Home of Strategic Command and Some of the USAF's Most Prized Aircraft Flooded | Hacker News Reader

Home of Strategic Command and Some of the USAF's Most Prized Aircraft Flooded

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I've noticed an almost complete lack of coverage of the flooding in Iowa and Nebraska - I have a lot of family there and the amount of damage has been astounding[1]. Nebraska has more miles of rivers than any state in the US, and many of them are flooding or close to it. It's a complete disaster there.

[1]https://weather.com/news/news/2019-03-17-flooding-before-and...

from nebraska. can confirm. entire towns have been evacuated due to flooding. only way to get around some of them currently is via airboat.

Its not on the coast or in Chicago or Denver, so it really will only get regional coverage. The book about fark.com "It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News" has a section illustrating this with a crane collapse in Manhattan and then one in St. Louis.

A few years back with that winter storm hit South Dakota and killed a lot of cattle (the cattle were mostly in the summer fields and the weather actually went from freezing rain to blizzard), it wasn't really reported and people wondered what the heck was going on with steak prices. I sometimes wish there was a "trend news" website that reported supply to consumer news.

There was a front page story about it in the New York Times last week (in fact there is still a story on the home page below the fold about it [0]) but it got bumped for coverage of the attack in NZ

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/us/flood-facts.html?actio...

I didn't have to dig far in the Boston Globe to find an article about it. It's third in the Nation and World section.

Just to give my experience: I'm from Nebraska, and was back there this past week. When I arrived home (in Lincoln), there was still 4-6 inches of snow on the ground, following the snowiest winter they've had in decades. It turned about 60 degrees on a rainy day and all that snow melted, but the ground was still frozen and had nowhere to go. We didn't have bad flooding in my area, but my parents yard was ankle deep in water for about 24 hours. The interstates were closed, and I got detoured twice driving out. It really is something.

I just heard about the flooding yesterday. Sometimes I don’t get the news. I’ll see wall-to-wall coverage on some inane thing, but only learn about huge, destructive flooding from random people I follow on Twitter.

Maybe we’re just sleeping in the bed we made, but how do we get out of it?

Well, some people think that we can't, the only thing left to do is to brace for impact.

The one getting most media visibility recently is Jem Bendell's "deep adaptation". This is not a new invention though. It was preceded by various resilient communities/resilient cities approaches, post-societal crash prepper books and prepper forums in general, and so on.

Wow. Why have this much critical infrastructure near flood zones? Given that climate change is increasing the frequency of major floods, why hadn’t they hardened their protections?

Airfields tend to be easier to build on flat, level ground. Strategic reconnaissance and airborne command aircraft make sense to base in a geographically central location so they can easily cover the entire continent.

From the omaha.com article on the subject it seems like there was a desire from Offett and an intent to put in greater flood-resistance infrastructure but it was stonewalled by questions about whether it was needed. So i guess the answer is in the realm of "some people knew and planned, but others tried to disregard both warnings and previous near-disaster floods."

https://www.omaha.com/news/military/one-third-of-offutt-unde...

Sounds like what’s happening at a larger scale =(

I’d imagine that the location was seen as useful during the Cold War years due to being far inland in a rural area away from likely targets of a nuclear attack.

As for flood mitigation, I’m sure it’s the same as it is anywhere: risk assessments probably considered the likelihood of ‘really bad’ flooding, and the potential impacts, too low to be worth the cost. (As to whether that was wise or not, I’ve got no idea.)

(Edit— from Wikipedia:

”Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington chose to locate the Air Force's crucial long-range atomic strike force at Offutt primarily because the base was centrally located on the North American continent, placing it well beyond the existing range of long-range, nuclear-armed bombers to (then) stay safely out of range of hostile missiles or bomber aircraft.”)

> Given that climate change is increasing the frequency of major floods

Climate change doesn't exist according to the government, remember?

Just politics to keep diverting from the reality. Scientists and Military agree: https://dod.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/612710/

To be fair, The Pentagon has repeatedly listed climate change as one of it's biggest threats for a number of years, but it's currently too politically touchy to do much about.

