Geoscience Education in the Mountain State:
CATS Environmental Geology Telecourse, Fall 1999,
Show 1 Transcript

CATS Telecourse
Environmental Geology
September 13, 1999

Dr. Bob: Greetings! Here we are again. It is time for our new presentation this semester, "Environmental Geology" with Dr. Deb Hemler. I'm Bob Behling and Tom Repine is in the back manning telephones and taking care of all types of additional activities as we come on air for you today. Deb, we're at quite a few sites this time throughout the State. And we'll get a map showing where everybody is and where they want to be for their transportation and such. So we're gonna be here with you for six formal sessions that constitute the 3 credit course. Then, four additional that we're calling adjunct activities that folks may or may not want to view live but will be on the air and taping it. We'll fill you in on all that additional material. Some other requirements including, for those who take the course for the 3 credits a one weekend activity. We're going to be doing it twice for what we call exploratories, others might call it a field trip. It'll be a Friday/Saturday type event and folks have to go to at least one of those. We have folks live here in our studio and I guess we're ready to roll.

Let's look first on the overhead for our outline of what we're going to do today. The registration information, it'll take some time to put that together and then the package that I had mentioned of six on-air presentations, always live, if everything works electronically. You know how that goes. Four adjunct programs and one of the two exploratories we'll run. Just a brief statement of what CATS Environmental Geology is to be about and then a discussion of earth materials. We'll have a break and the break may be an emerging situation and it evolves as we move along. Then we're going to talk about the east coast of the United States. Hurricanes being so very timely and it fits in so nicely. We will be going off air at ten minutes to eight. We will have a break of about ten minutes or so and then we have to go off air at ten minutes to eight because of another group coming in. Deb, why don't you take charge here and let's start rolling with the first information.

Dr. Deb: The one thing that you need to make sure you do, is if you are taking this for credit or not taking this for credit you must please do the pretest. This pretest is not a graded event. This is just a way of collecting data to see how far you come during the course of the semester. So please make sure that everybody, facilitators, everyone at your site takes the pretest. Those are to be returned to Phyllis in the envelopes that have been provided to you. Do not send those to us or to Tom Repine. The other thing you need to do today is register (goes to overhead to view information). You should have in front of you a West Virginia Extending Learning Form and the information you need to fill into that. There is a course number. You need to fill in the number provided there. The subject of course, geology. The section 6W1. This is a three credit course and then a grade option. You give #2. (Putting sample on overhead) Fill in those boxes appropriately. If you're using a credit card you need to remember to circle the credit card and fill the information in and make sure you sign it. These are to be returned to Tom Repine by the facilitators. If you're filling out by check and not credit card make sure you make that check payable to WVU and make sure your social security number is on that check. Sometimes we have tracking problems and that alleviates the problem. Those of you that have never been enrolled at WVU or are who not currently enrolled at WVU, you need to pay an additional $10.00 fee that is to activate your record. If you just graduated with a Master's or a Doctorate or an undergraduate degree you must now reactivate. Even though you were a student, if you just received a degree you now have to reactivate that and pay the $10.00.

Dr. Bob: Going to other Universities does not apply. It has to work through WVU or else we have real troubles getting you back into the system in a timely fashion. If we miss a certain cutoff date we cannot, even though you've done all the information, put you back into this particular course this semester. It takes a lot of gymnastics to get things done. We're taking special care this time and we'll be calling if the need arrives to get this done real well, real fast.

Dr. Deb: You're going to make out a check for $99.00 to take the class. If you are not currently enrolled you make out a check for an additional $10.00 for a total of $109.00. You'll need to staple the check to the form. So, facilitators, make sure that you get that finished and send the check back to Tom Repine. The next thing we're going to do is put up a list of facilitators and the various sites that we have around the State.

Dr. Bob: This is just the start.

Dr. Deb: Hopefully, at very convenient places around the State. If you didn't, or weren't aware of a site that is closer to you, here's a chance to check and make sure that there's not one that is more convenient. The Morgantown site to be announced, that's Tom Repine. He's the one you'll communicate with directly or myself if you contact me at the University. You can see the 18 sites around the State. Facilitators you need to make sure you get a list of all participants. Get their name, their mailing address, their telephone and if they have e-mail get that as well. If their taking this for a credit or non-credit option. Get this information to Tom Repine. Mail this tomorrow or you can e-mail it to him. That takes care of some of the registration information. Now we have to take a look at the course outline. If you have any questions about the broadcast your facilitator has a phone number. That phone number is the 1-800 number with the passcode to get through. This will put you through to Tom Repine and then Tom can then forward the question on to us or we can handle it during the body of the broadcast. If you have a question after the broadcast there is a toll free number at the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, 1-800-WVGEOLOgy or you can e-mail Tom Repine and the address is repine@geosrv.wvnet.edu. A really important part of this show is the fact that we do have a web site for you to access: http://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/. That will get you there and you can click on the education button or you can just type in the whole address and that will get you directly to the telecourse web page. This will have a lot of useful information over the course of the semester and what we try to do is get transcripts of the broadcast on. If you have a question and you're not quite sure about something that Dr. Bob said or I covered and you'd like to read it again or see it again, this is a valuable place to go. Make sure that you check out the web site whenever possible.

