Wacko Who Said Floods Are God's Punishment For Gays Is Flooded Out Of His House. TG

Tony Perkins took this photo of his badly flooded
Louisiana home as he and his family escaped.
In the past, Perkins has agreed with those who said big
floods were God's wrath because gay people exist. 

I found it odd that, unlike in every previous horrible weather disaster, I didn't hear from the extreme religious wackos that the huge Louisiana flood happened because God is annoyed gay people exist.

One possible explanation for the lack of damnation talk with the flood is that one of many people whose houses was trashed by the Louisiana flood is a guy named Tony Perkins,

Perkins is President of the Family Research Council, a notoriously anti-gay conservative activist group.

While Perkins has never been the leading voice of the "God created this disaster because he hates gays" he at least agrees with the sentiment. According to Snopes, he was interviewing Paster Jonathan Cahn last October after a storm caused terrible flooding in South Carolina.

Cahn said the flood was God's anger that the United States legalized gay marriage, and Perkins agreed that God was trying to send a message.

(What was left unexplained that if God hated gay marriage so much, why did He unleash the flood on South Carolina, one of the most conservative places in the nation.)

I confess I'm a bit guilty of schadenfreude, though I really am not that pleased that Perkins' house was wrecked. Like all flood victims in Louisiana, he needs our support.

Still, I find it interesting that Perkins didn't say anything about God's anger. He called the disaster a flood of near biblical proportions, which is true, and said this was an opportunity for Christians to help others in need, which of course is a refreshingly good thing for Perkins to say.

I also noticed the home page of the Family Research Council web site has a large block asking people to donate toward Louisiana flood relief.

Perkins, his wife and five children escaped from their flooded house via a large canoe. An RV on their property was undamaged, so they will stay in that until their home is repaired.

And no, I definitely don't think God is punishming Perkins for being so virulently homophobic.

Horrible Person Left Dog To Die In Texas Flood, Thankfully Somebody Noticed

This dog was left to drown in a Texas flood, chained
to a porch as the water rose. A television news crew
and volunteers rescued her  

As noted in my sister blog, Matt's Weather Rapport, Texas had a really bad flood recently.

In one of the worst videos, but with one with a very happy ending, rescuers and a television news crews came upon a dog tied to a house in neck deep flood water, barely holding its head above water.

Television station KPRC reporter Phil Archer and a volunteer, Jeff Shimek jumped into the water, untied the dog from the porcj before the water rose high enough to drown the dog, and put the dog, named Archer, in their boat.  

"They chained him to the front of the fucking house,?" one of the men in the boat says when they encountered the dog.

Yep, they did.  You can see it all in the video at the bottom of this post. Poor Archer looks terrified, but that seemed mixed with gratitude when the rescuers put the dog in their boat.

The reporters and flood volunteers turned Archer over to the Houston Humane Society.

Humane Society spokeswoman Monica Schmidt said a ring around Archer's neck meant that she was chained outside for some time, Reuters reported.

A number of people have expressed interest in adopting Archer.

"She's a fantastic dog and deserves so much better than what she had," Schmidt said, according to Reuters.

The local sheriff is not happy with the people who left the dog chained in the water, either. If the find the people that left Archer behind, they might be charged with animal cruelty.

"This is infuriating," Sheriff Nevis wrote on his public Facebook page. "These residents will get a visit from me when they return."

Here's the video:

Who Knew You Could Drive A Lamborghini Underwater?

A Lamborghini driver in San Diego couldn't
resist plowing through a badly flooded
intersection this week. 

As heavy rain flooded San Diego streets this week, inundating cars and businesses, the driver of a $200,000 Lamborghini decided not to worry about the flooding at all.

I guess the person was rich enough to decide that if $200,000 floated away, so what.

As you'll see in the video below, the Lamborghini Gallardo miraculously makes it through the water, despite the fact it was mostly under water at times.

Apparently, the air intakes of the Lamborghini are positioned pretty high up, which prevented a stall. Cars that stall in water do so because water gets into the air intakes, causing something called hydrolocking. Hydrolocking usually means you completely destroyed your car engine.

Which is one of many reasons why it's a really, really bad idea to drive through flooded roads.

I don't think this was very good for the car, but what the hell. And don't try this at home!

