Question Dust Storm

Shit, Sydney's about to be hit by a massive dust storm.

Wish me luck!

CrazyMinh wrote: Shit, Sydney's about to be hit by a massive dust storm.

Wish me luck!

Looks like you could use it.

CrazyMinh wrote: Shit, Sydney's about to be hit by a massive dust storm.

Wish me luck!

Dust storm?

'pleaseeee'

Just left cali....earthquakes, LARGE FIRES, high taxes, No...INSANE TAXES, bad roads, crappy laws, crowded roads (like today just before a 4 day weekend!) and several other 'hot messes' I will not mention here!

dust?

lighttech wrote: Just left cali....earthquakes, LARGE FIRES, high taxes, No...INSANE TAXES, bad roads, crappy laws, crowded roads (like today just before a 4 day weekend!) and several other 'hot messes' I will not mention here!

I would take all of that over where I am now. I'd gladly pay to live in the Bay Area again if I were able to work. My love for Berkeley is probably well beyond reason, but it is what it is.

But then, SF and LA are so different that they might as well be different states... no, wait, different planets.

And it's not as if Atlanta's traffic isn't even worse than SF, and I've been told that it is almost as bad as LA's. And compared to the areas outside of Atlanta proper, my understanding is that LA has better public transit, too; a pretty low bar to pass considering the absurd car fetishization in southern Cali. Even in Athens, where I am now, I end up having to take Uber far too often because public services are apparently Evil with a capital E and only the University's buses run more than once an hour (if that).

(No, I don't want a car. I have never felt safe when driving myself, and while I would have one if I needed it for work, right now I am still on SSD and avoid leaving the apartment as much as I can - hell, even when I am able to work, I do so from home for most jobs - so having a car would be even more of a waste of money than Uber is. If the talk of moving in with some friends in mid-state NY next spring goes ahead, I'd probably get one, but that's because they're in a relatively small city where a car would be a necessity rather than a luxury.)

As for taxes... this is the US, we don't know what taxes are. Trust me, the US government - even in California, Oregon, and Massachusetts - has minimal taxes compared to what is paid in the saner parts of the world, because the US also doesn't know what public services are (not that I see a big differentiation between 'public government' and 'privately owned but government chartered and publicly traded corporate' - once it gets beyond a certain size, a corporation basically is a part of government, which was what corporate charters were all about in the first place, so differentiating them is pointless).

Low taxes are not necessarily a good thing, as this state of decay known as Geeeyaw-juh proves.

But then, the main things I loathe about being here aren't about the state itself (well, except for the horrible weather - for someone who doesn't leave their apartment much I have a surprisingly strong hatred for heat and humidity), but about the family member responsible for me being here in the first place, so I am biased. I would do just about anything to leave at this point. I felt imprisoned and in exile from the moment I agreed to go to help my late father here in Georgia (a state I had only been to twice before, both times for less than five days), and I'd been looking for any escape even before setting foot east of the Rockies again.

But I am still trapped here, three years after that bastard died, and still need to find a way out.

Schol-R-LEA wrote: But then, the main things I loathe about being here aren't about the state itself (well, except for the horrible weather - for someone who doesn't leave their apartment much I have a surprisingly strong hatred for heat and humidity)

By way of comparison, if we flipped Athens' N latitude to S, and accounting for miles inland from open water, he'd be living in Bathurst, NSW.

OK, there is that.

Schol-R-LEA wrote:

lighttech wrote: Just left cali....earthquakes, LARGE FIRES, high taxes, No...INSANE TAXES, bad roads, crappy laws, crowded roads (like today just before a 4 day weekend!) and several other 'hot messes' I will not mention here!

I would take all of that over where I am now. I'd gladly pay to live in the Bay Area again if I were able to work. My love for Berkeley is probably well beyond reason, but it is what it is.

But then, SF and LA are so different that they might as well be different states... no, wait, different planets.

And it's not as if Atlanta's traffic isn't even worse than SF, and I've been told that it is almost as bad as LA's. And compared to the areas outside of Atlanta proper, my understanding is that LA has better public transit, too; a pretty low bar to pass considering the absurd car fetishization in southern Cali. Even in Athens, where I am now, I end up having to take Uber far too often because public services are apparently Evil with a capital E and only the University's buses run more than once an hour (if that).

