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Pat Shingleton: "Damage to the Rivers and Canning"

5 years 6 months 1 week ago Friday, September 14 2018 Sep 14, 2018 September 14, 2018 5:00 PM September 14, 2018 in Pat Shingleton Column
By: Pat Shingleton:

On September 16, 2005, Ophelia scraped the Carolina coast with winds at 85 m.p.h. Carolinians remember 1999 and Hurricanes Dennis, Floyd and Irene. Recovery operations from those storms lasted through the end of 1999. The nation's largest lagoonal estuary at Pamlico Sound in North Carolina was also altered. For six weeks, the entire water content of Pamlico Sound was replaced by flooding. The University of North Carolina's Institute of Marine Sciences released its research on the effects of the storms. Pamlico Sound has only four small inlets that restrict water exchange to the sea. What occurred over the six-week period normally would take a year, displacing three-fourths of the sound's volume. Salinity declined by two-thirds and the sound's annual intake of nitrogen increased more than 50 percent. Pamlico Sound is a valuable mid-Atlantic fish nursery. Numerous marine organisms died then, because of the storms, and it is expected to be replicated because of Florence. In closing, it’s nearly harvest time in south Louisiana, especially for the sugar cane crop. In our "younger days," the purchase of the “deep-freezer” by my dad in the 1960s became a storage locker for the fruits and vegetables from our property in Ellwood City, PA.  Fruit trees included: apple, pear, peach, plum and a grape arbor; producing enough fruit for jams and jellies and an apple pie throughout the year.  Our garden provided an abundance of tomatoes, beans, potatoes, carrots, lettuce and rhubarb. In September, tomatoes were “pureed” into juice, a recipe my brother Kevin still uses in his famous spaghetti sauce. I remember the sweet corn harvest and the assembly-line process of ears being blanched, cut from the cob, packed and loaded into the deep freeze.

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