Dr. Bob: I could give you my e-mail address also but it takes me awhile with all the other courses that I'm teaching I'm not always as close to the communication link. For that reason we work it all through Tom and Tom and I are together several times everyday, either on the phone in addition to all the e-mail that he'll dump to either Deb or I. We try to make it one focal point for you. We found as we fine tuned activities in working with the telecourses that this really works the best for you. That's the main part.

Dr. Deb: The next thing we want to talk about is taking a look a the syllabus essentially which is on the web site. (Goes to overhead) This is what you're going to tune into. On this web site is a description of the requirements for the telecourse. As Dr. Bob mentioned we are going to have six required broadcasts that you should attend, should see, and then there will be four other adjunct broadcasts that you don't have to attend but will provide supplemental material. We might have kind of informational sessions, things that might crop up during the course of the semester and some general background. There are a variety of topics that could be covered. These are the required dates for classes. Class #1, tonight. Jot these times down or consult the web site. We have two in September. One in October, three in November with the last broadcast is November 29th. In addition to attending these broadcasts you need to attend one of two exploratories. There will be one in Parkersburg which will be for the northern half of the State on October 1st and 2nd. There will be one in the southern end of the State in Summersville, November 12th and 13th.

Dr. Bob: We're not going to talk in detail about that now but we'll get that put together.

Dr. Deb: The only thing we need to tell you is that you need to attend one of those two. Not both, either or. Your lodging will be provided for you by CATS so you don't have to worry about the expense of a hotel for 1 night. That will be the Friday night that your there. Your substitute will also be paid for, so your county will be reimbursed for your substitute. Now you need to go back and let your county office know that you will be missing that day and that you need to have a substitute and that the State Department, the West Virginia Department of Education will pay for that substitute. You shouldn't have any problems getting out for that. We're going to provide the field transportation. Your going to have to be responsible for your own food. The text will be provided for you. We're in the process of getting those textbooks out to you. Your facilitator should have a copy of one so you can take a look at it. Reading assignments will be made out of this. It's free to you thanks to the West Virginia Department of Education and the CATS Program.

Dr. Bob: I won't be assigning reading until you get the textbooks. What had occurred is we got some of the textbooks and therefore we're going to wait until our next on air. You will get them. It's a good, very readable book, and a good variety of topics.

Dr. Deb: The other thing you will be responsible for viewing are the Cadillac Desert tapes. We will ship those to your facilitator and then you will make arrangements to view these. The best way to do this is for you all to get together on some off night and view the tapes together. Otherwise you have to make arrangements to pass these around or get copies. Whatever works best for your site, go ahead and do that. Those are something that you will be asked to view. The evaluation is always a big question. We have several evaluation instruments. Would you like to talk about how they will be assessed in the class?

Dr. Bob: What we're gonna do is, as soon as you get the textbooks, we will have a number of quizzes. Types of things where everyone sends in their own responses but you can at your various sites talk to one another. It's an open book, open note, open mouth discussion but then you generate your own answers and responses on the quizzes. Ok? Then there will one final test. Those quizzes will be based on the air type content so that you will probably build our anticipation as you will build from the on air session before for the content in conjunction with the chapters that you've read. Then there will be one final test. A multiple choice test. That will be done after the last broadcast in November, November 29th when we will distribute it. Then it is due back to us December 8th. That one, you can use your book and notes but you can't use any other person to work on it. In the sense of multiple choice questions and that open book exam there are quite substantial reading material for each question. Sometimes three or four tops fit on a page 8 ½ x 11, so you have to read through quite a bit of material. That will constitute the testing per se, those quizzes you can talk together but you do your own hand in on that and then the multiple choice test at the end where your on your own but you do have your notes and your text. Then a research paper/lesson plan. That will be due in November but both of us will be looking at it so it is premature to choose a topic, but what I would hope is that you might choose something that works very well for you in your area. Those of you that have been in areas that have been flooded recently or many times, might choose a river, a river system as part of their water shed in order to discuss. For those others in areas, as in Marion County and elsewhere around the State, where subsidence has been a real problem. They may choose to investigate from the materials available and they might be on web sites and elsewhere and out of local newspapers, information about mine subsidence. Others might choose "what is the history of earthquakes in our area?" over the years and some other things that we have run. This has been a very popular topic for a couple of folks down in the southern part of the State. Those that are closer to the State of Virginia. Wise County is the site of some fairly recent earthquake activity. Or a variety of things...mass movement phenomenon, almost anywhere in this state. Acid mine drainage in many places in the state. The drought conditions might be very, very interesting because of the shrink/swell potential in the clays and the soil around foundations and the resulting problems in areas where the drought is. Solid waste is another so you can take the opportunity to go to a solid waste facility and the basic rule of thumb is they should welcome you with open arms. If they don't, something's wrong, so back off. I've had that occur in sending students but for the most part they just love for people to come in and see their facilities. So it's a marvelous research project. Maybe it's an aggregate quarry. What are the things that are required by the State or just in general, what is required in order to start an aggregate quarry in an area? Or something as simple as watching construction in town. Especially if they are just starting. What do they have to do with geofabrics to prevent runoff into the street? What do they have to do about keeping the area clean? Maybe a pictorial activity or another possibility is to choose your hometown area or around your school on a topographic with a sheet of paper 8 ½ x 11 and put it on a 7.5-minute topographic map and then find all the environmental problems and concerns right around that area. Your students probably come in by bus on many of those routes. On a topographic map, two miles is about so big (demonstrates size on paper) so this is about 2 miles by 6 miles square, a 12 square mile area. You do several overlays. It doesn't have to be real elegant, we not expecting a geographic information system where it's all done on computer. But you could put it all on different layers of onion skin for the flood potentials, the subsidence potential if there is any, for mass movement, all kinds of interesting things. It's a great variety. The research is just generating the data. The lesson plan....

