Reporting as Curation: Nebraska Flooding

This year has been one for the record books in Nebraska — at-least meteorologically . As the Omaha-World Herald reports, the period between September through February was the fifth-wettest fall-winter on record, this February the eighth-coldest on record. Thats not to mention that this recent deluge is responsible for Nebraska’s worst flooding in 50 years.

This flooding is due to a bomb cyclone, the meterological equivalent of a bass drop. When a low pressure system drops at-least 24 millibars in 24 hours, it undergoes the rather terrifyingly named explosive cyclogenesis. This pressure drop makes the ensuing storm stronger and can even approach a category 1 hurricane in terms of wind and rain.

As the waters recede, Its hard not to notice the how utterly un-drivable many of the roads underneath are. And it seems that this is not just the case of a single storm’s damage but indicative of a legacy of poor infrastructure management.

But it seems that this is part of a larger narrative of how poorly infrastructure has been managed in Nebraska recently. Take, for example, the snow storms of this past season:

In the heightened national attention, perhaps pressure to fix the roads will finally lead to serious investment. As it seems, the current government is slow to admit fault and responsibility.