(No, I don't want a car. I have never felt safe when driving myself, and while I would have one if I needed it for work, right now I am still on SSD and avoid leaving the apartment as much as I can - hell, even when I am able to work, I do so from home for most jobs - so having a car would be even more of a waste of money than Uber is. If the talk of moving in with some friends in mid-state NY next spring goes ahead, I'd probably get one, but that's because they're in a relatively small city where a car would be a necessity rather than a luxury.)

As for taxes... this is the US, we don't know what taxes are. Trust me, the US government - even in California, Oregon, and Massachusetts - has minimal taxes compared to what is paid in the saner parts of the world, because the US also doesn't know what public services are (not that I see a big differentiation between 'public government' and 'privately owned but government chartered and publicly traded corporate' - once it gets beyond a certain size, a corporation basically is a part of government, which was what corporate charters were all about in the first place, so differentiating them is pointless).

Low taxes are not necessarily a good thing, as this state of decay known as Geeeyaw-juh proves.

But then, the main things I loathe about being here aren't about the state itself (well, except for the horrible weather - for someone who doesn't leave their apartment much I have a surprisingly strong hatred for heat and humidity), but about the family member responsible for me being here in the first place, so I am biased. I would do just about anything to leave at this point. I felt imprisoned and in exile from the moment I agreed to go to help my late father here in Georgia (a state I had only been to twice before, both times for less than five days), and I'd been looking for any escape even before setting foot east of the Rockies again.

But I am still trapped here, three years after that bastard died, and still need to find a way out.

well when I left LA....Atlanta is where i ended up at , for the most part the vib is way different(the laws here makes sense!) but this is where movie biz is leaning towards right now and I made enough contacts to make the move and with money saved up it was the better choice of LA and its mess of overcharging for everything..(gasoline I am looking at you!)

I you want area.. I took a place near Barnsville...open, nice house, small town feel

I googled, and the the average gas price in California is about 3.16. US$ 3.16 per US gallon of gasoline? I wish I could pay that little. Gas here is around R$ 4.50 per litre, which (by a coincidence in the exchange rate to the size of the U.S. gallon) translates to about 4.50 USD per gallon.

Here:
US$2.46 for a gallon of regular unleaded.
US$2.88 for a gallon of whole milk

At least I have use for the gasoline, but YMWV.

I don't recall what my gas is in dollars-per-gallon, but I do know I spend $20/month on it. Working from home is the best!

Dust storms, on the other hand, are not the best. Good luck!

Incidentally, today I (re-)learned that Sydney is on the east coast of Australia. For some reason I'd been thinking it was north of Perth. Derp.

The only place I want is Berkeley - and that isn't in the cards.

Is there a type of natural disaster or storm the United States does not get? To my knowledge, limnic eruptions are the only one we don't get. We don't have too many lakes with CO₂ trapped in the lake bottom.

lighttech wrote:

CrazyMinh wrote: Shit, Sydney's about to be hit by a massive dust storm.

Wish me luck!

Dust storm?

Dust storms are nothing to scoff at either.

Between terrible to non-existent visibility and the sanding effect of all that dust being blown about at high speeds to the impact on the lungs of all that dust, it may not kill as readily and quickly as a forest fire or a hurricane, but it can easily kill all the same.

It does after all do the same kind of damage to a body as did the infamous London smog before they could get that under control (by banning or severely limiting coal burning in residential areas)

Thankfully these things are rare (still)

Katssun wrote: Is there a type of natural disaster or storm the United States does not get? To my knowledge, limnic eruptions are the only one we don't get. We don't have too many lakes with CO₂ trapped in the lake bottom.

*ominous drum roll*

Yet

Katssun wrote: Is there a type of natural disaster or storm the United States does not get? To my knowledge, limnic eruptions are the only one we don't get. We don't have too many lakes with CO₂ trapped in the lake bottom.

Hey, it's a big country, as is Australia (tying things back to the original topic). China, Russia, Canada, and Brazil all have their fair share of natural disasters, too, but you don't hear as much about it (in part because a lot of them are in sparsely populated regions, ones which are often sparsely populated for a reason).

Though I will admit that living in known major fault zones (like the place I would rather be living in ), flood plains (like, oh, the third of the mid-west within the Mississippi basin and associated waterways), volcanic zones (Hawaii, of course, but also the Pacific Northwest, Yellowstone, and much of Alaska), tropical storm pathways (pretty much the entire East and Gulf coasts), or areas where major winter storms occur (more or less the whole US except Hawaii, California, Arizona, and Florida), dust storms (Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Texas) or major heat waves (everywhere except maybe the northernmost parts of Alaska), could all be seen as foolish at times... but I would be hard pressed to think of any place on Earth which doesn't have some sort of endemic natural disasters.

