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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Flood update and elsewhere
Posted by Jill | 6:21 AM
Well, after about 14 hours of nearly continuous ritual of either vacuuming up water from the laundry room floor or tap dancing on towels in the family room in what I fear is a vain attempt to save the carpet, we finally collapsed in utter exhaustion last night as water continued to seep into the house.

Today more rain is predicted.

At least the morning paper offered an explanation as to why, with five inches less rain than was dumped on us in 1999 when Tropical Storm Floyd paid its unwanted visit, the flooding was so much worse. Back then, we were in a drought summer, the ground was parched, and reservoirs were nowhere near full. Last week we had 1.5 inches of rain on top of the big ice storm six weeks ago. So when an average of eight inches of rain fell on Sunday (9.3 inches the highest recorded total, in River Vale), there was nowhere for it to go except as unwanted guests in people's houses.

This morning I am hoping to go downstairs and find that perhaps the seepage by some miracle stopped during the night. I am not optimistic, given the wet sidewalks and driveways this morning indicating more rain during the night (and more predicted today and tomorrow). We do not have flood insurance because we do not live in a flood plain, not that it would have helped because flood insurance covers only structural damage and damage to operational things like furnaces and water heaters. My water heater is in a 2" deep tray, an overpriced-but-worth-it $60 add-on when we last had it replaced, along with a battery-operated alarm that goes off when there is water in the tray, thus giving us advance notice when it gives up the ghost. And my furnace, with barely 1/4" of water around it, was chugging along merrily last night.

But now some decisions have to be made and some money spent. Because the seepage is largely at the front of the house, it seems more productive to attack the source of the problem, however intermittent, and enhance the drainage, rather than paying some charlatan tens of thousands of dollars to dig up the basement and install God-knows what. So that means calling out a landscaper who does this sort of thing. It also means calling someone in to either extract the water from the carpet and de-mildew it or pull it up entirely and de-mildew it and then decide what to do about flooring. At any rate, it's going to be expensive, and while I had planned to put money into the house this year, it's not where I'd planned to put it.

It could have been worse. The Bergen Record has a photo this morning of a house in River Vale submerged nearly to the top of the garage. Yesterday people in New Milford were being rescued in boats. With a brook and two reservoirs on my way to work, and my route going through the aforementioned River Vale, it remains to be seen if I could have even gotten through. Today I'll head in, if only because there doesn't seem to be a point to be one of Mickey Mouse's brooms with buckets for a second day as water contineus to seep in.

And this is why I really don't have much to say about yesterday's shooting at Virginia Tech. I did have MSNBC on during my towel dancing on the carpet yesterday, but the "If it bleeds, it leads" coverage excluding all else seemed like just more Atrocity Droning, not unlike the nonstop coverage of last year's shooting at an Amish school. What stood out most frighteningly were the calls by talking heads for so-called bulletproof security on college campuses. Look, folks, this is a tragedy by any measure. But when the network that continually tries to pump up a failed president's ratings by casting him as a strong, resolute leader in the face of The Terrorism Of Which We Must Be Afraid All The Time calls the shooting "an act of evil on a scale that we've never seen in this country before", I think we've entered the realm of tabloid journalism hyperbole, and I'm not going to pay any more attention to that than I am to the continued attempts to flog the corpse of Anna Nicole Smith.

This sort of thing is nothing new. In 1966, ex-Marine Charles Whitman killed 15 people and wounded 31 before he was shot by police. In 1984, James Huberty killed 21 people and wounded 19 others in a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California. In 1991, George Hennard shot and killed 22 people in Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and wounded 24 before committing suicide in the 1999 Columbine shootings that politicians are still flogging. When something like this happens, whether on a college campus or not, I don't think the relative body counts are what's important. Whitman was clearly nuts. Harris and Klebold were certainly extremely disturbed young men. And it's interesting how eight years later, the talk of the "bully culture" that spawned the Columbine massacre has fallen silent. I guess it's hard to rail against bully culture in the schools when a 67-year-old radio personality is calling a women's college basketball team "whores".

But what's most disheartening is the implication by the tablonews networks that the fact that the shooter, apparently a student at the University, may have been "a 24- year-old Chinese national who arrived in San Francisco on a United Airlines flight Aug. 7 last year on a student visa issued in Shanghai" is somehow significant. I suppose if we can chalk this up to some "damn fur'ner" we won't have to look at either the pressures on college students or accept the fact that there will always be people who go nuts and act out.

I'm not trying to belittle the horror and the loss for Virginia Tech students and the families of the dead and wounded. But the frenzy surrounding this incident seems to be more about cable news wanting to deliver eyeballs to advertisers than about any need to cover developments in the case.

By all means, let's ask questions about the response of campus security, and whether students should have been warned earlier. But it would be tragic if college campuses were turned into police states as a result of one tragic, horrific incident.

UPDATE: Perhaps the same cable news-bots who are flogging the Virginia Tech massacre might want to consider, as Larry Johnson has, that what happened in Virginia would be just another day in Iraq under the U.S. occupation.

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