Dr. Deb: The important part then is how you're going to relay this to your students? That's what we're really here for. We're trying to get you to get earth science back into your classrooms. It's one thing to know the information and one thing to research it and put it into a paper. We want to know how your gonna use that with your students. In addition to doing this paper then the second part of the paper then is to tell us in a lesson plan form or some type of rich description of how your going to implement this in the classroom.

Dr. Bob: Part of that also includes the safety measures. One of things you might do is the frequency of flooding and such. What if you had a little stream on your campus or adjacent to your campus and you took out pebbles and painted them different colors and you put them into the stream and then after a major through flow event, a major discharge event, go back and find the pebbles. Where have they moved? You've put them in a certain location and have they moved? You also include a bit of the safety event. You don't do out then when it's in flood and that sort of thing. There's a whole array of things and we'll try to continue to throw these out as we go, class by class but we'll try to get this early so that you can be working on it by the end of September. You can always change, you can change up until the last day I suppose if you want to but we'll give you plenty of ideas. If you have any questions give us a call. This is something that we hope you will find to be most valuable because you can translate it and use it directly in your class. If someone says, "Gee I'd like to incorporate my students in it this semester working on it," fine. No problem.

Dr. Deb: One final note to make here. Your preliminary course syllabus said that the quizzes would be due but they didn't really give you a due date. The dates for the quizzes will be put on the web site for you to access but they're gonna be due one week after the broadcast. We need to be assessing where you are and how you are coming through this course, a week or a broadcast at a time. So the web site will post those quiz questions and then the following week you will be expected to submit those. You can submit them directly on the web site. There's a place to fill in answers and then just hit the submit key or you can download them and mail it to Tom. We prefer that you try using the web site, that's the most efficient means for us to get your quiz immediately.

Dr. Bob: That way you can even do it up until midnight. We have a due date to try and have some kind of deadline.

Dr. Deb: This is to keep you from submitting it eight weeks after that first quiz is due.

Dr. Bob: We know how difficult is it, you've got other work to do. Teachers are a lot like people though, you have to have deadlines. So we do create a deadline. We sit down and work at it. Again, you can anticipate that the four quizzes will come starting the next official on air live evening so that it will build on what we do tonight and what we do the next night and then the quiz comes out. Then we will not have a quiz the last, the very last on air show. So it's the four middle ones we'll have every week some sort of activity.

Dr. Deb: One other thing to remind you, this is a 290 class and for those of you out there panicking saying, "Oh, I need a 300 or whatever." 290's do count towards graduate credit. You are limited on how many of those you can count but 290's will count for a Master's degree or a Doctoral degree. Don't panic and say that this isn't going to help you, it will. I think that just about covers Tom's long list of things we were required to talk to you about.

Dr. Bob: I think it's what 40%, 30 or 40%, the 290 courses can qualify.

Dr. Deb: There's a specific number of credits, 18 maybe somewhere around in there, but if you want to know specifically just ask your advisor and they will let you know. So the last item on our agenda is "Just what is environmental geology?"

