At 10:00 AM on the first Tuesday of the month, the county tests its emergency sirens.

Ashley with her head tipped back on mouth in a little circle, howling along with the emergency sirens

The very first month we had Ashley, we happened to be walking right under one of the sirens at the moment it started up. Ashley started howling along with it, which made me laugh. And Ashley looked a little embarrassed, thinking she’d done something wrong. I didn’t want that, so I started howling as well.

Since then, Ashley and I (and Jackie when she’s with us) have howled along with the emergency sirens every month.

Our neighbors have not complained, although I suppose they think we’re rather weird.

I don’t get why people are treating Helene like some unpredictable catastrophe, rather than just the way things are now.

I’m like, “Hey, it’s going to be like this all the time from now on—either impending disaster, disaster occurring, trying to rescue people from the disaster, or recovering from disaster—from now on.”

It’s weird that people don’t understand that. I mean, it’s so obvious to me, but people are still treating each new disaster as an unpredictable one-off.

Although some people are getting a clue. Zillow, for example, will now show climate risks for property listings in the US.

There’s a small creek that runs behind Winfield Village. It feeds the ponds in the Lake Park subdivision, and then the water flows on to the Embarras River.

It usually has only three or four inches of water in it, but after heavy rain it swells quite a bit.

A swollen creek, overflowing its banks enough to reach nearby trees
This gives you some idea how swollen the creek is.
The weir in our little creek is completely under water
Less impressive to you than to me, because you don’t know that there’s a weir across the creek which is completely hidden by the high water.