Dakota Today

**Nova runs the Mega Volcano show again

Sure seemed like I had seen some of the NOVA program broadcast tonight before.  I started to see hits on Dakota Today from Google searches for "Lake Toba".

Anyway, tonight I saw the whole NOVA program, but if you want to see the Dakota Today post made
months ago, check

Dakota Today on NOVA's MegaVolcano Show Sept 26, 2006

Breathing sulphuric acid and volcanic ash glass particles is not good for your health. Hope we have no immediate surprise Mega Volcano in the neighborhood such as Yellowstone.

Anyway.. interesting show, but now and then Public Broadcasting "detective-type" shows scientific, historical, whatever take an inordinate amount of time to get to the point. "Building suspense in Science Reporting" is kind of an oxymoronic phrase.
**Stay tuned as we build suspense in the wait for real SD news such as SD Democratic women whining about Tom Daschle endorsing Sen. Obama who will not be the next woman president-- Doug Wiken

**Let's destroy a good swimming pool and raise taxes to build a new mistake

The powers that be in Winner SD are busy hyping a new project.  A new swimming pool.  Step one was destroying the old bathhouse rather than repairing it.  Fait Accompli that act.  It is much like the previous idiotic plan here to demolish a solid old school building with a new piece of poorly planned and poorly placed junk construction built for students who are no longer here.  That plan was driven by local desire to sell concrete and carpet, etc.  Never mind that it was the economic equivalent of a couple dozen people dying here as the bond payments disappeared from the local economy.

But the local "progress" faction learned some truly scabby tactics from that  and whoppee they are back on the road with a new swimming pool idea financed by taxes on local houses and visitors dumb enough to buy food or drink here or stay in a motel here. 

A crop of these signs have popped up on some lawns in Winner, SD.  An anonymous tract has been mailed to everybody with  a utility account in  Winner with  no return address and  no sender name on it. u Previously we received a letter indicating supporters included Gene Grossenburg and Dr. Berg.  Grossenburgs sell concrete.  When the school project was approved, Gene's son Barry was on the school board.  As soon as the project was approved, he resigned from the school board.  Hmmm.

This is a foolish, poorly planned and presented wasteful plan.  The existing pool has one foot thick concrete walls.  There are cracks in the bottom which require annual patching.  That is not a reason for spending several million dollars and adding another local tax.  The claim is that tens of thousands of gallons of water are leaking from underground and under pool or pool deck rusted pipes. 

That leakage problem can be solved for next to nothing by plugging all such pipes where they run into the pool and adding above deck plastic pipe for suction and return lines from the filtering system which can than be inspected for leaks easily.

Instead of building a new summer-only pool that has piping underground again, spend money to enclose the existing pool in a building and add an access "tunnel" to the nearby high school so that students can have swimming as part of the athletic curriculum.  At least it would provide a useful skill which can never be said for football and other contact sports.  As far as I can tell, nobody from this school has died early because the did not play football, but several have died early around here because they never learned to swim.

Enclosing the old pool will help stabilize the system and make it useful year around and also reduce evaporation from the pool water surface.  Building another pool to replace a pool with foot-thick walls and hundreds of square yards of existing concrete deck is very wasteful of materials and taxpayer resources.  If the existing pool is not going to be used, the pool site should be located elsewhere and at least the hundreds of cubic yards of existing concrete there be used as a foundation for some other new community building built on the pool walls as a foundation.

If anybody gives a damn about not wasting taxpayer money, I will put up an album of photos of the existing pool here at Dakota Today.

*** Stay tuned even if your only ideas of "progress" involve wasting tax dollars for self aggrandizement--- but no plaques on the wall of this blog for memorializing the chief tax wasters-- Doug Wiken

**Wet Snow in Winner April 25, 2008

So much for the mist and light possible chance of snow forecast last night. A couple inches of partly cloudy early this morning and it kept falling until around noon. Photo below shows some of it mostly before sun had done it's work. By now, the ground heat and sun has melted a lot of it. Must have been around a half inch of actual moisture in it. Photo below.

