Vietnam: A Television History; Cam Ne Village Activity [Part 1 of 2]

It is the summer of 1993. Record amounts of rain drenching. Farmers fear the loss of their already saturated. Turn into lakes. The rain. Forest. And some people narrowly escaped. Where. Uprooting entire communities. Destroying crops. Destroyed.

Life in the state area. This is a costly flood. In U.S. recorded news. It all began with a freakish weather pattern over the Midwest produced an unusually Webb summer. Meteorologist Paul Douglas to be honest meteorologists were baffled. We were perplexed with this situation. During a typical year the jet stream is constantly on the move the jet stream is a high speed a river of air. The superhighway for storms is always in motion. And so you may get flooding for a week or two but then the jet stream shifts and a drier pattern moves in. During 1993 we had a major shift in the pattern for some strange reason. We had a giant blocking high pressure system over the Southeast a heat pump high and this roadblock in the atmosphere forced the jet stream to take a more or less continuous detour

across the Midwest that produced wave after wave of storms. Now this is a three dimensional representation of what the storms looked like. Oyster flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico converging when it reaches cool Canadian air consistent storms over the Midwest. Not just for a week or two which would be typical but for month after month after month and this was the result nine states experiencing the worst flooding in history. Thirty inches of rain in a six month period. Not only was the river flooding there was flash flooding. Where the farmer's fields turned into ponds and lakes. Literally meteorologists referred to Iowa as the sixth great lake for about a six week stretch. There's no way the ground can absorb that volume of water. It had to run off into streams and rivers and the result was the worst flooding our nation has ever seen.