Rain
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A leading Aussie poet: Les A. Murray, “February: Feb,” from Les Murray Selected Poems (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2007), 108.
Using steam distillation: Bear and Thomas, “Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” 993–95.
Just like perfume: “Petrichor: Rain’s Piquant Perfume,” Ecos, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia, February 1976, 32.
Ultimately, Bear and Thomas linked: I. J. Bear and R. G. Thomas, “Genesis of Petrichor,” Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, vol. 30, no. 9 (September 1966), 869–79.
They help form the blue haze: William Alyn Johnson, Invitation to Organic Chemistry (Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1999), 261–62.
The aroma is: Bear and Thomas, “Genesis of Petrichor,” 869–79.
They called it “petrichor”: Bear and Thomas, “Nature of Argillaceous Odour,” 993–95.
Despite geosmin and ozone: Author interview with Heather Sims, head perfumer, Arylessence, August 22, 2013.
Many of these are behind the most famous perfumes: Luca Turin, The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 52–53.
Chanel was said to abhor: Lisa Chaney, Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (New York: Viking, 2011), 185.
Beaux said he chose: William Lidwell and Gerry Manasca, Deconstructing Product Design: Exploring the Form, Function, Usability, Sustainability, and Commercial Success of 100 Amazing Products (Minneapolis: Rockport Publishers, 2011), 130.
ELEVEN: CITY RAINS
South Florida’s water supply: Elizabeth D. Purdum, “Florida Waters,” Institute of Science and Public Affairs, Florida State University, April 2002.
It happened that California was searing: “The 1976–1977 California Drought: A Review,” California Department of Water Resources, May 1978.
Historians have variously described: See eminent historians of both California and Florida who have written histories with the title Land of Sunshine: William Deverell and Greg Hise’s Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); and Gary Mormino’s Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008).
In the nineteenth, flood-weary Mexicans: Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 14–15
In L.A. alone: Kevin Roderick, “Deadly Flood of 1938 Left Its Mark on Southland,” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1999.
grizzly bears lumbered down from the hills…sewage-treatment plants upstream: Roderick, “Deadly Flood of 1938”; and Peter J. Westwick and Peter Neushul, The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2013), 173–74.
An estimated 85 percent of Los Angeles: Author interview with Hadley Arnold, March 31, 2014.
Elaborate charts: California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, “Safe Eating Guidelines for Fish from Coastal Areas of Southern California: Ventura Harbor to San Mateo Point,” http://oehha.ca.gov/fish/so_cal/socal061709.html.
“The water will have”: Ian Lovett, “Slaking a Region’s Thirst While Cleaning Its Beaches,” New York Times, April 7, 2013.
The late writer and Everglades champion: Jack E. Davis, An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 522.
devastating, ruining, havoc-wreaking rains: Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 223.
After the 1947 wet season: Ibid., 221.
As with the Los Angeles River: Cynthia Barnett, Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 29.
When I visited the Miami: Author interview with Virginia Walsh, Senior Professional Geologist, Chief Hydrogeology Section, Miami Dade Water and Sewer Department, May 28, 2014.
Scientists say Miami: Southeast Regional Climate Change Compact, “A Unified Sea Level Rise Projection for Southeast Florida,” April 2011, iv.
The water may not wash over flood gates as we imagine: Coral Davenport, “Rising Seas,” New York Times, March 27, 2014.
This rain runoff: State of Washington, Puget Sound Partnership, www.psp.wa.gov.
But the greatest tragedy: Mass, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, 18.
Fleming died: Staff, “Seattle Audio-book ‘Star’ Among Four Dead in Storm,” Seattle Times, December 15, 2006.
Seattle is at the forefront: Office of the City Clerk, Executive Order: 2013-01 Citywide Green Stormwater Infrastructure Goal & Implementation Strategy, March 6, 2013.
The first green street: Seattle Public Utilities, Green Stormwater, Street Edge Alternatives, http://www.seattle.gov/util/MyServices/DrainageSewer/Projects/GreenStormwaterInfrastructure/CompletedGSIProjects/StreetEdgeAlternatives/index.htm.
“Be a light”: Denise Whitaker, “Storm Water Pond Dedicated in Memory of Woman Who Drowned,” KOMO News, May 22, 2013, http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Storm-water-pond-dedicated-in-memory-of-woman-who-drowned-in-basement-208538021.html.