Though Australia also has the World's Deadliest Fauna, so I have to admit that the US lucked out on that. We may have rattlesnakes, grizzly bears, and black widow spiders, and used to have a lot of bison as well, but that nothing compared to drop bears and ten meter long salties .

Schol-R-LEA wrote:

Katssun wrote: . but I would be hard pressed to think of any place on Earth which doesn't have some sort of endemic natural disasters.

The UK does pretty well.

I still say the Earthquake has all other 'disasters' beat for the most part..most of the others...you SEE coming for hours if not days

but waking up at 3AM to a 7.0 and watching a 25 in TV fly across the room LEVEL to the floor, for 20 feet till the cable tugged it and it fell....is SO much fun! Then hoping the house does not fall and all the cheap construction hold up!

If you're referring to Northridge (17 Jan 1994), yikes, yeah, I can see that being unpleasant. Doubly so, since that would have surely have been a CRT at that time, correct? Big, heavy, leaded-glass-fronted box that promises major injury if it hits you? Youch.

I will have to admit that I got lucky, in that there largest quake to hit the Bay area while I was living there (March 1995-March 2009) was a 5.3 M_w, and it was some distance away from where I was at the time (October or November 2008, IIRC; I was in Hayward, while the epicenter was in Livermore, It think) not even big enough to make the national news from what I remember.

As I've said before, my impression (which isn't well-informed, as I've never been to SoCal) is that SoCal and NorCal are about as different as, say, Connecticut and Georgia (to use two examples which I am familiar with, more so than I care to be in fact).

Getting back to dust storms, it is my understanding that Northern China is going through a Dust Bowl right now, which just shows that a) learning the lessons of history is supposed to include other peoples' history as well as your own, and b) agricultural and civil engineering errors are still errors regardless of who is making them or what their ideological positions are. At least they seem to be addressing this repeated mistake faster than the US did in the 1930s ( not that this would be difficult , as in the US it went on for over a year before anyone started to address it on a national level; it didn't really get any traction until a dust storm which began in Nebraska hit Washington. D.C.).

I have to admit that Brazil is pretty lucky on the natural catastrophes front. Generally speaking, the big ones are floods and droughts. Oh, and mosquito-borne diseases, can't forget those.
But other than that... tornados do happen, but not nearly as often as in the U.S., and they tend to be on the small side of the range. Hurricanes are very rare (a single named one in recent history, Catarina in 2004.) Earthquakes are puny and hardly worth mentioning. No volcanos at all.
No, our catastrophes are more of the self-inflicted sort. Crime, corruption, deforestation, poverty, horrible politicians, and stuff like this .

Astrodragon wrote:

Schol-R-LEA wrote:

Katssun wrote: . but I would be hard pressed to think of any place on Earth which doesn't have some sort of endemic natural disasters.

The UK does pretty well.

Actually the UK has more tornadoes per square mile (or km) than the US.

plutoniumboss wrote:

Astrodragon wrote:

Schol-R-LEA wrote:

Katssun wrote: . but I would be hard pressed to think of any place on Earth which doesn't have some sort of endemic natural disasters.

The UK does pretty well.

Actually the UK has more tornadoes per square mile (or km) than the US.

ER, no we dont.
Land tornadoes are very small and rare.
We do get very small ones at sea, but they only annoy a few fish.

Astrodragon wrote:

plutoniumboss wrote:

Astrodragon wrote:

Schol-R-LEA wrote:

Katssun wrote: . but I would be hard pressed to think of any place on Earth which doesn't have some sort of endemic natural disasters.

The UK does pretty well.

Actually the UK has more tornadoes per square mile (or km) than the US.

ER, no we dont.
Land tornadoes are very small and rare.
We do get very small ones at sea, but they only annoy a few fish.

Looks like 34 per year. That's certainly far less than the ~1200 we get in the USA. But on the other hand, the USA is more than forty times as big as the UK. That means the USA only experiences about 30 tornadoes for every UK-sized area. That's pretty comparable. The difference becomes more pronounced if you cherry pick just England, which does have a higher average tornado density than the USA as a whole (granted, much weaker tornadoes).

But comparing the UK to the USA is silly. It makes more sense to compare it to individual states, which have widely varying amounts of tornadoes.

Well, nothing really showed. The skies reddened a bit, but it was nothing like 2009's apocalyptic dust storm. I'm actually rather disappointed.

Earthquakes??

Lol...

...Australia is situated on a single tectonic plate...

