Bruce Sterling

Texas: the Blooming Marsh That Was Once Desert

Link: Photo in the News: Texas Goes Green After Record Rainfall.

A deluge of torrential rains has lashed the Lone Star State for more than a month—making June one of the wettest ever recorded in Texas.

The rains spurred Texas' grassy plains to bloom dense vegetation, as seen in a photograph taken by a NASA satellite between June 11 and June 20.

The deep, emerald green indicates regions where plants are growing more quickly or robust than average, and the dark, almost-black color marks where vegetation was most dense.

Brown spots point to clouds or water on the ground, which in some cases may mask plant growth.

About 48,000 square miles (124,319 square kilometers), an area the size of Mississippi, was pounded by rains. Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas were hit with more than 330 percent of their average rainfall. In Texas, every major river basin flooded, an event that had not occurred since 1957, according to the Associated Press.

Powerful floods also took the lives of more than a dozen people and destroyed an estimated thousand homes....

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(((In other and even weirder Texan news, Texan state officials ignore the incompetent feds and rely on big-box commercial retail outfits to respond to weather emergencies. Can secession and the Greenhouse Republic of Wal-Mart be far behind?)))

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/07/texas-tells-fem.html

"These large retailers, including Wal-Mart, H-E-B and Home Depot, are part of the state's emergency prep team, invited to brainstorm about strategy and problem solve when there are questions about the best way to respond to a disaster. In exchange for their know-how, they're given advance notice about when the state is about to make critical decisions on evacuations, school closings or when highways will be "contraflowed" into one direction away from a storm.

... This new model, in which retailers' flexible delivery systems are paired with government's network of local emergency responders and powerful communication tools, has received rave reviews from those involved in recent Texas emergencies....

(((If the government of a nation-state isn't the go-to organization in public emergencies, then what core function does a government serve? We're heading for a world where Al-Qaeda thumb-wrestles Home Depot for control of the streets.)))