Dr. Bob: That was even on the outline. Don't you love it when it all comes together. As I've suggested by the titles of the potential activities that you can engage in, environmental geology is a composite of geologic hazards. Such things as earthquakes, mass movement phenomena, rapid landslides, that is. These are the natural events now. Although there may be a human overprint to that cause and effect relationship. Earthquakes along with the volcanic activity and something you've heard of before, the ring of fire around the Pacific Ocean. That earthquakes don't happen everywhere. The hurricanes or in the Pacific they would be called typhoons, so we will be talking about atmospheric conditions. We'll be talking about dynamic change along coastlines. We tend to continue to focus on hurricanes at this time of the season and yet we will come to find in our discussion that along coastlines the noreasters are incredibly damaging. As a matter of fact, what started as hurricane Dennis two weeks ago and wound up as a tropical storm just kept pounding and pounding and pounding because it meandered out in the coast and then it came back. But in the northern hemisphere these low pressure systems all rotate counter clockwise. So the winds are coming counter clockwise in from the northeast. That's why they're called noreasters. As a matter of fact winter storms, there have been some really monster winter storms. Remember that winter storm when we had 20 to 30 inches of snow over a huge area of the eastern United States. That was a land hurricane. It had wind gusts that probably didn't get above 74 miles an hour many times but it was an extraordinary storm and it happens in winter we call it a noreaster. Those types of storms have dramatic potential on effecting and changing the shoreline. So we'll talk about that especially along the east coast of the United States. The west coast of the United States has a different type of shoreline and that's another part of environmental geology. Comparing and contrasting. The western environment with the amount of water that they have as compared to the eastern environment. That's why we have selected Cadillac Desert as an example of how the west has treated water resources or mistreated water resources and how the east views water resources. Yet in the east when you say we've got plenty, we've seen this past summer that drought conditions can easily exist also in the eastern United States. By and large our stewardship over two centuries use has not been so much wasting the water as we have diminished the quality of the water enormously. So our stewardship really needs to be examined. Here we start to slip from the natural events into the human overprint. What do we do with our waste materials? Three big categories of waste materials. The municipal waste materials that otherwise do not have toxics or compounds in them that otherwise would have to be made as a very dangerous waste material. Either liquid or solid that has to take special handling because of the elements present. The third one, what are we going to do with our radioactive waste material? The radioactive waste material problem will be examined also within the context of this course. Further, with the energy resources across the United States. How have we used energy and how has that made an impact on all of our other resources? We'll also look, not only at energy, but also in aggregate. We are an energy consuming nation but we're constantly in the need of enormous aggregate resources so that the tonnage of iron ore that's been taken out in the United States and around the world is but of a fraction of the amount of the aggregate that is needed to mix with cement to make concrete. So we'll talk about aggregate resources. Where that can come from, where the problems might lie and how we have to address the issues, life after the quarry is used? That certainly has a lot to do with West Virginia because we can talk about aggregate coming out of the Ohio River, by dredge. Doesn't happen much any more. Aggregate coming out of large quarries in Martinsburg and Charles Town area as now as urban development has expanded they'd rather fill up the quarries and that they disappear. Yet those quarries were an integral part in the economic development of that area for the best part of this last century. So we will be looking at things beyond the traditional coal, oil, gas, type of concerns with respect to energy resources. We'll even get into the discussion, though brief, as to whether it makes sense to put a windmill farm on Dolly Sods to try to utilize that natural resource. But what I'm constantly interested in is having folks at least think about these things and are forced to articulate some of their own thinking about them. Everything from building a Corridor H to whether or not there should be a wind generating farm on Dolly Sods. Not good for the birds I'll tell you. That constant hum. We will do those types of things also. We'll get into state and federal and private agency activities with respect to preparedness and then as a result of major events, what do they do? What do they try to do? After the event, months even years after there's still things that need to be done and do these agencies do them in a timely fashion or do we still have a long way to go? So it's information dissemination and all sorts of great things like that. When you get the textbooks and looking at the chapter heads you can see that there's a wide variety of topics that are broadly in the environmental. What I'll do is tell stories. You can read the text. The key element in all of this is my trying to share with you some of the ways in which case studies that I have worked on or that others have done to focus on some aspect of events. Human induced or human aggravated or whether it's just a natural event. The difference between periodic events and episodic events. Periodic events we can tell with certainty because of the measurements we've made, the data we've collected that it will reoccur at a certain time. We know for example, you can pull out your calendars and in the future you can mark down when Haleys Comet is going to return. I can not tell you when the big one is going to occur in the San Andreas Fault in California and everyone wishes we could predict those types of events. But I can tell you that within our lifetime it's very likely that there will be an earthquake somewhere along the San Andreas. If it isn't our lifetime it's our children or grandchildren. There is a recurring sequence but it is episodic and does not have a fixed time of recurrence. So we'll keep that in mind as we move along. We also start each day with a quick scope of news events because when you think about it you could spend a good ten or fifteen minutes as you get into this next topic for example. Or if when your in session where it's block and you've just come from across the campus and it's time for the students to kind of settle down and get into it. You say, "Well, the last time we met, in the case of the block it probably was at least 48 hours ago, this has all occurred. In the past 48 hours there has been yet another earthquake in Turkey about 60 miles from Istanbul in the oil field areas. It knocked out communications. There have been thousands of after shocks. Try to place yourself in that circumstance where first of all a massive shock took place at night when most people were asleep in their homes. 15,000 casualties we believe was the count in Istanbul and surrounding areas. 15,000. That's almost unimaginable. Yet when we talk about it in detail we'll find that other times in Earth's history in some events in China, hundreds of thousands perished in single earthquake events. Perhaps even as high as 700 or 800 thousands in one earthquake in historic times. But getting back to this event...an event in the oil field areas 60 miles away and sandwiched in between the big event in the Istanbul area, Athens, Greece. The death there is at least 80 with 40 some additional missing. It's quite likely that a hundred will have perished in that earthquake. The interesting thing is that all the ancient things still stand. It was apartment buildings that collapsed, day care centers, schools. The one in Athens hit during the day so that kids were in school. Of course, the big event that we're watching in the news now is hurricane Floyd bearing down. In the Bahamas they have closed the airports, they have evacuated and all gone to higher land. The storm surge may be as high, we talk about this in greater detail the second half tonight, the storm surge may be as high as 15 or 20 feet. If you've been to those islands you know that 15 to 20 feet takes care of a lot of the island. There aren't many real high areas in those islands. Gert is the next tropical storm forming right behind it. We're in that peak time in September so we're going to focus on that the second half after the break this evening. Then wildfires...the wildfires in California and the State of Washington and Nevada. Air quality, ash and soot in the air, the closing of airports if forced in many locations. Yet there are also wildfires in Brazil, Peru, elsewhere around the world. Last year at this time we were blaming everything on El Nino. This year we're beginning to blame things on La Nina. Not an absolute opposite type effect but variations and perdivations in the air temperature, water temperature, especially the water temperature interface in the oceans can have far reaching effects globally and not just the continent adjacent to the ocean in the "downwind" direction where the prevailing winds are blowing. We need to incorporate that and yet that is ongoing as we speak. Volcanic eruptions...Mt. Etna has been sporadic in its activity over the past year and a half to two years. The amount erupted over the weekend was only about 300, 400 feet high. Fortunately is was mostly a lava flow that is going down into a valley that has been accepting the active Mount Aetna activity over the past decade or two, so no one lives there. That's a good sign. However, in Ecuador, Quito the capitol city lives under the shadow of a volcano that put material up into the atmosphere almost five miles over the weekend. Now that's a different explosivity and that material they're watching the volcano very, very carefully. I'll tell you that one of these news events before we leave in December will revert back to Popocatapetl, which is a volcano right outside of Mexico City. This last spring and for almost a year, Popocatapedal has been sporadically active. There are quite a few people who live in Mexico City who watch and wait for that event. So, we never seem to be at a loss here in West Virginia. We went through a period of drought and we've been doing this every other day for the past two months for example, we would have talked about the drought conditions throughout West Virginia. Then when hurricane Dennis came up along the coast and became a tropical storm over the Labor Day weekend they almost had flood conditions. Certainly they had more water and in the soil conditions when it dries and desiccates it cracks the water just goes right in. You have real problems. Had we been doing this over the past number of months we would have warned that in China for the second year in a row there was going to be the potential for enormous flooding. Hundreds of thousands of people, million people or more evacuated. The reason was they were coming through a drought over the winter time and when the rain did come the Earth could only absorb a certain amount because it was baked as hard as a brick. Essentially that's what happens to clay when you dry it out. The cracks can absorb some water but the rest of the soil has lost its ability to allow rainfall to infiltrate. So these types of broad topics will be constantly addressed in the discussion of the news events.

