Achenblog named a post after you. <g>
"Rainy Day People
The forecast today calls for fungus, with scattered mildew. There may be sustained periods of mold, and isolated outbreaks of flesh-eating bacteria. The National Weather Service has declared a Severe Mushroom Watch for the entire Mid-Atlantic region. Experts have lichened the situation to living in a rain forest.
As always when we have a weather event like this, it's not the rain, per se, that's the problem. It's the large amount of water coming from the sky. It's the H2O, in liquid form, that literally falls from dark clouds, all the way to the ground, moistening surfaces and pooling in a manner that is closely related to puddling. Scientists warn that low-lying areas, ditches, deep holes, and floodplains may be particularly prone to flooding.
The worst storms are so saturated with moisture that they carry copious quantities of H3O, which can't evaporate even in bright sunshine. The molecular structure of H30 gives the substance the characteristic of sogginess that is three orders of magnitude more liquefied than water that is merely wet.
Oddly enough, few people understand the hydrological cycle (precipitation, evaporation, vitrification, ionization) or grasp the fundamental principles of the Law of Conservation of Dampness. They don't realize that when you mop up a wet space with a towel you are merely transferring the liquid water from one object to another, and that the only way to have a net decrease in H2O and H3O in the home is to get out the hair dryer and start blasting everything in sight. That turns the liquid water into a plasma, which can return to the sky by riding lightning bolts back up into the clouds.
Even then, there's zero net change in the amount of water in the system, but the whole point of dampness mitigation is to try to transfer the water from your own basement into the basement of your neighbors and of people you've never met, far away. The corollary is that, when you hear that someone has a flooded basement, you should be thrilled that that's just more water that you personally don't have to worry will fall from the sky onto your home. All of this is basic science and logic, but our schools don't teach this anymore because its not "hydrologically correct.""
blog.washingtonpost.com |