...none of that earthquake stuff here. Though there was a small tremor once in NSW, although it barely registered on the Richter scale.

Although we do get Hurricanes up in Queensland (NSW is too far south to be really affected), Tsunamis on our west coast, occasional (like once every five years (except down at Thredbo)) hail and snow, the occasional dust storm (the biggest one in the last twenty years being the aforementioned 2009 one, and the most recent being the subject of this thread), a Tornado once ripped the roof off the Broadway shopping mall in Hornsby, we have dust devils in the outback, we've had a few major thunderstorms...

Our BIGGEST problem with natural disasters has to be drought and bushfires. We've pretty much always been in a state of drought since 2005 or so (it's not really a problem in and around the cities, but out in the bush it's a MAJOR issue), and bushfires...

A few years back, there was a big one in the ACT. A fire tornado (yes, they exist outside of Anime) swept through Canberra, and destroyed a good deal of property. It was one of the biggest natural disasters in Aussie history, with millions of dollars (AU) damage being done, and tens of thousands of homes and businesses being destroyed, alongside a good deal of the city's infrastructure. I wasn't there, as I live in Sydney, but it was hellish to see on the news. It burned down a great deal of the bushland, and while Australian plants have evolved to regenerate after fire comes through (yes, it happens that much), it took ages for the infrastructure and local populations to recover. It also caused a minor financial crisis, due to the amount of money that had to be handed out to the survivors so that they could have settlement, and it ruined insurance premiums for a few year afterwards. My dad was complaining constantly at the time about the insurance bills going up by a couple of grand each month while the rebuilding was going on. I don't remember much, it was quite a while ago.

Kettlekorn wrote:

Astrodragon wrote:

plutoniumboss wrote:

Astrodragon wrote:

Schol-R-LEA wrote:

Katssun wrote: . but I would be hard pressed to think of any place on Earth which doesn't have some sort of endemic natural disasters.

The UK does pretty well.

Actually the UK has more tornadoes per square mile (or km) than the US.

ER, no we dont.
Land tornadoes are very small and rare.
We do get very small ones at sea, but they only annoy a few fish.

Looks like 34 per year. That's certainly far less than the ~1200 we get in the USA. But on the other hand, the USA is more than forty times as big as the UK. That means the USA only experiences about 30 tornadoes for every UK-sized area. That's pretty comparable. The difference becomes more pronounced if you cherry pick just England, which does have a higher average tornado density than the USA as a whole (granted, much weaker tornadoes).

But comparing the UK to the USA is silly. It makes more sense to compare it to individual states, which have widely varying amounts of tornadoes.

The thing about tornadoes in the uk is that most of them occur at sea, and the land ones tend to be the 'removed a few roof tiles' variety rather than 'declare a state of emergency' type.
Rather like our eartquakes...

Been through some natural disasters, avoided more.
DISASTER BEEN IN? MITIGATION
Hurricane yup move far inshore
Blizzard yup stock up on food, fuel, books to read
Tornado yup move away from Kansas
Flood yup build on higher ground
Earthquake nope build stronger or move
Tsunami nope move away from coast. Far away
Volcano nope move. As if you have to ask!
Wildfire nope manage forests to minimize fuel load. or move
Mudslide nope don't build on or at bottoms of vulnerable hills
Avalanche nope live in plains / prairies
Sinkholes nope ???
Ice storm yes go South to the Sun Belt
Drought yes water conservation on community / state level
Meteoric impact nope kiss your ass goodbye
Massive solar flare nope save to buy new electronics and appliances after it's over

There we go - the official EW guide to natural disasters

elrodw wrote: Been through some natural disasters, avoided more.
DISASTER BEEN IN? MITIGATION
Sinkholes nope ???

Don't live in Florida, Southern Georgia, Western Ohio, or Eastern Indiana near all the subsurface karst.

Katssun wrote:

elrodw wrote: Been through some natural disasters, avoided more.
DISASTER BEEN IN? MITIGATION
Sinkholes nope ???

Don't live in Florida, Southern Georgia, Western Ohio, or Eastern Indiana near all the subsurface karst.

Sinkholes are worldwide. Italy has many. A notable example of an ancient sinkhole in the US occurred in SD near the current town of Hot Springs, where a sinkhole became a trap for mammoths. (That site is now an active excavation site and tourist trap.) If you count collapses of subterranean pockets in the rock (not Karst) where can you move to be safe from sinkholes?

No sinkholes in orbit.