What I'd like to do now is a brief discussion for about 10 minutes or so to talk about unconsolidated materials. Now we're getting into the real nitty gritty of the course. If you've taken an introductory in geology before you can recall that you talked about rocks and minerals. The earth materials. Usually in an introductory course in geology it's the minerals first. I've never understood why but it's just become a pattern. The rationale for that you see, is that the minerals make up the rocks. I'd like to think that you should study the rocks first. But unconsolidated materials is what we always have to deal with. (Goes to the overhead) We'll talk about unconsolidated. As the word implies unconsolidated suggests that the individual grains are not cemented together. They have not been baked together or put under compression so that the individual particles are loose. It may help a lot to dig and excavate in it but they pose real problems if we have to work and interact with them. There is several ways in which we can look at unconsolidated material and try to categorize the material. One way is by particle size. This is a review. A review of particle size. There's big stuff and there's small stuff and some of the terms are quite simple and simple to understand. Boulders for example, and cobbles. Then we have pebbles. These are all geology terms, engineering terms too. Granules. Then three terms that are most critical, most important. Now realize that boulders you tend to think what would a boulder look like. If I asked you in your notes to draw an outline of a boulder what would it look like. Would it be smooth. You tend to think of boulders in the context of what you have experienced maybe as river rock. But boulders of particle size could also be angular. If Paraketine or Popocatapedal or Mount Etna explodes violently there's material that would be classified as boulder sized but it would be angular. So we then talk about the size, which we're doing here, but we also keep in mind that size requires shape. It could be angular or rounded. And in between subangular or subrounded. Just so that you constantly remember that this is a possibility. Here are the rest of the three sizes....(tape ends mid sentence)

Greetings, back again! The system is working. We've had some phone calls in from the sites and part of it revolves around the exploratories. What we have received is information is that we understand the concerns that many times Friday nights are critical nights, high school football on into the season. So what we are doing, talk to your facilitators so that the facilitators get a handle on this. We've also, the initial response, there are quite a few, maybe a hundred people around the state who are sitting in as you are at this moment. So that would be a real problem running things and getting vans, busses, or whatever. So, one other possibility is that Tom, Deb, and I would stay on Saturday night too and we could accommodate part of the group on Friday, Saturday, and part of the group all the rest of the day Saturday. Say pick up the rest coming in Saturday noon on later into the evening on Saturday. Whereas the folks that had been there on Friday, they would talk off about 3 o'clock and we'd run the others about another 3 hours on Saturday and you would spend your one night in the motel if you so desired to choose that Saturday night and drive home Sunday. We would not have activities and field work on Sunday but we would have the field work running, using up the sunlight hours and maybe even having to drive back to the motel. That would be a variation to accommodate those who would have a Friday activity. We can plan it very easy to do it in segments and revisit some of the other sites later in the Saturday afternoon. Maybe start it then for those other people who have a commitment at about noon on Saturday while we're having lunch, then the others come in and then we move on ahead. Tell your facilitators, get some reading for this as to that potential. Some would do it Friday/Saturday some a long day Saturday into Saturday early evening and we might even have a session back in a larger room the motel for slides, worksheets, working with the maps, that sort of thing.