And, the snow shovels had already been packed away. South Dakota of all places...indeed.

***Stay tuned even if you don't think snow and weather is the cat's pajamas----Doug Wiken

**Storms and hits on SD Highway Cameras at DT

Not much of a surprise to anybody in South Dakota that our weather goes up and down like a roller coaster. Might be shirtsleeve weather one day and a day or two later we may be "enjoying" a foot of snow. Whatever, the TypePad hit counter shows a post here on the SD Hiway Cameras generates more hits when the weather may be causing driving problems.

It would be nice if South Dakota and perhaps the SD Rural Electrics and Rural Telephone coops could get together to add a few more photo sites such as down here in South Central South Dakota where the weather radar sometimes grossly misses actual local conditions. While SD DOT is at it, they might think about adding some weather data to the photos. Below is a not too good suggestion, but might be worth somebody with more influence than me pushing a bit.

And, below just in case we get some more nasty driving weather is the link to those cameras...even if they do ignore southern South Dakota.

New Window LINK to SD Highway Cameras

**Stay tuned even if my lunar eclipse photos were over-exposed--- Doug Wiken

Winner Spring Winter or Snow and Mud

I watched KELO weather for the last week or so with doom-filled projections for monstrous snows and thought their initial predictions would put most of it in SE South Dakota. But, I cleaned up most of the tools outside anyway. Then when the snow hit, there wasn't much...until it hit again and again. I don't know, there may be something between 6 inches and a foot of snow. A lot of it melted on the bottom making mud out of the township road and also making it very hard to move the snow off after my little Mitsubishi Eclipse proved it was not a snow plow. Anyway, I got it shoveled out and moved enough that I could clear off most of the snow with the tractor. Below is a photo I took this morning in Winner a few hours before they got around to blading the snow off the streets.

The sun is shining now and if the wind slows down a bit, the area would be pretty tolerable. Sounds like next week is going to be more like actual spring. This snow seems wet enough, most of it may stay where it fell which would be some good moisture for the area.

My son-in-law said he saw something like 20 cars and two semi-truck-trailers in the ditch along the interstate in eastern SD last night. The slush on the roads out here yesterday could have pulled vehicles into the ditch, but I haven't heard yet if there were any serious crashes around here. Electric power flickered off and on so that hospitals, etc. had to switch to standby power generators.

**Stay tuned. The weather is always a topic even if it is never interesting to anybody except the victims themselves--- Doug Wiken

**It is that kind of a day

Not really a bad day, but one of those depressing gray days. Years ago, we lived in Rochester, NY. The weather was drizzle gray for something like 40 days. The local news rag noted that there had been a statistically significant increase in the death rate after a dozen or so of those days.

A few hundred thousand years of evolution haven't removed weather effects on mental state. Anyway, the photo below gives a pretty good idea of the not so bad, but not so good weather today.

Time to turn on a reading light and see what is new in the daily papers.

**Stay tuned in a few months I will be griping about the unbearable heat---Doug Wiken

**Golly Gee Whiz, That Bombardier Plane N343DF carried Tom Brokaw

Some of you may have noticed the photo of the cattle and the jet plane a few days ago here at Dakota Today. The Plane N343DF gets around the world if a Google search means anything. It dropped into Winner, SD carrying Tom Brokaw and several other hunters according to the breathless story in the Winner Advocate.

The cutline under the airplane photo in the paper indicated the plane was the largest that had ever flown into the Winner Regional Airport...probably true even if it was called Wyly field up until a few months ago. The story writer called it a "superior" plane. My guess is "Bombardier" was said, but not heard. Anyway. More to the point, the story indicates the plane weighed 98,000 pounds. My recollection from discussion with an engineer at the airport when the runway was poured indicated the maximum load was around 40,000 pounds and they had only gotten that high a weight limit for such a short runway because they assumed the snow removal trucks might weigh that much.

So, it was indeed a large plane..paper says that the wings extended 10 feet beyond the edges of the runway. It as also possibly just a bit too big or at least too heavy. Must have had good brakes and plenty of takeoff power...I guess a plane that probably costs between $20 and $50 million oughta be hot.