In spring 2014: Ed Fletcher, “Folsom Lake’s Decline Exposes Gold Rush History,” Sacramento Bee, December 31, 2013.
Governor Jerry Brown: Carla Marinucci, “Gov. Jerry Brown Sails into History Books,” SFGate, September 29, 2013.
During a rare deluge: “With Rain in the Forecast, LADWP Urges Customers to Turn Off Sprinklers and Save Water,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, February 25, 2014.
Angelenos use far less: Paul Rogers and Nicholas St. Fleur, “California Drought: Database Shows Big Difference Between Water Guzzlers and Sippers,” San Jose Mercury News, February 7, 2014.
Hundreds of acres: Stephanie Pincetl and Tim Papandreou, “Los Angeles, the Improbable Sustainable City,” California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, sustainablecommunities.environment.ucla.edu/2011/09/los-angeles-the-improbable-sustainable-city/.
Bolstered by a cadre of young conservation-design gurus: See the nonprofit Watershed Management Group, watershedmg.org.
If we do not lower the carbon emissions that are warming the Earth: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Climate Impacts in the Southwest,” http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-adaptation/southwest.html.
The city has launched an ambitious retrofit: Author interview with Mark Hanna, September 29, 2014; and City of Los Angeles Stormwater Program, “LADWP Announces Stormwater Capture Master Plan,” March 28, 2014.
“The work on the river”: Author interview with Hadley Arnold, Executive Director, Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University, March 31, 2014.
TWELVE: STRANGE RAIN
“were afraid to move in case we trod on them”: Anecdote based on firstperson accounts recorded by Paul Simons, “Raining Frogs and Monsters: Tornado-like Waterspouts May Explain Showers of Fish and Snails and Other Strange Downpours. But Do They Hold a Clue to the Mystery of Nessie?” The Guardian, November 11, 1993; Michael Allaby, Tornadoes (New York: Facts on File, 2004), 113; and Bob Rickard and John Michell, The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena (New York: Penguin, 2007), 25.
When the rain let up: David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace, The New Book of Lists: The Original Compendium of Curious Information (New York: Canongate, 2005), 566.
“In Paeonia and Dardania, it has, they say, before now rained frogs”: Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet of the Learned of Athenaeus, vol. 2 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 526–27, full text accessed via University of Wisconsin digital library, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Literature/Literature-idx?id=Literature.AthV2.
In 1946, the professional skeptic: Bergen Evans, The Natural History of Nonsense (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1
946), 25; and Jerry Dennis, It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes: Four Seasons of Natural Phenomena and Oddities of the Sky (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 47.
Reports of frog rain continue: Liwei Fu, “Strange Storms: Frogs, Spiders and Fish,” Epoch Times, story updated January 6, 2011, http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/strange-storms-frogs-fish-insects-from-skies-6468.html.
In 2010, hapless frogs fell: Kathryn Quinn, “Raining Frogs,” Romanian Times, June 22, 2010.
The same year, frogs and fish: Cosmas Butunyi, “Kenya: Experts Warn of More ‘Fish and Frogs’ Rain,” The Nation, October 5, 2010.
“I have personally never been so fortunate”: E. W. Gudger, “Do Fishes Fall from the Sky?” The Scientific Monthly, vol. 29, no. 6 (December 1929), 526.
The sky rained mud: Joe Hasler, “Weird Stories of Objects Falling from the Sky—Explained,” Popular Mechanics, September 17, 2009.
Australian scientists have some of the best: Peter J. Unmack, “Biogeography of Australian Freshwater Fishes,” Journal of Biogeography, vol. 28, no. 9 (September 1, 2001), 1065.
A tornado reported: Chris Dolce, “Where Frogs, Fish and a Cow Fell from the Sky,” Weather.com, August 23, 2013, http://www.weather.com/news/tornado-central/frogs-fish-raining-down-20130411?pageno=2.
The strange rain of Labor Day 1969: “Charlotte Rains Golf Balls,” St. Petersburg Times, September 3, 1969.
Popular Mechanics magazine speculated: Hasler, “Weird Stories of Objects Falling from the Sky—Explained.”