Well, what I want to do now, remember that we have not quite a half an hour, about a half an hour to go. Then we have to cut off at 10 minutes to 8 because there is another class, telecourse, that will be producing from this studio. We have to vacate.

What I would like to do now, since hurricane Floyd is something that you could use in your classroom tomorrow and for the rest of the week, is to quickly review the dynamics of a hurricane. (Goes to overhead) Remember hurricanes int he northern hemisphere are counter clockwise rotations. They are low pressure systems. The low atmospheric pressure is increasingly diminished as the hurricane gets its energy from going over very, very warm water. Over the very, very warm water the air will rise, therefore its a low pressure type system and the low increases in intensity. This particular hurricane Floyd is a moose. Right now it is a category four hurricane. It has wind velocities already to 155 miles per hour. (Puts up overlay on overhead of Sappier/Simpson hurricane damage potential scale.) You can see that tropical depression and wind speeds and tropical storm and then the category up to category five. Floyd, I checked a 5 o'clock update, was right on the cusp. There were winds approaching 155 level. It will continue to build. The only thing that is preventing it now from continuing to build is Bahama. The islands of Bahama's are probably not large enough to really cause it to stub its toe. It's a moose. It's three times the dimensions of hurricane Andrew. So not only is it the intensity but it's an enormous size of mass that is just moving slowing to the west. There is this hurricane category, we move on, the wind speed, and then the storm surge. We'll talk about that in a moment. You see if there's low pressure in the center of the storm literally the surface of the ocean will bulge because there is low atmospheric in the center it means its higher around the margins. Around the margins in the eye it pushes down and the center bulges up. The more defined it is and the more tight it is the greater the surge. If this indeed gets to be a very, very low atmospheric pressure, storm surges can be catastrophic because so much will depend on when that storm hits. If that storm hits on high tide then you have added concerns, obviously. Then, the words on the piece of paper seem very, almost benign, from usually none and extremely minimal and so forth, but we're talking now of an event where the words extreme and catastrophic are the general terms of understanding should a storm of this magnitude strike land. This is a situation vastly different from Dennis. It is possible that a storm like Floyd can come on board on the eastern shore line and not do as much flooding damage and coastal change as Dennis did. Dennis just sat out there at a lower wind velocity, a third of the wind velocity just kept pounding, and pounding, and pounding at 40-50 miles per hour. We have in the basement of White Hall, a geology building in downtown Morgantown, a seismograph for earthquake activity. I didn't bring it in today but the seismograph was running when hurricane Hugo came on board at South Carolina. The needle of the seismograph in White Hall just when berserk. It was atmospheric pressure pounding the coastline. The unconsolidated materials on the shore absorbing some of that energy but the bedrock vibrating the same way it does for an earthquake. That needle just went crazy. Until that hurricane came on land and started to dissipate. That's when the engine is cut off. Two ways, the winds hit the mountains or the hillsides of the trees and it diminishes the wind velocity. The hurricane moves on land so that the eye then no longer is being built by being over warm water its over cooler land. Another interesting factor to consider, in this the circular pattern, hurricanes are describing some sort of a path. It may be erratic, but it is generally from east to west. Quite a number of hurricanes that affect the east coast of the United States begin as storms even on the African continent and certainly a number just off shore. Gert, the one that's following Floyd, started offshore as a tropical depression. In a hurricane moving in this direction, think of this, that there is a component of velocity added to the wind velocity because the hurricane is moving. When the winds get up here and if this is the direction of movement, when the storm is right here, its the wind velocity plus the movement of storm velocity. Down here, on the other hand, you subtract the velocity of the storm from the wind velocity because it is diminishing a bit. Further, there are bands around here and here where the really heavy rain fall. It varies but it's not a perfect circle rather it is a series of two bands. As I said, the real concern is that the wind direction that's the most intense is the one that hits it from the east-northeast. A term that you often hear about a noreaster. Some of those winter storms, the noreaster that pound all the way up to the cape in Massachusetts can do enormous damage. We don't happen to call them hurricanes because the wind velocity is not quite reached the 74 miles per hour. That's when the sustained winds reach that it's a hurricane. You say, "Well...what are the size of some of these storms? What are we talking about?" I would suggest that a number of our students have access to the weather channel. If you want to get access on your computer just type in weather.com and you'll get right to the weather channel and then you'll have a menu. They have updates, the latest was at 5 o'clock. The one before that was at 2 o'clock. This is hurricane Fran when it came on board in 1996, September 9th, 1996. This was a storm that created flooding at Dolly Sods such that it washed the road out. If you have been up near Bear Rocks you know that there's not a whole heck of a lot of local relief. But there was so much rainfall that the rain volume amounts pouring off of Dolly Sods created a flood of record in that little tributary down the slope from Dolly Sods. The flood of record in this century. It was very isolated. To wash out the road on Dolly Sods should really be startling to those who have been there because there's just not that much slope. Yet, here in Morgantown, it was cloudy and we really didn't get much rain at all. What happens is that when the hurricane comes onboard and when those winds come up into the mountains, whether its North Carolina, Virginia, or West Virginia, that air mass has to rise up above the mountains. It's called Orographic Uplift. You take an air mass from sea level and you cause it to rise, it's going to get cooler. You see this phenomenon when you take a cold drink out at pool side on a warm summers day with high humidity. The air mass can hold the water content but your cold glass of beverage is cooling the air right around the edge of the container and therefore that air is super saturated and condenses out on the cool container. Same analogy as that air mass goes up the mountains, condensation resulting in precipitation on that side of the windward side. Now to be sure, the overall pattern of air flow in the United States is prevailing westerlies, west to east. There are variations because of the upper air flow