The big rainstorm "massively flooded" the Whole Foods on University Avenue, or so I was told by the people who said they were store employees, as I stared at the shopping carts full of sodden merchandise. The store was closed and will be closed for days, they said.
I circled around to try to get back home, avoiding left turns on University Avenue, where all the traffic lights were set on blinking red. I took a back road and then turned north onto Shorewood Boulevard where it crosses the railroad tracks. On either side of the tracks, the entire foundation under the rails had been washed away, so that sagging (though not broken) track hung over empty space.
Much worse: "The body of the man swept away by floodwaters Monday night has been found in a retention pond on the West Side," the Wisconsin State Journal reports.
"Their car was swept into an embankment, endangering the three passengers inside," the department said in an update Tuesday morning. "Bystanders assisted the three occupants out of the vehicle. Two were pulled to safety, and the third was ripped from the hands of a bystander by a strong current in the floodwaters.... He was driving the car with two passengers, when the car stalled in floodwaters and was carried into a normally-dry drainage ditch," [Madison Police spokesman Joel DeSpain] said.
A passerby saw the car nose down in the culvert, so he went to help those trapped in the car. "The vehicle was quickly filling with water, and water was past the windows," DeSpain said. "The driver told the man he couldn't open his door." A rear door was able to be opened, with two people, a man in his 70s and a woman in her 50s, in the car....
"He had gotten out of the car, but the current was very powerful," DeSpain said. "Despite heroic efforts, they were unable to keep him from being sucked under the car."
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The rain around DeSpain falls mainly on the plain.
Be safe and stay dry.
I bet Whole Foods regrets not moving into the site that ultimately got filled with a Target. You know, the one up the street on the hill.
"He was driving the car with two passengers, when the car stalled in floodwaters and was carried into a normally-dry drainage ditch," DeSpain said.
Sometimes it's better not to try to ford rushing waters with a car. It's difficult to not be able to get where you're going. It can be very inconvenient if you can't find a safe detour and you have to stay somewhere else for the night. But you get to live.
Here in Nevada (of all places), they say "Turn Around, Don't Drown". The desert is prone to flash floods.
A local Kroger occasionally gets hit by a power outage long enough to invalidate all their refrigerated foods. It's worth a couple hundred thousand dollars of throwing stuff out, the manager said.
Crazy to drive into that deep of water. Besides the risk of death you can easily ingest water into the motor. You can't compress water and the resulting hydrolock is catastrophic.
The Whole Foods was also flooded in June. At least they know what to do now.
I'll bet Lake Michigan is full and all the talk about how it was evaporating and draining away through Chicago was just climate alarmism. But not to worry, we can talk about California wildfires.
A tweet for Sister Sarah (Make America Grovel Many Times) Jeong who is now looking for boring tweets so she can keep her job at the NYT:
Lake Michigan, somewhere in Flyoverlandia, has 9.95 trillion gallons of water more than 2012/2013.
I don't have anything profound or clever to say. I just want you to know that those of us who are part of your virtual community care about you and your physical community in Madison and hope things get back to normal with as little pain and discomfort as possible.
Amazon running a grocery store is wrong on so many levels. But maybe we will get Prime bargains on flood food.
Thanks, DK.
Amazon sells 35 pound bags of Purina One dog food for much less than Kroger, and with free shipping. One time it came second day air. I take it there's a huge markup on Purina One, and Kroger takes a really really huge markup.
Typical retail markup is double the price, though apparently not for grocery-type grocery store items, where it is much less.
Keep checking your basement. There can be a 12 to 24 hour delay before the ground water makes its way to your foundation (from personal experience in 2007).
People seem to always underestimate the depth of the water they attempt to drive through. I know whenever I see the videos of these things, I am always surprised to see how deep it actually is when the vehicle itself proves it to me.
Conventional grocery stores are expensive to run. Refrigeration costs alone run 15,000 or more per month for the average size store. Percentage mark-up varies by department and the amount of labor required - bakery’s and delis have the biggest labor percentages and shrink; therefore higher mark ups, in the 50% range.Volume is everything in that business. If a grocer nets 3% at the end of the year he did well.
Minneapolis has high and low spots, and there are low spots in otherwise high areas. When storm sewers were installed 100 years ago, some of those low spots were deemed habitable. Nature had other ideas. Now and then, she supplies a real gully washer, and those low spots fill up, and the houses flood.
It took about 80 years to figure this out, and then the city bought out the owners of the low spots and turned them into rain catch basins. They have walking paths on the outside, and there is lots of that weedy looking plant life that would get you ticketed if it were on your property. But they work. No more flooded houses.
The "Stupid Motorist Law" in Arizona states that any motorist who becomes stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway may be charged for the cost of their rescue. (Section 28-910 - Arizona Revised Statutes).
That law just makes so much sense.
We have 4 Whole Foods in Cambridge and 1 on the border of Somerville. So there.
Hey, there's only three, plus the one on Beacon Street in Somerville.
Ann,
I'm making the sign of the cross with my fingers and pointing it at YOU.
rhhardin said...
A local Kroger occasionally gets hit by a power outage long enough to invalidate all their refrigerated foods. It's worth a couple hundred thousand dollars of throwing stuff out, the manager said.
8/21/18, 11:11 AM
Wonder what the numbers were on backup power for them. To have it happen repeatedly...
Wonder what the numbers were on backup power for them. To have it happen repeatedly...
I asked. They'd need huge generators that would have to be maintained so it didn't pay. The power's pretty good outagewise.
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