Those must have been some damned expensive pheasants. The plane returned to Teterboro Airport in NJ in perhaps two or three hours after leaving here flying at 45,000 feet over 500mph. I guess Tom Brokaw and friends are some of those people with more money than they know what to do with (even if he might not end a sentence with a preposition).

The paper also had a follow up on the SD Regent visit to Winner. Apparently nobody asked any questions if the newspaper report was correct. I guess when I attend meetings and then read the Dan Bechtold stories about those same events, I wonder if we were actually on the same planet at the time. More on that tomorrow when I am actually awake.

If you are awake before that, see if you can find out the weight limits for planes landing at the Winner Regional Airport.

*** Stay tuned even if you fly mighty low and slow and on both feet as well--- Doug Wiken

**Sights and Sounds of the changing seasons

I have a sight of the changing season..that is a photo. I don't have the sound. The sound was the first time this fall that I have heard cranes squawking as they were heading south. They were flying in a cloud or above it or so high that I could not see them. Contrails of a couple jets were visible, but only the squawking from the sky from the cranes. But, with camera in hand, another sign of the changing season was obvious:
Click on image for a slightly larger version.

And, downright chilly this morning too. Enough ice on car windows to require scraping. Forgetting to close a small window can make a large indoor temperature difference as well.

**Stay tuned for more on the Board of Regents visit to Winner, SD-- Doug Wiken

**Black Hills Flood and no Cloud Seeding to Blame it on

Hermosa, SD on the edge of the Black Hills and not so far south of Rapid City, SD has been devastated by a flood caused by a lot of rain in a hurry washing rattlesnakes out of their holes and off their rocks and attracting politicians to the aftermath.

I wish the people of Hermosa the best. They have gotten a dose of the worst and don't need any more of that.
BUT, I am remembering that after the Rapid City Flood 35 years or so ago, that cloud seeding was blamed and the wingnuts of the time went about nuts circulating petitions around South Dakota blaming both the Rapid City flood and the prairie drought on the the cloud seeding.

Well, Hermosa got a dose of something like the Rapid City flood even if the weather conditions may or may not have been the same, but as far as I know, no cloud seeding was involved.

No matter what engineers may say about flooding possibilities in the Black Hills or immediately surrounding area or perhaps any mountain area, when a canyon or series of canyons with mountains around them collect rain like a huge funnel and then dump it out the creek or stream which may otherwise be a trickle, there is going to be a torrent of water.

If nothing else comes out of this, it might be another message that it just does not make sense to build anywhere close to a stream or on a stream bed in the Black Hills or on the edges of the Black Hills unless you are many feet about the stream. Streams there can turn from a trickle to a torrent in literally minutes.

As a politician or two has said, it is a miracle that nobody was killed in this torrent and deluge. But then politicians like to find miracles and often mention God in the next phrase or sentence. Frankly I think miracle is over used. Damn good luck following damn bad luck might be a better description of what happened. But, no votes in such none miraculous descriptions.

**Stay tuned even if you worry more about lightening than flooding where you are--- Doug Wiken

**Cloud photo from northern Tripp County, SD..maybe mammatus

A neighbor from about 15 miles north of here got a photo of one of the clouds around Tripp County a few nights ago. Not sure if this is one that was blowing around when we got about 3/4 inches of rain near Winner or from the night about 3.5 inches of rain fell someplace south of Presho, SD.

Anyway, the photo was taken a few miles north of Ideal, SD with the sun low on the western horizon and lighting the clouds from beneath. I saw similar clouds with similar lighting, but had no camera at the time.

Click image for a larger version. Thanks to Lowdon Heller of Ideal, SD for the image. He has a blog of his own worth checking. Ideal News and Views is in the list to left.

A few things we do see around here include clouds and sunrises and sunsets. Now and then fog and sun. A few mornings ago there was fog. It was just rolling off the hill and farm to the south west of us. I was a bit late and got something more like a haze instead of the rolling fog.

Click on the image for a larger version.

**Stay tuned even if weather clouds your mind rather than excites it--- Doug Wiken