LEARN NC

teenage boys removing a piano from a flooded house

Measuring the waters

By Kristin Post

1.3 Teacher's guide: Failed measurement

By Kristin Post

Provided by UNC Libraries / Documenting the American South

Introductory script

People have informal ways of measuring, like the tools we used earlier in this class. We’re going to find out how Earl Cavenaugh informally measured the rising flood, and we’re going to find out the reason his system didn’t work during Hurricane Floyd. In this excerpt, you’re going to hear Charles Thompson and Earl Cavenaugh again. Earl Cavenaugh is going to describe how fast the creek was flooding and what he did to try to track its rate of change.

Preliminary questions

  1. How would you take measurements of a rising creek near your house?
  2. If there has been a heavy rainstorm or hurricane, how long do you think it takes before a flood reaches its highest peak? (In minutes? Days? Hours?) Write a handful of different predictions up on the board.

The recording

Play the Failed Measurement oral history excerpt. Running time: 1 minute 48 seconds.

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Transcript

Early Cavenaugh
General rain — it’s been known through our generation. If it’s rain, a general rain, it’s going to get out of the banks. It will rise by the time it quits raining, five days. Sometimes it depends on whether it rains more there or here, whether or not it would go four maybe or five. But we were looking for it to rise five, but it was up here the second day after it quit raining. More than it, uh, had been being as high as the flood.
Charles Thompson
After that second day, did y’all start knowing that it was different right away?
Early Cavenaugh
Always when it rains, I kind of wanted to know how high it is coming. So I got me an aluminum yardstick and I go stick it down in the ground to ten. Then I go back and read it and see how many inches it goes an hour. I’ve been doing that now since 1962, when it come into my house. So I know kind of how to prepare — see how fast it’s coming. So I took that one this time and went down to check it. Uh, I lost the thing. It was done gone. Usually two inches an hour at the very peak is all it would rise. This time it was coming a foot an hour or something.
Charles Thompson
A foot an hour.

Follow-up questions

  1. Prediction follow-up: According to Earl Cavenaugh, how many days does it usually take before the creek floods to its highest point? (Answer: 5 days.)
  2. How many days did it take before the Hurricane Floyd flood came through? (Answer: 2 days.)
  3. Why did Mr. Cavenaugh want to measure how fast the water was coming up? What did it mean when the yardstick floated away?
  4. What are more accurate ways of measuring the rate of floods? Discuss.
  5. What kind of measurements do we hear about on the daily news on TV? (The weatherman may mention the lake level, the temperature outside, the barometric pressure, how many inches of rain or snow fell, etc. Discuss these measurements.)
  6. Does your knowledge of some of these measurements help you decide to do or not do something in your daily life? Why is it important to take these measurements?