@Astro: Yeah, I heard you the first time, and I already agreed that they are weak. But if you follow that link I posted, you'll see that the number I quoted is is almost entirely made up of tornadoes occurring over land, not sea.

elrodw wrote: Sinkholes are worldwide. Italy has many. A notable example of an ancient sinkhole in the US occurred in SD near the current town of Hot Springs, where a sinkhole became a trap for mammoths. (That site is now an active excavation site and tourist trap.) If you count collapses of subterranean pockets in the rock (not Karst) where can you move to be safe from sinkholes?

No, there's always a chance, because the causes are numerous. But why willingly build or buy in the US state that has the highest number of sinkholes? A low-lying state with a high water table, made of karst (rock that is dissolved by water), also with one of the highest rainfall amounts by state.

You can't really be safe from tornadoes in the US either (though Vermont, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire are pretty safe bets).

Katssun wrote: No, there's always a chance, because the causes are numerous. But why willingly build or buy in the US state that has the highest number of sinkholes? A low-lying state with a high water table, made of karst (rock that is dissolved by water), also with one of the highest rainfall amounts by state.

I was going to mention earlier that sinkholes (and caves) also happen in Kentucky.

With regard to sinkholes you're actually better off in south Florida than in central parts of the state because you're on uncovered karst with a shallow water table. There's no easy way to form a large void surrounded by solid rock without it staying filled with water or even filling with sand washed down from the surface.

Sinkholes aren't something to expect when the bedrock is igneous or metamorphic rock, so there are areas in the Eastern and Western states for which they're an alien concept.

Mountainous terrain is less favorable for tornado formation. Alaska has very, very few tornadoes due to terrain and climate. So you can move to Alaska, but then you're near the "ring of fire", which makes earthquakes and volcanoes more probable. And blizzards and ice storms. Plus if you're in forested mountainous terrain, mud and rock slides, forest fires, and avalanches are more likely. To avoid those, you can move to prairie or plain areas - and be vulnerable to tornadoes.

For most disaster types, you can move away from one - but it makes you more likely for another. You can't win.

I've experienced three earthquakes, strong enough to have been felt. One in southern Illinois, it woke me up. One in Kentucky, just barely strong enough to notice. And one in central Illinois, shook my home for about a minute.

Well now Australia is simultaneously flooding, having landslides, and having raging firestorms. And they say there's no such thing as climate change.

Sir Lee wrote: I have to admit that Brazil is pretty lucky on the natural catastrophes front. [...] No, our catastrophes are more of the self-inflicted sort. Crime, corruption, deforestation, poverty, horrible politicians, and stuff like this .

You forgot 'idiots breaking into sealed ¹³⁷Cs radiography units and passing the radioactive material around like a joint on April 20th".

But AFAIK, at least you haven't had anything like Three Mile Island, Santa Susana , SL-1 , or the long-term problems seen at places like Hanford and Oak Ridge. Or things like what you see in Appalachian coal mining towns (which has included a number of similar dam failures, though most of those were decades ago). Or Deep Water Horizon. Or.... well, the problem with being on the cutting edge is that you tend to get, uhm, cut. A lot. And the US has been on that edge for over a century. Taking risks has brought the world a lot of great things, but it has a price.

CrazyMinh wrote: Well now Australia is simultaneously flooding, having landslides, and having raging firestorms. And they say there's no such thing as climate change.

I would politely suggest that discussion of "climate change" be considered political and we avoid discussing it, as people can make cogent and also rabid ideological arguments one way or another. We don't need that kind of shrill inflammatory rhetoric flying madly about.

(PS - if you want my views, PM me. Even then, I may not answer - it depends on my mood. I will not discuss my views on many things controversial in the forums, lest they lead to a huge argument and angry fans.)

Schol-R-Lea: Point, I somehow forgot to list that. But it does go into the "self-inflicted catastrophes" category.

Schol-R-LEA wrote:

Sir Lee wrote: I have to admit that Brazil is pretty lucky on the natural catastrophes front. [...] No, our catastrophes are more of the self-inflicted sort. Crime, corruption, deforestation, poverty, horrible politicians, and stuff like this .

You forgot 'idiots breaking into sealed ¹³⁷Cs radiography units and passing the radioactive material around like a joint on April 20th".

But AFAIK, at least you haven't had anything like Three Mile Island, Santa Susana , SL-1 , or the long-term problems seen at places like Hanford and Oak Ridge. Or things like what you see in Appalachian coal mining towns (which has included a number of similar dam failures, though most of those were decades ago). Or Deep Water Horizon. Or.... well, the problem with being on the cutting edge is that you tend to get, uhm, cut. A lot. And the US has been on that edge for over a century.

