Good morning, RVA! It's 57 °F, and when was the last time we saw early morning temperatures in the 50s?? Today you can expect highs in the upper 70s, some gentle sunshine, and to find me in a hammock for at least part of the day.
Water cooler
Frank Green at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the Virginia Supreme Court has finally cleared the way for the Lee Monument to come down. As for the timing, "Removal will be a multiday process, and no action on the statue is expected this week, officials said." I'm interested in the Department of General Services plan to remove this thing and really hope they keep the plinth as it stands today. I also wonder if, after the monument and fencing come down, the space will resume its role as a high-traffic gathering place for folks. We all saw how the community turned the bland grass circle into an actual place last year. So let's use some of that ARPA money and make some permanent upgrades! Chris Suarez, also at the RTD, talks to a handful of local folks about the impending removal and has this interesting fact I did not know: "Georgia now leads the nation with 109 monuments standing. Virginia, which has removed or relocated more monuments than any other state in the country, led the nation before last summer."
All that rain a couple days ago triggered a combined sewer overflow event, and the @rvah2o account (winner of a recent fake award I made up one morning) has a nice thread about the plans and funding required to make that sort of thing less frequent. Remember, combined sewer overflows happen when our centuries-old sewer system can't handle the amount of stormwater gushing through it and discharges whatever its got at that moment into the river—which includes untreated wastewater (aka pooptown). @rvah2o points to state legislation that will fund some immediate fixes, plus longer term plans that will completely modernize our 19th century infrastructure (seriously, it's centuries old). They estimate the total cost at around $850 million! You can sign up to get email notifications of every CSO event here, if that's your sort of thing.
The Virginia Mercury's Graham Moomaw has this promising headline: "Virginia's Redistricting Commission has its first draft maps. They look...normal?" The maps released by the commission's consultants yesterday are for the Northern Virginia region and are definitely more compact, or, as Moomaw puts it: "The initial result was maps with more straight lines and less meandering squiggles." Sounds great. Now we'll see how the Commission reconciles the two versions of the maps and how incumbents impacted by the new maps handle possibly having to primary one another. Yikes.
Yesterday, I wrote a bit about the number of people killed by Hurricane Ida—24 hours ago it stood at eight. As of this morning, though, 56 deaths have been attributed to Ida. According to Wikipedia: "23 in New Jersey, 16 in New York, 7 in Louisiana, 5 in Pennsylvania, 2 in Mississippi, 1 in Maryland, 1 in Virginia, and 1 in Connecticut." The climate crisis does not just mean stronger hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico a thousand miles south of here that we don't have to think or care about. Five times as many people died north of Richmond than did south of Richmond. We're going to have to invest in better infrastructure, especially in neighborhoods we've neglected, to withstand these sorts of dangerous weather events (see above (and below)).
I know football at all levels is problematic, but this is fun: WTVR's Lane Casadonte reports that George Wythe High School beat Caroline last night, 8-6, snapping a 42 game losing streak.
Logistical note! Monday is a federal holiday, and, instead of writing this email I will be sleeping in, drinking coffee in my living room before anyone else in my house wakes up, and scrolling through online auctions. I hope you're able to find some time to do your own version of quiet-coffee-auction time. 'Till Tuesday!
This morning's longread
New Orleans Was Already a 'Heat Island.' Then Ida Cut the Power
Climate change means hotter summers and fiercer weather which results in more damage to aging power infrastructure. That means after a storm rolls through, thousands and thousands of people might have to swelter through burning-hot temperatures with no air conditioning. It's worse for cities, of course, and double worse for the redlined neighborhoods in those cities. This piece in Wired looks into this exact situation happening in New Orleans right now (and cites the work done by local climate scientist, Dr. Jeremy Hoffman).
Several factors turn cities into heat islands. Concrete, asphalt, and brick absorb heat really well. When the ambient air cools down at night, those dense materials can only release some of that heat, so they may still be warm when the sun comes up the next day and applies more energy. “So you get kind of this baking-in factor over the course of multiple days of heat,” says Portland State University climate adaptation scientist Vivek Shandas, who has studied the heat island effect in Portland, New Orleans, and dozens of other cities. Following Hurricane Ida, he says, it now looks like New Orleans is facing a “string of days of excess heat.”
If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.
