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Weather: Sunny. A chance of rain in the morning, then showers likely with a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60 percent. Wednesday Night: Mostly clear. Showers likely with a chance of thunderstorms in the evening. Lows in the lower 70s. Chance of rain 60 percent.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Flagler Beach here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Palm Coast Code Enforcement Board meets at 10 a.m. every first Wednesday of the month at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For details about the city’s code enforcement regulations, go here.
Special Magistrate Hearing to consider two Flagler County code enforcement cases, among them an order issued by the county’s chief building official to demolish the Old Dixie Motel at 2251 South Old Dixie Highway–the dilapidated motel that’s been at the center of a legal dispute stretching many years between the county and two successive owners. 1 p.m. in board chambers at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell.
Separation Chat, Open Discussion: The Atlantic Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State hosts an open, freewheeling discussion on the topic here in our community, around Florida and throughout the United States, noon to 1 p.m. at Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. All are welcome! Everyone’s voice is important. For further information email [email protected] or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
The Flagler Beach Library Book Club meets at 1 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
The Circle of Light Course in Miracles study group meets at a private residence in Palm Coast every Wednesday at 1:20 PM. There is a $2 love donation that goes to the store for the use of their room. If you have your own book, please bring it. All students of the Course are welcome. There is also an introductory group at 1:00 PM. The group is facilitated by Aynne McAvoy, who can be reached at [email protected] for location and information.
The Flagler County Republican Club holds its monthly meeting starting with a social hour at 5 and the business meeting at 6 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn, 55 Town Center Blvd., Palm Coast. The club is the social arm of the Republican Party of Flagler County, which represents over 40,000 registered Republicans. Meetings are open to Republicans only.
 Keep Their Lights On Over the Holidays: Flagler Cares, the social service non-profit celebrating its 10th anniversary, is marking the occasion with a fund-raiser to "Keep the Holiday Lights On" by encouraging people to sponsor one or more struggling household's electric bill for a month over the Christmas season. Each sponsorship amounts to $100 donation, with every cent going toward payment of a local power bill. See the donation page here. Every time another household is sponsored, a light goes on on top of a house at Flagler Cares' fundraising page. The goal of the fun-raiser, which Flagler Cares would happily exceed, is to support at least 100 families (10 households for each of the 10 years that Flagler Cares has been in existence). Flagler Cares will start taking applications for the utility fund later this month. Because of its existing programs, the organization already has procedures in place to vet people for this type of assistance, ensuring that only the needy qualify. |
Notably: We have enough hurricanes to worry about that we shouldn’t go soaking them out of history. But September 1938 was something else. Here was Hurricane Hitler bearing down on Czechoslovakia, back when hurricanes were not named, with FDR appealing to him to negotiate and Britain’s Chamberlain negotiating with him too poorly much, when an actual hurricane crashed over Long Island and New England. The day it struck, there was not a word of it on the New York Times’s front page. “Reich Has Cereals for 18-Month Siege” was on the front page. So was an article about Chamberlain waiting on Hitler. The weather forecast? “Rain and cool today. Tomorrow cloudy, probably rain.” I’m not kidding. That was the weather brief atop the front page. The next day, “HURRICANE SWEEPS COAST; 11 DEAD, 71 MISSING, L.I. TOLL; 80 DIE IN NEW ENGLAND FLOOD.” The storm would eventually kill 700 people and cause $620 million in damages in 1938 dollars, $14 billion in today’s dollars. It was probably not in the best of tastes that Charles Poore, the Times’s book reviewer, on a day when his paper headlined the loss of 500 lives, dozens of them from a tidal wave on a beach on Long Island, opened his review of Allen Tate’s The Fathers on page 15 with this line: “There is a growing danger that a tidal wave of apathy may sweep away all our interest in novels about the South during the Civil War.” (This a year after Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind had been the top national bestseller two years in a row.) On the next page, a brief editorial: “Not the southern coast of the country but Long Island and New England felt the brunt of the tropical hurricane. The story is told in 15,000 families in distress” Then comes this odd line, as inelegantly successive of the 15,000 families as Poore’s opening paragraph was after the front page: “Wars are not necessary evils. Hurricanes are. There is nothing for it but to bow to the whirlwind when it comes. But the art of bowing has still to be learned.” To which I could not refrain from thinking out loud these two words dedicated to the editorial writer, with apologies to more fastidious readers: fuck off. Back to Hitler: A few days later, the hurricane–not surprisingly, with editors such as these–was off the front page again. On Sept. 30, Chamberlain was proclaiming “peace in our time,” and Hitler was crushing Czechoslovakia, a preview of what would take place less than a year later on a scale beyond words. The New England hurricane would still be the most damaging thing to happen to the North American continent, outside of human malice and murder, for the next six years.
—P.T.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
Today, Florida’s southern thumb has been transformed into a subtropical paradise for millions of residents and tourists, a sprawling megalopolis dangling into the Gulf Stream that could sustain hundreds of billions of dollars in damage if Hurricane Irma makes a direct hit. So it’s easy to forget that South Florida was once America’s last frontier, generally dismissed as an uninhabitable and undesirable wasteland, almost completely unsettled well after the West was won. “How far, far out of the world it seems,” Iza Hardy wrote in an 1887 book called Oranges and Alligators: Sketches of South Florida. And Hardy ventured only as far south as Orlando, which is actually central Florida, nearly 250 miles north of Miami. Back then, only about 300 hardy pioneers lived in modern-day South Florida. Miami wasn’t even incorporated as a city until 1896. And even then an early visitor declared that if he owned Miami and hell, he would rent out Miami and live in hell.
—From “Michael Grunwald’s “Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been,” in Politico Magazine, Sept. 8, 2017.
