Mother Nature Wins, Again

Kevin Brown, Ag. Conservation Technician, BCCD
​Texas.  Need I say any more?  We all know what I am referring to.  Can you imagine?  My heart goes out to those affected.  The power and the magnitude of what Mother Nature can do is just mind-boggling.  With water, you can actually touch it.  You can feel it.  But what power it has with the right conditions.  Think about wind too.  This is a little side-track, but think about the fact that you can’t really feel or touch air.  You can’t hold it.  It is just “nothing”, UNTIL it isn’t.  It can rip homes and buildings and trees apart in the blink of an eye.  That is pretty astonishing for something that you can’t even “feel” most of the time.

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Back to water.  I have been at the Conservation District now for over 12 years, and I have learned a lot!  I will not pretend to know everything, but as the old saying goes, “I know enough to be dangerous”.  For those who study it, water is actually predictable.  Years ago, I watched a movie called Backdraft.  It was about fire, but it showed you that fire also is predictable.  To me, it is just fire, and it burns things.  To people that understand it, it has a personality, for lack of a better term.  Water does too.  From my simplistic mind, let’s examine a few things.  Water flows downhill.  The more water you have (concentrated), the more issues you have.  The steeper the terrain you have (and we have plenty), the more velocity you have.  The more velocity you have, the more issues you have.  Add volume and velocity together, and you have a disaster just waiting to happen.

I used to watch some of the shows on TV where they were buying and selling homes and inevitably on a lot of those shows the host would have a “special surprise” for the buyers.  The surprise would be that they would walk to the backyard and show them a nice, gentle, babbling brook out back.  The customer would just fall in love.  They would say, “I never dreamed that, within our price range, we could afford something so nice, and even get a beautiful stream too”.  At the same time, I would be yelling at the TV, “Run!  Run for your lives!!!!!  Do NOT buy this house!”  Why?  Some day that beautiful, babbling brook is going to become a ranging torrent of flooding waters and YOU will pay the price.  It WILL happen.  Case and point- Texas.

We, as human beings, have this notion that we can just do whatever we want, where we want.  We build multi-million-dollar homes on the coast where you know they will get hit by a hurricane at some point.  We also continually build homes in flood zones.  People continually live in homes in flood zones. (I am sure the people that sent their beloved children to camp had no idea it was built in a floodplain in “flash flood alley”.)  You certainly can’t protect yourself from every event, but you can tip the odds in your favor by not tempting Mother Nature.  We need to understand that Mother Nature still wins and being in areas where (x) happens is not the place to be.  That can be easier said than done, but a lot of us have been through it.  From mid-year 2017 until 2023 we saw a LOT of water.  It was way over the average.  Many streams, and people’s homes, will never be the same again.  Hopefully, those same areas will not see that again for at least a generation.   However, it will happen again.  If you have to live in these areas, prepare yourself the best way you can.
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The Bradford County Conservation District is committed to helping people manage resources wisely.  You can visit the Bradford County Conservation District at 200 Lake Rd in Wysox across from the Wysox Fire Hall. Contact us at (570) 485-3144 or visit our web page at www.bccdpa.com.