Watch:

Taking A Ride In a Mudslide, And A Tornadic Pikes Peak. Weather Drama in Colorado

I drove through lots of flash flooding here in Vermont over the past month and a half, but luckily did not drive in deep water, or accidentally encounter water that was too deep.

Or if I did encounter flooding that looked unsafe, I turned around and found another way to get where I was going.

This is a view of a car being swept away by a Colorado
mudslide. Watch video below to see what it looked
like from inside the car.  

Out in Colorado, though, the flash flood water came up way too fast for a guy in his car to get out of the way.

It was on a mountain road, near the site of a really bad forest fire last year.

When it rained, it swept all kinds of mud and black debris from the fire onto the road. That's why the flowing water you will see in the video is black.

This guy somehow managed to somewhat calmly narrate from inside the car as the black flash flood sweeps him along.

It ended OK, though. His car's trashed, but he's fine. Watch:



Meanwhile, way up above 14,000 feet at Pike's Peak. Colorado, you'd think you'd be out of Tornado Alley. You'd be wrong, judging from the video by LaRae Gallant shot this weekend.



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Scenes From A Vermont Flood

For more than a month now, torrents of rain have been pouring onto Vermont. There's been repeated, damaging floods.

The storm clouds roll in at around 1 p.m. on
the Fourth of July

Even those that have not experienced any flood damage are suffering. Crops are drowning. Mosquitoes are thriving. People are sick of being wet.

On the Fourth of July, one of the worst storms yet in this episode of rainy weather swept into northern Vermont, and we had another, yes, another flash flood. It's getting old. The photos in this post are scenes from this Vermont flood.

The heavy rain quickly overwhelms roads, in this case, i
in Jericho, Vermont.  

 This four foot deep swimming
pool in Richmond, Vermont
was overwhelmed by
flooding.

Residents of Jericho try to
control the effects of flowing
water and mudslides  

This road in Jericho is closed for
a long time.

After doing their damage, the
thunderstorms depart, glowing in
the Fourth of July sunset.  

Incredible Video of Flood Surging Into College

Here's quite a surveillance video of a flash flood sweeping through Carl Sandburg College in Illinois this week.

The water builds and builds outside the office until it's too much for the doors to handle, and in the water comes. What a mess.

There's been nasty flooding everywhere, so it's not surprising there's destruction everywhere.

One thing that impresses me about this video is how long the lights and the computers stay on, despite the white water surging into the building.

Vermont Sadness A Year After Irene

It's been a year since Hurricane Irene trashed Vermont. In just a day, hundreds of homes drowned in floods that came on so suddenly that some people didn't have time to flee. Businesses drowned, or simply washed away that Sunday.

This mobile home near Saxtons River, Vt.
lies in ruins in August, 2012, a year after Irene.

Big chunks of Vermont's road network fragmented into short stretches of pavement interspersed with yawning canyons where culverts and bridges had been the day before.

At least five Vermonters died in Irene's onslaught on August 28, 2011. Perhaps only the Great Flood of 1927 was a worse disaster for the Green Mountain State.

The post-Irene cleanup went fast. Armies of volunteers swarmed swamped neighborhoods, doing their best to put the pieces back together. The state's road crews fixed the roads in a flash. Most were paved and smooth by the fall foliage tourism season, which came only a little over a month after Irene.

Now, if you drive through the towns hit hardest by Irene, you could almost believe the disaster never happened.

A sad sign on a flood damaged house near Plymouth, Vermont
in a photo taken about a year after Hurricane Irene
wrecked the home.

What were mud caked streets last August are tidy lanes, with perfect flowers in perfect planters on perfect sidewalks in front of perfect gift shops which greet, well, imperfect but still very welcomed tourists.

Restaurants are open and look like they're thriving. Houses have been repaired. Fresh white paint gleams on clapboards. Homeowners have long since finished cleaning muck from the basement and gutting soggy rooms. They are now busy tending neatly trimmed lawns and foisting bumper crops of zucchini from their gardens onto their neighbors.

Except.

This sign was still up at a wrecked farmstand
near Plymouth, Vermont in August, 2012, nearly
a year after Irene.

It's jarring when you turn a corner and see it. The wreckage of the epic flood. It's still there in spots.  A sagging tilted houses amid a sea of gravel, left just as they were the minute the water receded after the rains of August 28, 2011 ended. Twisted metal knotted around dead trees, representing what was once somebody's mobile home. A shed deposited upside down in the middle of a field.