Ray W. says
On the 26th of May, the New York Times reported that during the previous weekend, heat index values in the Miami region reached as high as 112 degrees. The new record was not one degree higher, but 11 degrees higher. This is in mid-May, not July. This is not a breaking of a record but an obliteration of a record.
Other reports have Atlantic waters at record-breaking highs for this time of year. NOAA scientists predict the possibility of more named storms than ever before. Hurricanes are heat pumps; they distribute warm ocean level air into the high atmosphere. Upwellings of cold deep ocean waters occur as the eye of a hurricane tracks across open waters.
Last year, some 2300 American residents died from heat-related causes: 445 in Texas and 77 in Florida. The annual average number of heat-related deaths from 2004 to 2018 is one-third last year’s tally.
Several weeks ago, a debate among FlaglerLive readers took place. One commenter opined that employees bear sole responsibility for addressing potential injury caused by heat. I argued that the law recognizes that everyone, including employers and corporate entities, owes a duty of care to ensure the safety of those with whom we interact, especially employees.
According to the Times, some six states have enacted laws increasing protections for workers who are exposed to excessive heat. Two, Florida and Texas, enacted laws that do not increase protections for workers who are exposed to excessive heat.
The Times also reported that the number of U.S. electricity blackouts that leave more than 50,000 people without power for at least one hour increased by more than 60% between 2015 and 2021. Obviously, leaving senior citizens without power to run air conditioning systems for extended periods of time during heat waves can endanger their lives.
Ray W. says
Yet another general interest comment.
Curious about the state of Florida agriculture, I found a Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services site that published 2022 statistics. The report was dated February 2024.
Every five years, the USDA’s Ag Census is published for “Value-Added Products.” The latest data was for 2017. 2022 data will be published later in 2024.
Palm Beach was the county producing agricultural products of the greatest total value, at $901 million. Volusia County came in with $196 million in total value. Flager? $14 million.
As of 2022, Florida had 47,300 farms and ranches (44,703 farms) totaling 9.7 million acres. Florida ranks 29th in farm acreage.
In 2021, Florida agricultural receipts of all types totaled $7.74 billion.
Florida is first among all states in bell pepper production values, floriculture sales, value of indoor foliage plants, Valencia oranges, grapefruit, sugarcane, fresh market tomatoes, and watermelons. Second in all-types of oranges, strawberries, sweet corn, and non-Valencia oranges. Third in cabbage production.
As for cattle, Florida was ninth in beef cows and 18th in total cattle. 780k calves were born in 2022, down 20k from 2021. As of January 1, 2023, total cattle and calves in Florida was 1.62 million, down 10,000 head from 2022.
Ray W. says
Thank you, Mr. Tristam, for your reference to the repeated 1938 surrenders by Chamberlain prior to the abandonment of Czechoslovakia to the German National Socialist dictatorship. Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming to broad applause, “Peace in our time!” Seldom was any great statesman ever more wrong than he.
In February 1938, Winston Churchill addressed Parlaiment immediately prior to the March Austrian Anschluss that preceded the diplomatic debacle at Munich. The British Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden, and his Under-Secretary, Lord Cranborne, had just resigned.
Churchill, bemoaning Britain’s fate, spake thusly:
“This past week has been a good week for the dictators – one of the best they have ever had. The German Dictator has laid his heavy hand upon a small but historic country, and the Italian Dictator has carried his vendetta against Mr. Eden to a victorious conclusion. The conflict between them has been long. There can be no doubt whatever that Signor Mussolini has won. All the majesty, power, and dominion of the British Empire have not been able to secure the success of the causes which were entrusted to the late Foreign Secretary by the general will of Parliament and of the country. … So that is the end of this part of the story, namely, the departure from power of the Englishman whom the British nation and the British Parliament entrusted with a certain task; and the complete triumph of the Italian Dictator, at a moment when he desperately needed success for domestic reasons. All of the world, in every land, under every sky and every system of government, wherever they may be, the friends of England are dismayed and the foes of England are exultant. …
“The resignation of the late Foreign Secretary may well be a milestone in history. Great quarrels, it has been well said, arise from small occasions but seldom from small causes. The late Foreign Minister adhered to the old policy which we have all forgotten for so long. The Prime Minister and his colleagues have entered upon another and a new policy. The old policy was an effort to establish the rule of law in Europe, and build up through the League of Nations effective deterrents against the aggressor. Is it the new policy to come to terms with the totalitarian Powers in the hope that by great and far-reaching acts of submission, not merely in sentiment and pride, but in material factors, peace may be preserved?
“The other day Lord Halifax said the Europe was confused. The part of Europe which is confused is that part ruled by parliamentary governments. I know of no confusion on the side of the great Dictators. They know what they want, and no one can deny that up to the present at every step they are getting what they want. The grave and largely irreparable injury to world security took place in the years 1932 to 1935. … The next opportunity when the Syballine books were presented to us was the reoccupation of the Rhineland at the beginning of 1936. Now we know that a firm stand by France and Britain, under the authority of the League of Nations, would have been followed by the immediate evacuation of the Rhineland without the shedding of a drop of blood; and the effects of that might have enabled the more prudent elements in the German Army to regain their proper position, and would not have given to the political head of Germany that enormous ascendancy which has enabled him to move forward. Now we are at a moment when a third move is made, but when that opportunity does not present itself in the same favourable manner. Austria has been laid in thrall, and we do not know whether Czechoslovakia will not suffer a similar attack.”
Chudrick Basedman says
Roses are red
Sex is only permitted between a man and his wife
Homosexuals, sodomites and adulterers will not inherit heaven nor eternal life.