Monday, July 18, 2011

Just in time for a heat wave, weekly Tennessee paper surveys local creeks and swimming holes

With warnings of excessive heat in at least 17 states today, it's a good time to think cool. And you may feel a little cooler just looking at the pictures in the July 11 edition of the weekly Hickman County Times in Centerville, Tenn., about 50 miles west of Nashville, which spotlighted the county's abundance of creeks and swimming holes and even took their temperature, with the help of a former officer of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

"If you want to know whether this survey is definitive, the answer is No," Editor Brad Martin writes. "In fact, we are sure that there are other holes that are colder, other creeks that we may have missed — and that we’ll be hearing about all of those very soon. But that will be a controversy that’s fun."

In his creek-by-creek account, Martin wrote, "Though we didn’t jump in, we noticed all along the way that tree-lined road along creeks were significantly cooler than . . . well, the concrete of the county seat’s Public Square. If most gauges were showing 96 on these late afternoons (and it probably was), we didn’t know about it." For PDFs of the front page and the two inside pages, full of cooling creek photos, click here. For the pages as a PNG file, go here.

UPDATE, July 20: As a cautionary tale, perhaps about knowing your creeks, we note this story from The Ledger Independent of Maysville, Ky.: A Chicago teenager drowned while swimming in a creek in nearby Lewis County, on a farm that hosts Catholic missionaires from other parts of the nation.

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