These scenes are even more jarring than they were right after the storm because they seem so out of place amid the newly repaired villages and streets.

You wonder why the wreckage is still there.

And you know, as anyone opening the pages of Vermont's Burlington Free Press this morning can attest, the disaster continues. 

In Stockbridge, an old farmhouse still lies tilted and warped in a ditch where the rushing waters of Irene deposited it. The house became a widely photographed iconic image of Vermont's Irene disaster. The roofline of the house remains perfectly even. The shades in the unbroken second floor windows are closed, as if the occupant in the house has decided to take an afternoon nap. But the bottom of the house is bowed out,, and the whole structure tilts precariously, as if trying to outdo the Tower of Pisa.

This house in Stockbridge, Vermont, became an
iconic image after the Hurricane Irene disaster
last year. This photo was taken two weeks ago, nearly
a year after Irene.

Poignant signs are still attached to some wrecked properties. "Please keep out. Irene already robbed us" is spray painted on a boarded up house window near Plymouth, Vermont. The scrawl hints at creepy opportunists who used a person's tragedy to steal from them and just make things worse.

Another sign invited people to take pictures of the wreckage. Maybe that would help them gain attention, and maybe help the rebuild. A year after the storm, they so far haven't rebuilt.

Another hurricane is bearing down on the United States as I write this. New Orleans, again. It's seven years since Katrina wrecked New Orleans and they still haven't fully recovered.

Nobody deserves a disaster, to lose their homes, their livlihood, their sense of place. Let's hope that if it happens, nobody stays in limbo for a long time afterwards, like victims of Katrina, or a few unlucky people in Vermont who were blindsided by an ugly rainstorm named Irene.

Wild Storm Chase, Burlington, Vermont, 7/4/12

The Fourth of July in Vermont had some fireworks that no pyrotechnic company could beat.

Incredibly intense thunderstorms roared down from southern Canada, and as alwasy, I set about storm chasing as the weather developed.  I always have to collect more weather porn, don't you know.  And belatedly on the Fourth, I got some real money shots from the weather.

Burlington Free Press phototgrapher Glenn Russell
documents flooding in downtown Burlington
after a wild July 4 storm.

At midafternoon, one complex of storms formed just north of the Canadian border, a little above northwestern Vermont. It appeared the storms were heading right toward my St. Albans, Vermont house, so all I had to do is sit and wait with my camera and intercept them.

Nope. They storms veered to the east, despite the dire severe storm warnings for St. Albans. I couldn't catch up with the storms as they headed toward Danville, Vermont, in the northeastern part of the state.

I had to give up the chase.

The area around famed Joe's Pond in Danville was hammered with fallen trees, overturned boats and lots of damage.

I thought I missed all the storms, until I saw on radar that another complex formed northwest of Montreal.

I wondered it the storm would hold together, and boy did it ever. It formed a "bow echo" on radar a backward "C' shape that portended trouble.

Flooding on South Union Street in Burlington after
a very severe thunderstorm on July 4. 

This one kept further west than I thought.  As I raced south to intercept it as I saw going by to my west, the storm raced south over Lake Champlain, finally making a beeline toward Burlington, Vermont.

Burlington got hammered with 60 to 70 mph wind gusts that knocked down lots of trees. Even worse was the incredible amount of rain that fell in a short period of time. Lots of streets flooded, as did cars, business and homes.

Sadly, a building that takes in homeless people during the day for meals and help got trashed by the flooding, according to the Burlington Free Press. 

Here's the film of the storm I took on Burlington's Riverside Avenue. This wasn't taken through a fogged up window. The visibility was really that bad, it was raining so hard:

Sad Hurricane Irene Debris Still Litters Vermont

Tuesday, I covered a Vermont governor's press conference for the Burlington Free Press on a showery day next to an area of scrubby sumac trees littered with dozens of tires, pieces of houses and scraps of rotting furniture.

Somehow, the glass on this door didn't break as Tropical
Storm Irene flooding swept this door away last August.

The Governor, Peter Shumlin was announcing a change this year to Vermont's annual rite of spring, Green-Up Day. Green-Up Day, established in 1970, hits the first Saturday in May each year. Thousands of volunteers go out and clean up road side litter that accumulated over the winter. It's really a nice event.

