Daily Archives: August 18, 2018

Homerville explosion from pipeline starting in Lowndes County 2018-08-17

Gas from a tiny pipeline demolished a business and sent three women to the hospital yesterday with third-degree burns, plus it shut down Homerville, Georgia, for a day.

Hosing down remains of Coffee Corner, Clinch County News
Hosing down remains of Coffee Corner, Clinch County News, photo by Laura Nipper.

First and most detailed with this story is Clinch County News, and it has been carried by the Associated Press all over the U.S. and beyond.

Apparently only WCTV thought to ask about the pipeline, which is owned by Atlanta Gas Light, aka AGL Resources, and since Southern Company bought that in 2016, Southern Company Gas. Unless Southern Company comes back with a different route, the maps say that pipeline starts in Lowndes County, Georgia, on my property.

Here is Noelani Mathews of WCTV reporting about the Sabal Trail pipeline in January 2016, from where that AGL pipeline takes off from the Southern Natural Gas (SONAT) pipeline to Nashville, Georgia, which was broken by Continue reading →

Video: Hollin Gammage singing Little River at SuwRK Songwriting Contest

Hollin Gammage, from McMinnville, Tennessee, outside the Suwannee River Basin, sang “Little River,” and won a prize for Best Americana, at the First Annual Suwannee Riverkeeper Songwriting Contest, Saturday, June 23, 2018, at the Salty Snapper, Valdosta, GA.

Hollin Gammage
Hollin Gammage (photo by Bret Wagenhorst)

I think we’ve all been “Half crazy til I hit the water.”

Here’s the video: Continue reading →

Rivers bigger and more important that previously thought 2018-06-28

Rivers and streams cover more of the earth’s surface than previously thought, and likely interchange more CO2 and other gases with the atmosphere than previously thought. WWALS Science Committee Chair Tom Potter found this paper.

George H. Allen and Tamlin M. Pavelsky, Science, 28 Jun 2018, DOI: 10.1126/science.aat0636 Global extent of rivers and streams,

Abstract

The turbulent surfaces of rivers and streams are natural hotspots of biogeochemical exchange with the atmosphere. At the global scale, the total river-atmosphere flux of trace gasses such as CO2 depends on the proportion of Earth’s surface that is covered by the fluvial network, yet the total surface area of rivers and streams is poorly constrained. We used a global database of planform river hydromorphology and a statistical approach to show that global river and stream surface area at mean annual discharge is 773,000 ± 79,000 km2 (0.58 ± 0.06%) of Earth’s non-glaciated land surface, an area 44 ± 15% larger than previous spatial estimates. We found that rivers and streams likely play a greater role in controlling land-atmosphere fluxes than currently represented in global carbon budgets.

Fig. 1. Global River Widths from Landsat (GRWL) Database, Figure
Fig. 1. The Global River Widths from Landsat (GRWL) Database contains more than 58 million measurements of planform river geometry. The line plot on the right shows observed river coverage as a percentage of land area by latitude, and the bottom insets show GRWL at increasing zoom. The rightmost inset shows GRWL orthogonals over which river width was calculated, with only every eighth orthogonal shown for clarity.

You can see the lower Suwannee River in the above figure.

The authors zoom in on the Amazon River Basin in Brazil, but those last two zooms could easily be Continue reading →