MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Tropical storm inundates New England washes out hundreds of roads and bridges, the Governor of Vermont declares the time is now to plan for climate change:
Gov. Shumlin: ...Listen, since I’ve been sworn in as governor just seven months ago, I have dealt with—this is the second major disaster as a result of storms. We had storms this spring that flooded our downtowns and put us through many of the same exercises that we’re going through right now. We didn’t used to get weather patterns like this in Vermont. We didn’t get tropical storms. We didn’t get flash flooding. It wasn’t—you know, our storm patterns weren’t like Costa Rica; they were like Vermont.....All I can tell you is that when you see Vermont covered bridges washing down our rivers, those bridges have been there for hundreds of years, so they survived the floods of the 1928 and '30s. And what that means is that, frankly, we're experiencing flooding now in many areas of Vermont that is unprecedented in record keeping. We went through that just eight weeks ago, where we had our biggest lake, Lake Champlain, at flood levels that have never been recorded in recorded history...how are we going to deal with a climate change future, in terms of transportation infrastructure, where we build, how we plan, how we build our highways and transportation infrastructure?