Friday Wrap-Up: Flooding, and the Walrus Cam is Back!

You know it's been busy when a normal day (yesterday) was boring. But I'm okay with "boring". Don't know about you, but I'm ready for a long weekend.

* * * * *



Anyone who's watched "Ice Road Truckers" is more-or-less familiar with the 300 miles of road between Fairbanks and Alaska's North Slope. They've had troubles this year with the road flooding during break-up (i.e., the spring thaw). Now it's flooded again (with more pix at the link):

DEADHORSE -- Unprecedented flooding continues to interfere with daily operations on the North Slope oil patch after surging waters wiped away swaths of the Dalton Highway and isolated a section of Deadhorse, the jumping-off point for the sprawling industrial region.

“This is just epic,” said Mike Coffey, commander of the unified incident command, a response team consisting of the state, the North Slope Borough and oil companies. “People who have been here for decades say they’ve never seen anything like it.”

The state has estimated the costs of the damage and repairs since March at $5.1 million. The federal government may pay for much of that, since the icing and flooding on the highway has been declared a disaster, said Coffey, the director of state transportation maintenance and operations.

The event was caused by heavy summer rains followed by extensive freezing this winter, trapping the water in place, then a rapid spring warmup that has brought record temperatures to the region.

* * * * *

The walrus cam is back on-line. From explore.org comes this sample vid-cap:

 

A popular webcam showing large male Pacific walruses lying on the beach with a Hitchcockian number of seabirds flying overhead is once again streaming to the Internet.

The high-definition stream from Alaska's remote Round Island had been dormant for nearly a decade after private funding ran out, but a high-definition version is back now, thanks to a philanthropic organization that operates a series of nature webcams from around the planet. The walrus cam, part of the Pearls of the Planet series, can be viewed here.