of the jet stream and then there's the variations like the low pressure coming onshore in the east coast as hurricanes. So a tremendous amount of precipitation falls in the mountains. That also causes the storm to drop in velocities tremendously. Fran and Hugo, especially, you can go into the southern part of West Virginia and still see the blowdown areas where the trees were just devastated. Whole parts of the forest were just devastated by down bursts, localized conditions. They can bring enormous amounts of rain because they've been fed by coming over warm water and they are at maximum humidity over this warm humid condition and they're forced to rise up over the mountains. This is neat when the eye is just coming on board right at the southern tip of North Carolina. North Carolina has been a target for hurricanes this century, Wilmington, Top Sail Beach, Wilmington Beach, even with hurricane Dennis they evacuated Wilmington Beach. They shut off the electricity. Top Sail beach to the north, people shouldn't be building on Top Sail beach. What are those homes like? Are they little cabins? No...hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars and the property is also sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. There could easily be in some of these a million dollar investment. They sort of just shrug their shoulders and say, "well, we'll rebuild. We wanted to remodel anyway." It's just really crazy. We'll get to that in a moment. Coming back to me, if you lived along the North Carolina coast, what would you do? One of the local stores, its a grocery store, sells advertisement and then puts out these charts. It's a big pull out. You plot latitude and longitude and you watch how the storm moves. It must have driven you crazy during Dennis because it just went out and missed the shore and just meandered around a little bit and then turned back. You know now that we give out names of an alternating boy/girl, boy/girl type thing and they've got the names out several years in advance as to what the names are going to be. Then you have all this advertising, you need bottled water come to this grocery store, Harris Teter Grocery Store. The hardware store's love to, you have to rebuild there's a lumber company that has an advertisement but there's really good on this too. Here's the hurricane shopping list, what to do, what has the moon got to do with it, something to read, of course all your power may be out but you've got something to read ahead of time. These are very popular and they are distributed free at the checkout counters in the grocery stores. The federal government also decided that since North Carolina is so populated, so much a target, they put out a little brochure. These were done in 1996 because all those hurricanes hit. Its a preparedness folder, the hurricane tracking chart. That's a real popular issue. The Bahama's were in the way. If the Bahamas's are in the way so is Florida. When you look at this, right off Nassau is Miami and West Palm Beach area. However we do not know what is going to happen in this path. It's moving westerly about 15 miles per hour and it may just start to drift north. There's a big low pressure system sweeping down and that may help deflect it, course that isn't good news for the folks along Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina. The way it looks now, the greater potential for this to strike and in the U.S.A. Today this morning, now 12 hours, there was the potential and this is strike probability. First of all high right down here, but look at this whole coast line. The shore of Florida is different then the shore of Georgia. In Georgia there are rivers that enter out and then little islands that are sort of found between the rivers. In Florida its a beach down to Cape Canaveral that is dominated by material that was brought out in the rivers in Georgia and South Carolina. A lot of quartz sand rather then shells. But Cape Canaveral kind of shunts the particles out into the open ocean. That's south of here along the lower two-thirds of Florida, the shoreline and beaches are made up of more and more dominantly fractured shell fragments, broken shell fragments. The Keys are underneath this, probability scale. That's really unfortunate because it is the Keys that have only one bridge to get out and bridges linking all of the keys. Bridges are always vulnerable. This area, if this storm for some reason should veer to the west in the Gulf the Keys are always of great potential risk because of evacuation routes. So too are the Carolina's of course. Then by the time we get up here in Cape Fear in South Carolina and we get to Cape Lookout, Cape Hatteras and so forth up along the Carolina coast its called a cuspate foreland. It's concave out into the open ocean. There's only one other place in the whole world that has a shoreline like that...it's on the north slope of Alaska into the Beaufort Sea of all places. The point is, that in the Carolina's they have to be prepared for this and the dynamics are this...that the in coastal environments, what we should be doing is four big issues about construction, back from the shore...If you can see the ocean the ocean can see you. Furthermore, high not low. Build on the higher but use the dunes, the dunes should have been retained. If you see a community where they are shaving off the dunes they're putting those properties at great risk behind it. If any of you have been to Nags Head, in that general area, and when you get across the Bonner Bridge if you turn left to go up to Duck or even out to Corollo Light House you know they're putting those homes right on the dunes. They build them on stilts for the most part because of blowing sand rather then the high surge. This back and high, you can go to any of those municipalities and look for the charts on the 100-year level of storm and that storm maybe in springtime. One of the great damaging floods in Nags Head occurred at Easter one year in the 1930s because a noreaster just kept pounding the coast and pushing the water up on to land. You look for the 100-year level. You certainly don't build below it. You really shouldn't put your stilts below it and have your home just perched above it but there are many that do. It also relates to insurance purchasing. Some say, "Who should overall, should it be the Federal underwriting all this insurance with taxpayer dollars?" The response of some would be, "Of course not, why should it. You build at your own risk." After hurricane Hugo, South Carolina passed a law that if you lost your home you could not rebuild. That was in the courts of course, sort of like a left handed eminent domain situation. Some folks had lived there for generations, this is the first time in a century and you've passed this law and now we can't rebuild. The initial response was, "Yes, let's go to court." Your lawyer and my lawyer will fight it out and it may go all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. These are some really tough decisions that have to be made. The municipalities are going to say, "Look, we're also building the beach, year and year out, we're trucking sand out there to bring in tourists because the beach keeps moving and shifting. It's a very dynamic system.