Those included frog and fish falls: Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort (New York: Penguin, 2008; orig. pub. 1919), 29.
Perhaps there was an invisible: Ibid., 90.
Many of Fort’s pet phenomena: John S. Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice: The Very Real Threat of Comet and Asteroid Bombardment (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 15.
The biologist and bee expert: Thomas D. Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 59.
He later worked with the Harvard chemical-weapons expert: Tomas D. Seeley et al., “Yellow Rain,” Scientific American, vol. 253, issue 3 (September 1985), 128–37.
Other scientists and former CIA agents: Paul Hillmer, A People’s History of the Hmong (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010), section 5.
Fort could have told them: Fort, The Book of the Damned, 63.
“My own impositivist acceptances”: Ibid., 36–37.
Louis and Kumar hypothesized: Godfrey Louis and A. Santhosh Kumar, “The Red Rain Phenomenon of Kerala and Its Possible Extraterrestrial Origin,” Astrophysics and Space Science, vol. 302, no. 1 (April 2006), 175–87.
When exposed to the extreme heat: Rajkumar Gangappa, Milton Wainwright, A. Santhosh Kumar, and Godfrey Louis, “Growth and Replication of Red Rain Cells at 121°C and Their Red Fluorescence,” Conference Proceedings, vol. 7819, Instruments, Methods, and Missions for Astrobiology XIII, September 2010.
Some children wandering: Chares Pellegrino, The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010), 29.
It would take survivors years: Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 3.
It was some of the first proof: Ranjeet S. Sokhi, ed., World Atlas of Atmospheric Pollution (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 16.
Given the exact same amount of water vapor: Ahrens, Meteorology Today, 134–35.
In the countryside, he wrote: Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, quoted in Peter Thorsheim, “Interpreting the London Fog Disaster of 1952,” in Erna Melanie DuPuis, ed., Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 155.
When a pea-souper claimed 1,150 lives: Ahrens, Meteorology Today, 462.
People, press, and politicians: Peter Thorsheim, “Interpreting the London Fog Disaster of 1952” in DuPuis, Smoke and Mirrors, 158.
Ultimately, the Great Fog killed 12,000 people: Christopher Stevens, “The Pea Souper That Killed 12,000: How the Great Smog Choked London 60 Years Ago This Week,” Daily Mail, December 5, 2012.
Facing intense public pressure: Thorsheim, “Interpreting the London Fog Disaster of 1952” in DuPuis, Smoke and Mirrors, 160.
Not until the Clean Air Act: American Meteorological Society, “A Look at U.S. Air Pollution Laws and Their Amendments: 1955, 1963, 1970, 1990,” http://www.ametsoc.org/sloan/cleanair/cleanairlegisl.html.
Engineers at the Metropolitan Transit Authority: P. Aarne Vesilind and Thomas D. DiStefano, Controlling Environmental Pollution: An Introduction to the Technologies, History, and Ethics (Lancaster, Pa.: DEStech Publications, 2006), 335.
Black rains and black snow: R. D. Gupta, Environmental Pollution: Hazards and Control (New Delhi, India: Concept Publishing Company, 2006), 23–24.
Residents reported that the rains: Fu Jianfeng, “The Black Rain in Shenzhen,” East-South-West-North, August 24, 2007, http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20070826_1.htm.
For nearly a century: Chris C. Park, Acid Rain: Rhetoric and Reality (Oxford: Methuen and Co., 1987; citation is to the U.S. edition, New York: Routledge, 2013), 6.
In the 1960s, they began to reveal themselves in Germany’s Black Forest: Ibid., 100–101.
Some streams: Christine Alewell et al., “Are There Signs of Acidification Reversal in Freshwaters of the Low Mountain Ranges in Germany?” Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, vol. 5, no. 3 (2001), 368.
These drops, in turn: Ahrens, Meteorology Today, 483.
The sickest areas: Park, Acid Rain, 3.
In the 1960s, American scientists sampling rainfall: Gene E. Likens and F. Herbert Bormann, “Acid Rain: A Serious Regional Environmental Problem,” Science, June 14, 1974, 1176–79.
In an article in the journal Science: Ibid.
They sounded the alarm: Ibid.
Today it’s well under 8.9 million: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Acid Rain and Related Programs: 15 Years of Results 1995 to 2009,” October 2010.
