Water water everywhere

The rains came yesterday and last night with a persistent atmospheric river delivering over 100mm of rain to the communities like Agassiz and Chilliwack in the east end of the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, All of the eastbound highways out of the region are closed right now due to flooding and landslides, and while not as catastrophic as the 2021 floods that cut off this part of the country from the rest of Canada for weeks, it nevertheless shows how easy it is for us to be isolated here. The highway down the coast to Washington State is still open, but they too are dealing with flooding.

This was the first time that our region has had an orange level weather warning, and I would say that the system did well in predicting and warning residents of the eastern Fraser Valley about the impending danger. It validates the heuristics I attached to the colours when the system was launched a couple of weeks ago.

Coincidently, we woke up early this morning to the sound of water dripping inside the house. It had nothing to do with the rain, but rather a broken pipe in our ceiling. So my day began a bit early today. We filled the kettle and turned the main water off and now I’m just surfing and waiting for the plumber to come. He’s currently dealing with a flooded basement elsewhere on the island.

For the rest of the day I have enough water stored in my emergency containers to easily get us through a few days without running water. It’s nice to have emergency preparations validated by non-catastrophic events. The rain has stopped outside but it’s code orange inside our house today.

Anyway, here are a few links that caught my eye this morning.

An interesting read on Liberalism and its intersection with African political thought and economics The comments contains a good discussion as well.

Sports gives you a really tangible view of how the intangibles affect performance, which is one of the things that fascinates me about games like football and ice hockey. These rely on very subtle intangible connections between players to enable rapid adjustment in a dynamic environment. At the highest levels, skills aren’t all that different, but what often makes the difference in play and performance is culture. Manchester United went through a massive culture change after Sir Alex Ferguson left, from which they haven;’t recovered. It was wholesale changes that made a difference. It was the way new leadership handled the legacy of culture that was handed to them. The guys at Anecdote explore this more.

A project after my own heart, weaving music and ocean conservation together. Explore The Oceansong Project.

Every Thursday Patti Digh shares a few links she found during the week. This week there is a lovely collection of before and after photographs showing Czech people as both young adults and centenarians.