Jeff's Lunchbreak

During this recent flood scare, one issue I had was finding good sources of information. There was no single location that linked to all the good resources - I had to find them piecemeal. So, in the event that there's another flood in the future, I want to have one location with all these resources so I don't have to go searching for them again, and so that other people can easily find them. Below is a list of the resources that I found most useful.

• National Weather Service - Wichita River Current Level & Forecast This site provides a graph showing the current river level, updated every hour. It also includes a forecast, updated every 8 hours. The forecast is a single curve showing the most likely scenario.

• National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office - Norman Oklahoma
  This site will only put up a link for the river forecast when there's an emergency, but it shows a range of forecasts with the likelihood of each level. In other words, it's doesn't just show the most likely scenario like the previous link, but also shows the worst case scenario.

• National Weather Service - Watches, Warnings or Advisories for Wichita (TXC485) Texas
  Official warnings from the National Weather Service. These are text only warnings.

• Wichita Falls Flood Maps
  These are the areas that were flooded in the 2007 flood - the highest on record at 24.4 ft.

• Flood Inundation Prediction Map - Worst Case Scenario
  This was the worst case scenario predicted for 2015, showing all the areas that would be flooded if the river reached 28 ft. Recall that the highest on record was 24.4 ft.

• Official City of Wichita Falls Facebook Page
  The city posts most of their online announcements here, including evacuation notices, press releases, and links to information.

• Official City of Wichita Falls Website
  This site has some information, but doesn't stay as current as the Facebook page.

• Texoma's Homepage - Text Alert Signup
  KFDX News will text you headlines and links for Breaking News stories. These texts are year round for all breaking news, not just flooding.

• Nixel Signup
  This is a service that you sign up for that will text you important notices from the city. These updates are year round for various issues, not just flooding.
  

Posted by Jeff on A, May 29 | Permalink | Comments (41) | TrackBacks (0)

The drought in Wichita Falls is over. I'd mentioned the drought on this blog twice before, in 2011 and 2013. This was the worst drought on record for the region. Our reservoirs had dropped down below 25% capacity, and it had even gotten so bad that the city was recycling treated sewer water directly back into the drinking supply (more info: NPR - Drought-Stricken Texas Town Turns To Toilets For Water).

But since weather here seems to always be a case of extremes, the drought went out with a bang, with the wettest month on record for the city, and 'Moderate' flooding that forced evacuations of a few neighborhoods and actually did flood a few houses. We did dodge a bullet, though. The original forecast for Saturday was another big storm that would have dumped a lot more water into our watershed, and would have probably caused a 'Major' flood, exceeding the record high we had back in 2007 (which I also blogged about). Luckily for us, that storm bypassed Wichita Falls, so our flood wasn't near as bad as it could have been.

But you could read about the flood anywhere. The thing that made me want to write this blog post was a small little event in our backyard. Since the last flood, we'd built a deck over the pond in the back. And as the water came up this time, a bunch of spiders and other creepy crawlies got trapped on the deck with nowhere to go, so I took a few photos and a short video. Here's a picture of two spiders facing off to see who gets to keep the high ground (the bigger spider to the right won the face off).

And here's a video showing all the critters on the last high spot on the deck, a corner that was just a bit higher than the rest of the deck (I'm not too ashamed at my workmanship - it was only about 3/4" higher than the lowest corner).

But, me being the softy that I am, I couldn't just leave all those spiders to drown. Granted, it looked like they could swim decently, but since most spiders don't have good vision, and I saw a few heading off into deeper water, I wasn't sure how many of them would actually make it to shore. So I went and found a board long enough to make them a little bridge, and laid it across the water for them. It didn't take but a few seconds before the first spider had found the bridge and made its way over, and a lot of other spiders weren't too far behind. I only got a couple pictures of the bridge. Neither was great, and I probably could have gotten some better ones had I taken more, but right after I took those pictures is about the time it dawned on me that all those rescued spiders were now crawling around my bare feet, and I wasn't sure what type of gratitude they'd display.

Anyway, here's the first picture. You can see one spider fairly clearly on the side of the board close to shore, and a couple out of focus spiders on the board farther out in the water.

