” would have happened, elsewhere yes, but the public service value of the park would have been recognized in the worst storms after the park was created.
A lot of the towns bordering the Meadowlands exactly as that - parkland, with playing fields and such (and playgrounds on the higher ground). The sports complex wasn’t a bad idea to get some income from what otherwise would be useless land; it still leaves plenty for wildlife.
A few years ago I read in the local paper that they still issue a small number of trapping licenses there (for muskrats); the pelts used to be very valuable.
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