Foliage Season Brought 2.5 Million Visitors To Vermont

Scenes like this in Underhill Vermont on October 17
drew 2.5 million leaf peepers to the not so Green
Mountain State this autumn.

If you live in Vermont and felt kinda crowded during October, there's a great reason why.  

A new report says 2.5 million leaf peepers roamed the state during the foliage season and left behind a cool $500 million in spending on lodging, restaurants, attractions and other related stuff, reports WPTZ

The numbers aren't final either. As of this weekend, there were still some straggling colorful leaves left over to add a little beauty to our increasingly stick season surroundings. That meant there were a few straggling tourists taking in the last of the foliage. 

WPTZ checked in with some individual businesses to see how they did, and their reporters got the same story state tourism officials were telling them. 

"It was the busiest we've ever seen; I mean, you can still see it's busy, and it just kept on going, we have seen record numbers, and it's amazing We love it," Andrew Tascarella, the floor manager at Shaw's General Store in Stowe told WPTZ. 

In the fall foliage mecca of Woodstock, Vermont, the local Chamber of Commerce said they've also had an incredibly busy autumn. 

It appears people were not deterred by the nationwide reports of severe flooding in the Green Mountain State this summer. While people are still certainly suffering in the destructive aftermath, almost all the state was patched up, repaired and ready for tourists.

The weather was certainly gorgeous in September and October, and that helped. It probably didn't influence people who came here from long distances, seeing how they probably made their travel arrangements well before weather forecasts blared the good news about the sunny skies.

Then again, the bright weather to match the bright foliage probably encouraged those tourists to explore and spend money, rather than holing up in their hotel rooms on cold rainy days.

The fantastic weather also probably encouraged spur of the moment day trippers to take a trip up here to Vermont, I imagine. 

The abnormally warm autumn, the nearly daily sunshine and placid weather kept those colorful leaves on the trees later in the season than they would have if we had our typically stormy, windy fall.  That kept the leaf peepers peeping in Vermont longer than in most years.

This is subjective, but I'd give the quality of this year's foliage a B+.  It wasn't the most brilliant display I can remember, as the bright reds were somewhat lacking. But it was still gorgeously colorful and the tourists definitely got their money's worth.  

The big outbreak of snoliage - colorful leaves with snow covered mountains - that hit mid month was certainly a huge bonus. 

We are now getting into the November quiet before ski season arrives. The bulk of the winter sports folks won't be here for a good month or more. They need snow after all. Much of northern Vermont will get teased by some snow showers tonight that could leave a dusting even in many valleys. 

But record high temperatures are forecast Wednesday and Thursday, so those skis and snowboards probably won't get much use quite yet.  

For those who somehow missed the Vermont fall foliage this summer, what follows is a couple videos I took:

A "snoliage" tour around Cambridge and Underhill, Vermont on October 17. Click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that. 

Next, some driving around northwestern Vermont last week yielded these images. Again, click on this link to view or if you see the image below, click on that. 

Venice, Italy, Just Had Its Highest Flood Tide On Record. Here's Why It Wasn't News

The huge flood that didn't happen. The first test of a $6 billion
project worked: A near record storm tide in Venice, Italy
did not flood the historic city, for a change.

 Three years ago, the second highest tide on record hit  flood prone Venice, killing two people and flooding 85 percent of Venice, including St. Mark's Basilica.  

That flood was all over the headlines at the time. 

This past week, a similar tide menaced Venice, and I bet even people who closely pay attention to the news never heard about it. 

That's because Venice this time is fine. 

Here's why, according to the Washington Post:

"That's because of a $6 billion engineering project designed to protect Venice from mass flooding and the exhausting cycle of cleanup and recovery. The lagoon city's inlets are now guarded by 78 rectangular metal barrier, each the height of a five-story building, that are pumped with air and raised from the sea floor any time high waters threaten it. 

It's a landmark climate change solution, one requiring 30 years of planning and 20 years of construction, that has reduced fears of Venice turning into a modern-day Atlantis."

Venice has been inundated more frequently as climate change has raised sea levels. That makes high tides even higher, increasing flood problems in this region. Plus, the land in Venice is sinking, exacerbating the problem.

The actual protections around Venice are pretty cool. On most days, the barricades are hidden under water. Ships come and go just fine. During normal high tides without flooding salt water from the Adriatic flushes out the lagoons of Venice, so the water doesn't turn into a gross mass of algae, pollution, dangerous bugs, stink and yuckiness. 

The expensive safeguards clearly worked for Venice last week, but will that last forever?

As the Washington Post reports, the expensive engineering project that prevented a flood in Venice might not last forever. Projections call for a 30 centimeter (about a foot) rise in sea levels by mid-century. 

If that happens, the $6 billion project that project won't work anymore. At least not as well as it did last week. Of course, if emissions are cut dramatically in the next couple of decades, that would buy more time, making the system that protects Venice last a lot longer .

Venice was protected during the storminess of the past week, but not all of Italy was. 

As Al Jazeera reports, at least seven people, including a newborn and two children, were killed on Ischia island, on the south of Italy, as a landslide triggered by torrential rains hit a small town At last report, five people were still missing.

Five inches of rain poured down on the island within six hours.

Not sure if this tragedy was entire related to climate change, but storms are getting more and more extreme as time goes on. So this in consistent with global warming or weirding or whatever you want to call it.