One report in particular...

> The 22-page assessment delivered to Congress on Thursday says about two-thirds of 79 mission-essential military installations in the U.S. that were reviewed are vulnerable to current or future flooding, with more than half vulnerable to current or future drought. About half also are at risk from wildfires, including the threat of mudslides and erosion from rains following the blazes.

Yes, but concerns about building air bases in locations that flood predate the Pentagon's relatively recent concerns about "climate change", which is little more than political spin.

The truth is that the location of military bases is a political decision and the wisest decision-making processes (e.g., one that included good flooding estimates) are not always used. Of course, reality has a way of intruding into political thinking and decision-making but usually only long after critical decisions were made. But the crows eventually come home to roost.

IOW not everything is driven by the political topic "climate change". Sometimes its simply flooding, flood zones and extremely capitalistic local land developers.

Frequency of extreme flooding is increased by climate change. It's not political. It's climate science.

We should start a War On Mother Nature!

The feds wanted to expand the floodplain, but the business-friendly local NRD wanted to shrink it to save on insurance costs: https://www.omaha.com/news/metro/nrd-s-flood-plain-map-might...

How is the flooding related to climate change? Seems like 'climate change' is now a catchall bucket for unexpected weather, regardless of being too hot or too cold.

Yes, that's how climate change works. A warmer climate results in more extreme weather. A warmer climate does not result in uniformly warmer (or drier) weather.

How do we go from 'could have' to 'did'?

Huh? "Could have" what to "did" what?

Just because climate change is consistent with extreme weather does not entail it caused extreme weather.

Also, climate change = extreme weather is very handwavy. How is climate change falsifiable?

The Cooper nuclear power plant 59 miles from Omaha is also shutting down temporarily due to flooding:

https://www.omaha.com/news/iowa/cooper-nuclear-station-still...

The Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant 18 miles from Omaha was shut down permanently on October 24, 2016 due to flooding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Calhoun_Nuclear_Generatin...

The river isn't necessarily going to reach the 45' point that CNS requires for shutdown - it might, but no guarantee.

FCNS shut down due to budgetary concerns - its operational costs were too high to justify keeping it open. The flood was just the last of a long series of issues they had down there.

I'm actually a bit worried about the Red River in North Dakota. 1997 really was not very fun (well, the 96-97 winter was horrid). This rapid melt with too much snow and frozen ground is hitting a lot of places. My parent's place in MN had water coming in the basement apartment. It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are.

> It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are.

I'm from ND originally and remember that flood, and yeah, it floods here in the cities a lot. This was more due to the super: zomg cold+snow, to... zomg its 40F and the entire streets a river cause nobody cleans out the drains in the fall prior to winter so that thaws are ok.

I'll just say in St Paul, rapid thaws means almost everyones basements flood. Even on the hills, its insane how easily it happens.

Offutt AFB isn't too far from GCP us-central1. Anyone know if Google Cloud has said anything about the flood?

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144691/historic-flo...

See the interactive slidable map. A google data center that is probably us-central1 is just above the lake above the 'e' in Detail. The waters appear to still be a ways off. Google says it is in Council Bluffs, Iowa and there's a large google data center there you can find on google maps. A link to the location on google maps: https://goo.gl/maps/xEJt83kKoe22

This is the national emergency that you hear about on the news, right?

As I understand it, it needs to be something unforeseen and/or fast moving.

Climate change has been predicted for some time.

So probably not, as the president has well paid advisors that will have advised him of this fact. And the president won't want to overreach his authority.

It's not getting a lot of coverage on the news, but it will absolutely get state and federal emergency funding.

Related to this base, if you want to see the F22 fly up close, go the day before an airshow there to the east end of the runway and you will only be hundreds of feet away. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Offutt+AFB,+NE/@41.1108278...

George Carlin used to criticize people living in flood planes back in the day, catastrophic flooding is such a regular occurrence it made its way into his stand-up routine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUUbItrDjKw

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