And here's the second picture, looking out towards the end of the bridge. You can see that the high spot's almost covered. There are two almost in focus spiders about halfway across, and a third out of focus just starting the crossing.

There was actually one more spot on the deck where I set up a bridge to rescue spiders, but the picture I took of that was no better than the pictures above, so there's no reason to post it. On the little actual bridge that connects the deck to the shore, there were a few weeds and grass sticking out above the water, and the spiders had a whole series of web bridges along those plants. I set up a board that just touched the plants, giving those spiders a thoroughfare to dry land.

All in all, the weekend turned out about as well as could have been hoped for, at least considering the forecast on Saturday morning. The rain filled up our nearly empty reservoirs, and the flood wasn't close to as bad as it could have been. And I managed to save a few little critters.

Posted by Jeff on A, May 26 | Permalink | Comments (42) | TrackBacks (0)

With April behind me, it's time again to take a look at the server logs and make the list of the most popular pages on this site. There were no newcomers this time. Every page on the list had made it previously. I was happy to see one blog entry, 22 Responses to 22 Creationist Misconceptions, make the list again. The previous month was the first time it had ever made it, and I do rather like that entry.

Overall traffic in line with what it's been for a while now.

Anyway, here's the list for last month.

Top 10 for April 2015

1. A Skeptical Look at MBT Shoes
2. Origin of Arabic Numerals - Was It Really for Counting Angles?
3. Autogyro History & Theory
4. Creationist Dishonesty and a Follow Up to Previous Entries
5. Aviation Books
6. Email Debunking - 1895 8th Grade Final Exam
7. Blog - Friday Bible Blogging - Joshua 1 to Joshua 10
8. Golden Compass - A Surprise at the Bookstore
9. Response to an Editorial by Ken Huber
10. 22 Responses to 22 Creationist Misconceptions

Posted by Jeff on A, May 15 | Permalink | Comments (41) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a trifecta of bad luck traveling back from a conference yesterday (at least they were all minor instances of bad luck, and nothing horrible).

First, the flight was full, so I had to check my carry on bag instead of putting it in the overhead bin. It wouldn't have been a huge deal, but my flight wasn't scheduled to get into DFW airport until 10:00 pm, and I had a 2 hour drive to get back to Wichita Falls. I was hoping for as few delays as possible to getting on the road.

Second, once our plane was getting close to DFW, we had to go into a holding pattern. There had been a lot of thunderstorms in the area, shutting down the airport for a time, so there were a lot of delayed planes trying to make it in, and we were at the end of the line. Eventually the plane landed, when the flight attendant came on over the speaker system and said that it looked an awful lot like Houston out there. I think most people thought he was joking about the hazy weather, but I jumped right on my phone to pull up the maps, and sure enough, we were in Houston. Eventually the pilots came on to explain the situation - we'd been in the holding pattern too long and ran low on fuel. We had to divert to Houston to refuel, and to wait on the situation in DFW for the pilots to decide what to do. After an hour or so sitting in Houston, they refueled the plane and we flew on to Dallas.

After waiting longer than I wanted to at the baggage claim, I got my suit case and went off to the parking garage to get into my car, when this happened. I'd noticed a lot of traffic on the way to my car, but I chalked it up to all the construction going on at that terminal, and was even thinking to myself that I was glad the exit from the garage would bypass most of that traffic. I had no idea that the one road leading out of the terminal was flooded under two feet of water. Traffic was backed up all the way into the parking garage, and I think I sat for nearly an hour just in the garage before the water receded enough to where cars could start making their way through. After that, it was probably another good 20 minutes feeding into the main road to get out, and I didn't actually leave the airport till around 3:00 am. By the time I got to where the flooding had been the worst, it looked just about like this:

Luckily for me, I have family down in the area, so I crashed at my brother-in-law's place (brother's-in-law?), and drove back this morning in daylight. It was a bit more eventful of a trip than I'd have liked, but in the big picture, I suppose it wasn't really all that bad. Even with the delays, it took less time than it would have taken to drive it.

Horseshoe Image Source: Wikimedia Commons, edited by me

Posted by Jeff on A, May 8 | Permalink | Comments (41) | TrackBacks (0)