In places most prone: Meg Marquardt, “Neutralizing the Rain: After Much Success in the Battle Against Acid Rain, Challenges Remain,” Earth, June 2012.
Foresters believe: Charles Driscoll et al., “Acid Rain Revisited: Advances in Scientific Understanding Since the Passage of the 1970 and 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments,” Hubbard Brook Research Foundation, 2001.
Lakes are healing: Kristin Waller et al., “Long-term Recovery of Lakes in the Adirondack Region of New York to Decreases in Acidic Deposition,” Atmospheric Environment, vol. 46 (January 2012), 56–64.
Back at the Hubbard Brook: Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, Acid Precipitation Trends, www.hubbardbrook.org.
Scientists who track contaminants in the atmosphere: National Atmospheric Deposition Program, http://.nadp.sws.uiuc.edu/.
The largest premodern statue: Christina Larson, “China Takes First Steps in the Fight Against Acid Rain,” Yale Environment 360, October 28, 2010.
At the turn of the century, China surpassed the United States: Zifeng Lu et al., “Sulfur Dioxide and Primary Carbonaceous Aerosol Emissions in China and India, 1996–2010,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, vol. 11, September 2011, 9848.
In South Florida, studies have shown the massive drainage: Curtis H. Marshall, Roger A. Pielke Sr., Louis T. Steyaert, and Debra A. Willard, “The Impact of Anthropogenic Land-Cover Change on the Florida Peninsula Sea Breezes and Warm Season Weather,” Monthly Weather Review, vol. 132 (January 2004), 51.
At the other extreme: Matt McGrath, “Reservoirs Make Local Flooding Worse, Says Study,” BBC News, December 14, 2012.
“As we change”: Dr. Jerad Bales, U.S. Geological Survey, “Water, Energy, and Food Production: Observing, Understanding, Forecasting,” University of Florida Water Institute Symposium, remarks and Q&A, February 11, 2014.
Scientists analyzing precipitation: Robert K. Kaufman
n, Karen C. Seto, Annemarie Schneider, Zouting Liu, Liming Zhou, and Weile Wang, “Climate Response to Rapid Urban Growth: Evidence of a Human-Induced Precipitation Deficit,” Journal of Climate, vol. 20, May 15, 2007, 2299–306.
In the United States: J. Marshall Shepherd, Harold Pierce, and Andrew J. Negri, “Rainfall Modification by Major Urban Areas: Observations from Spaceborne Rain Radar on the TRMM Satellite,” Journal of Applied Meteorology, vol. 41 (July 2002), 689–701.
Skyscrapers can have: Author interview with Bob Bornstein, San Jose State University Department of Meteorology and Climate Science, July 29, 2014.
how the emissions we send: Global Carbon Project, Carbon Budget 2014, http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/.
“believed in ‘Megonia’”: Steven Gaydos, “Fort, ‘Wild Talents’ Were Major Influences on Anderson,” Variety, February 7, 2000.
Because they require both land and aquatic habitat: Kerry Kriger, “Save the Frogs!” http://www.savethefrogs.com/why-frogs/index.html.
After the nuptials: Naresh Mitra, “Croaking Consorts in Rain Call,” Times of India, April 10, 2013.
Among the Zuni: Ann Marshall, Rain: Native Expressions from the American Southwest (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2000), 69.
Nineteenth-century science journals: David P. Badger, Frogs (Stillwater, Minn.: Voyageur Press, 1995), 23.
Frogs have a “barometric propensity”: Book review of St. George Mivart’s The Common Frog (London: Macmillan and Co., 1875), Quarterly Journal of Science and Annals of Metallurgy, Engineering, Industrial Arts, Manufactures, and Technology, vol. 5 (January 1875), 99.
In Louisiana, the Creole people: Lafcadio Hearn, “Gombo Zhèbes”: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs, Selected from Six Creole Dialects (New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885), 22.
The weatherwise chorus: Badger, Frogs, 72.
Those that lay their eggs: Archie Carr, A Naturalist in Florida: A Celebration of Eden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 183.
Nearly two hundred frog species have vanished: David B. Wake and Vance T. Vrendenburg, “Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction? A View from the World of Amphibians,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, colloquium paper, vol. 105, issue supp. 1, 11466.