Just for completeness, let's not forget the utter devastation from mining nickel and other metals on the Kola Peninsula, or the sunken hulls with nuclear reactor cores (also on the Kola Peninsula), or the diversion of water for irrigation that led to the near-elimination of the Aral Sea, or Chernobyl, or the Andreeyev Bay radiological release, or the smallpox release from a bioweapons lab near the Aral Sea, or the Kyshtym radiological release, or Lake Karachay in the Urals, or .....

You get the point? Any technologically-advanced nation has a large number of man-made environmental disasters. It's not just the US. I resent the hell out of the implication that the US is the world's bad guy and whipping boy for all the 'worst' man-made problems. EVERY advanced nation has had or will have environmental issues resulting from that technological progress, period and stop.

That wasn't really my intent, honest. But I will take the point as given.

Sorry, I was dealing with a very, very painful knee (about 8 on the pain scale) and a headache (also about , and my response was probably pretty snarky. I didn't mean to chastise, only to point out that it's a common disease of progress. I can point out lots and lots of environmental issues in the US, and I won't try to defend them or say "but XXX is far worse". Man-made environmental disasters are disasters, no matter where they occur.

Another type of environmental disaster is introducing non-native species into an environment. Jumping carp in the Mississippi basin. Zebra mussels. Boas in the Everglades. (also sawgrass). Rabbits in Australia. Rats in most Pacific Islands. Kudzu in the US deep South.

Prior to attending Georgia Tech, the kudzu was my favorite part of Georgia. I get that it's a problem, but at least it's a problem that looks really cool.

Where kudzu is native, mountainous regions of Japan, parts of Korea and China, it is controlled by the climate itself, dying back every winter above ground. Cold winters keep it under control. That's why it mostly stays in the South.

IIRC, Kudzu was planted heavily in the great drought of the 30's to help control soil erosion. Since then - it's called "The Vine that Ate the South" - and any gardening book says "do NOT plant Kudzu. Ever."

elrodw wrote: IIRC, Kudzu was planted heavily in the great drought of the 30's to help control soil erosion. Since then - it's called "The Vine that Ate the South" - and any gardening book says "do NOT plant Kudzu. Ever."

Brazilian pepper tree. The only hope with this beast to find a way to make lots of money off of it (an extract from the berries shuts down MRSA) so that it's driven to extinction. Even compared to Australian Pine and melaleuca, this tree has proven a nightmare. (All three are illegal to plant in Florida, along with air potato and chinese tallow)

There are native plants that a pretty hard to get rid of as well.
Just try and get rid of an elderberry bush without resorting to salting the ground (and preferably using a flameethrower as well(

Astrodragon wrote: There are native plants that a pretty hard to get rid of as well.
Just try and get rid of an elderberry bush without resorting to salting the ground (and preferably using a flameethrower as well(

Elderberry mead can be very good!

null0trooper wrote:

Astrodragon wrote: There are native plants that a pretty hard to get rid of as well.
Just try and get rid of an elderberry bush without resorting to salting the ground (and preferably using a flameethrower as well(

Elderberry mead can be very good!

It is,but I prefer to make elderflower wine.
It tastes so nice until suddenly people fall over...

Louisiana has its giant rodents, aka Nutria. After lots of effort trying to hunt, trap, shoot, and otherwise exterminate the vermin, the state took a novel approach - putting out a Nutria cookbook and pushing the idea it's tasty wildlife.

Astrodragon wrote:

null0trooper wrote:

Astrodragon wrote: There are native plants that a pretty hard to get rid of as well.
Just try and get rid of an elderberry bush without resorting to salting the ground (and preferably using a flameethrower as well(

Elderberry mead can be very good!

It is,but I prefer to make elderflower wine.
It tastes so nice until suddenly people fall over...

You're supposed to make pies out of them!

I can't speak for anyone else, but there is some definite competition over the berries with the birds. I may only get three pounds out of a substantially large bush.

Speaking of disasters: Anchorage, Alaska today

null0trooper wrote: Speaking of disasters: Anchorage, Alaska today

as an expert (i have rode/lived/screamed like a little girl! through at least 5 major ones) I call that an 'E' ticket ride there, with over a full minute of DEAD on shaking that never slowed down or lessened!
Fun!

the link below shows a court room with a full minute of shaking....fun!
wtop.com/national/2018/11/watch-videos-s...alaska-quake-struck/