This year, Shumlin noted that while the debris from the devastating floods of Tropical Storm Irene have been removed from the streets of Vermont's scenic towns and villages, there's still a big mess hidden along the river banks and back behind the neighborhoods that were wrecked last August in what was easily Vermont's worst flood since 1927.

So, the governor said Green Up Day would last all spring, and be called Spring Clean Irene. We will still all go out the first Saturday in May to clean up the road sides, but volunteers will also fan out to help clean the debris marring the scenery, a legacy of last August's floods.

There's a nice Web site, Vermont Strong, which matches needs with volunteers and everybody is urged to go there and see what they can do to help.

This tire got hung up in trees during Vermont's Hurricane
Irene flooding last August.

It's all a great idea, and I hope there are a lot of volunteers. The press conference, even with a $25,000 donation from the guy who runs Subaru of New England, was sad, however.

Sad, because I wandered through the underbrush, photographing the pieces of people's lives that floated away in Tropical Storm Irene last August.  Much of the debris consisted of tires from a nearby washed out junkyard. But I'd find a television, childrens' toys, a Christmas decoration, a child's swing, an easy chair.

It was dark and drizzly as I took the photos, some of which you can see in this post, adding to the gloomy tableau. I just hoped that everyone affected by the flood is recovering as best they can.

A Christmas decoration swept away in Tropical Storm
Irene flooding in Vermont last August. 

An easy chair in the woods in Waterbury, Vermont, swept
there by Tropical Storm Irene flooding last August

A child's swing amid the Tropical Storm Irene flood
debris in Waterbury Vermont this week. 

A television amid the flood debris from last August's
Tropical Store Irene, photographed Tuesday in
Waterbury, Vermont

Vermont Irene Disaster Hurts Us All

I haven't posted on this blog for a couple of days because like everybody else in Vermont, I've been dealing with what is perhaps the worst disaster the Green Mountain State has ever seen.

Four people have died, buildings and houses have washed away, hundreds of roads are closed, a few of our iconic covered bridges that had been there for over 150 years were swept away, and towns are isolated.

I'm suffering from a bit of survivor's guilt. I was extremely lucky. Property damage at my house in St. Albans, Vermont consists of a few fallen branches.

The Winooski River roars past Winooski,
Vermont Monday. 

I work as a reporter at the Burlington Free Press, so I've been talking to lots of people who lived the worst of the flood.  Vermonters, me included, are proud and parochial about our state. It's corny as hell to say, but we love our beautiful villages, farms, small shops and rivers.

Some of that is in ruins. There's a video floating around YouTube of a covered bridge in Rockingham,  Vermont collapsing in the flood. Everyone who has seen it said it brought them to tears.

The power of the water, and where it went astounds everybody. I'll never get over it. There was white water on Main Street in Brandon, Vermont that pushed a pizza restaurant 25 feet downriver. In Wardsboro, four houses disappeared. They found a roof in the middle on Route 100 in Wilmington. Nobody knows where it came from.

Many of the towns hit hardest by the flooding were some of Vermont's prettiest. Grafton. Wilmington. Weston.

Some of my favorite places in Vermont are wrecked. The Weston Playhouse. The Alchemist, a brew pub in Waterbury that had the best beer in the state. (They hope to rebuild) My favorite swimming hole in the Mad River was surely hit. I wonder what that looks like.

Below is a video I shot of the torrent rushing past Winooski, Vermont yesterday.


But my mild anxiety pales in comparison to everybody else. I know a lot of people who suddenly have no house. Or no job. No prospects. What are they going to do? Nobody knows, and that's what really gnaws.

That's the refrain I keep hearing. Nobody knows. When will the road out of town reopen? Nobody knows. When will the electricity come back on? Nobody knows. The weather has been weird. Will we get a storm like this again in the coming years? Nobody knows. And that's the scariest unknown.

As always, Vermonters are turning out in droves to help out their flooded neighbors. There's no shortage of good ideas to help. On radio call in shows yesterday people suggested we raid our undamaged gardens and take the harvest to emergency shelters.  A couple of women in Waitsfield set up a table yesterday to solicit volunteers to help business owners start cleaning up. In less than an hour, the pair had 30 people helping out.

We help each other here in Vermont.  At this point, that's about all we've got. And that just might be enough.