Wow. It's really been a year since
Hurricane Toivo struck?
It's hard to believe, but it was 365
days ago today that Marquette was hit by a huge storm dubbed
“Hurricane Toivo” by locals. Because we're not on an ocean it
wasn't technically a hurricane, but exhibited hurricane-like drops in
pressure and wave action, so that's close enough. It flooded &
buried roads, altered lakeshores, ripped down trees, deprived
thousands of people of power, and tore apart a large chunk of a
Marquette city park.
Admittedly, it was nowhere near as
strong as, say Hurricane Hugo, but for us it was enough.
Four days after it happened, Loraine
and I took a walk down by the heaviest hit parts of the city, and
even then the damage was apparent--
Thankfully, a year later, most of the
damage is gone. The streets that had been flooded & buried were
dried out and uncovered, and the most of us have adapted to the “new”
shoreline that sits near Shiras Park. Of course, the damage done to
the Shiras Park parking lot is still visible, as the city tries to
decide what to do with that part of the park. Rebuild it like it
was, and watch it get damaged when another severe weather system
hits? Put some kind of barrier system up to protect the parking lot
from the waves? Try to alter the flow of the lake somehow?
That's one of those things that you
don't just decide to change on a whim.
Of course, with the planet's climate
rapidly changing and weather that was once weird now becoming the
norm (I mean, have you lived through our fall up here? 12 and a half
inches of rain since September 1st ??!!??) something
should probably be done in the near future. What once were every
storms that would pop up every thirty or forty years are now once
every three or four year storms. While our weather has really sucked
the last month, it hasn't been anywhere near as destructive as it was
a year ago today.
And that, despite all the complaining
we've done, its actually something about which we should be thankful.
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