Vegetation, the more vegetation you have the better off you are. If you've built within the vegetation, mosquitos and insects, I don't know if I want to live back there. The point is, the vegetation is there because the wind hasn't removed it. It is a zone in which the storm is unable so far over many, many decades to do any really serious damage. Besides the vegetation will diminish the wind velocities that could otherwise damage your home. If you rented any of those you know that there's sound side in North Carolina and then oceanside and oceanfront. The really expensive one is where you can see the ocean and the ocean sees you. The fourth one is a bit more subtle. It would seem like common sense. Don't build where there's an inlet. What constitutes an inlet? Looking from the air a barrier island is a temporary accumulation above sea level of sand sized grains. There may even be dunes. At Kitty Hawk for example, there's a massive dune, really spectacular dune. This in North Carolina is the sound. Specifically around Kitty Hawk and Nags Head its Pamlicker Sound. The open ocean is out here and when water in the storm surges brought in by the noreaster its going to flow over. There are natural inlets in these areas and it's going to pile up water in the sound. When you pile up water in the sound or pile up water in the land the water is going to run down through the lowest area. The water will seek that level. So when it says don't build at an inlet, this situation can be shown time and time again. There's a street, good transportation near the homes on either side of the street, oriented west to east, the ocean is in the east then somebody has their home right there. Do you see what don't build near the inlet tends to mean? Because the water that has piled up out here is likely to use that street as a channel. Where is it going to impact? Right at the end of the street. As a matter of fact, the curbs alone are built to help channel. When we talk about river floods in Salt Lake City this past year and a couple of years ago they just sandbagged the cross streets and let the river be created down the main street that happened to be running downhill. You tend to not build streets obliquely on a hillside. You either parallel to the contours or perpendicular to the contours. Don't buy that property right down at the end. In Wilmington Beach there was an inlet and entrepreneurs said "We'll fill it in with sand" and then they soiled it and it was a Holiday Inn. Notice the past tense. Two years ago the hurricane came through there and it went back to wanting to be an inlet. The building was taken back down. When you're in these areas these four guidelines make a lot of sense if your interested. All our great retirement funds, we're all going to retire on the banks of the Monongahela (laughs). If some of us for some reason thinking about retiring to the Outer Banks watch this storm, watch what it does. The change along the shoreline is very dramatic because of what is called long shore drift. Again geologists aren't always real imaginative. This is the sand and a current that comes in like this, there is a component of energy along the shore. The sand particles get washed up and then come back, washed up and come back. Perhaps you've been at the beach where you take your cooler and you set it out on the beach and your boombox and you go out floating and all of a sudden you realize, "Oh fooey" my cold beverage is back hundreds of yards and I'm losing ground fast. I've got to come in to shore and walk all the way back because the current component did not come in perfectly parallel to the shoreline and there was an amount of energy directed along the shore and that is a long shore drift. When Dennis was sitting offshore it just sat there and enhanced the long shore drift situation. What I've sketched is often what could have been built here a century ago, a lighthouse. I think we all watched this past year when the Federal government had allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to relocate the Hatteras Lighthouse but they didn't fund it. They authorized the funding but they didn't fund it. Finally, they said it's got to be done this year. Many of the entrepreneurs in that area what did they say? "Don't move it." Why not? Because the Federal government was stabilizing the shoreline and they were afraid if they allowed that to be moved the Federal government would say it's up to nature now and that their businesses were at risk because of the stabilization of the shoreline. Shorelines are stabilized in one of two ways, soft, it's called nourishment, beach nourishment. Very costly, very short term because they bring sand and they dump it along the shoreline. Atlantic City, Myrtle Beach they dredge it from offshore or else they bring it by truck from inland and it last for awhile and sometimes only until the next storm. You say, "The thing to do then is the hard one." Groins are built out perpendicular to shore or a sea wall. The problem there, if you put in a hard beach the recreational beach is gone. In 1900 Galveston was struck by a hurricane that did not have warning systems and one in four people in a town of 30,000+ perished so they build a sea wall and they have no beach anymore. They haven't for a long, long time. Well we've come to the end of this show. Let me tell you what the outline is for the adjunct is next week. We're gonna talk totally about rocks and minerals. It's not something that you will be tested on per se but if you want that as additional information we'll be here providing the first of four adjunct shows. So we've enjoyed it. I hope you watch hurricane Floyd. We will be back together again for sure in two weeks and we will discuss again the aftermath of hurricane Floyd. In the meantime, take care, be good stewards of this spaceship Earth...See you later!

WVGES Education Specialist, Tom Repine (repine@geosrv.wvnet.edu)

Page last revised: October 1999

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