The area where I live is under a "historical and catastrophic" flood situation, as the media is calling it. It started raining, with a severe thunderstorm, Friday late afternoon. It has rained heavily since then every several hours. At our home, we have gotten around 6 inches of rain, and it's Monday evening. Of course, we are about to get hit with another very strong storm which will probably deliver at least a couple inches more.

The Ohio River has shot up. It is supposed to get higher than it was in 1997, one of the highest levels in the last 50 years. Just a couple days ago, no one was forecasting such a thing.

The levels are being forecast will be up on the flood wall at Paducah, which means that the city had no choice but to put in fast gear closing all of the gates in the floodwall - some 47. That means that the fear is significant - especially considering that this week and weekend is quilt week in Paducah.

Quilt week is the biggest week in Paducah. Paducah is home to the national Quilt Museum, and one, if not the largest and most prestigious quilt competition and show are held in Paducah every spring. Tens of thousands of people come from all over the world, and the quality and quantity of the quilting that is exhibited is astounding. It's an awesome show. It also happens to be one if not the major economic stimulus activity in the city annually.

But, the quilt show's main exhibit is displayed in the Paducah Convention Center, which, ironically, was built outside the flood wall. Why that was allowed is something that history is going to have to sort out. But now, as the flood gates are, by necessity, to keep the city from being flooded, having to be closed, it means that the convention center can't be used for the show.

So, the city was just about completely unprepared for the situation that has hit - a stalled front that rapidly has poured untold inches of rain relentlessly down on the city and the region enough so to drive the Ohio river to historic levels in just a few days - right when the quilt show is supposed to open.

Yes, the city has come up with contingency plans. It's putting the biggest part of the quilt show in an abandoned Circuit City store building out by the mall. Yuck. Taking a core part of the show out of the downtown area, even while leaving some of it there, is both going to fragment the show, cause a lot of confusion, and hurt the downtown which has come to rely on the quilt show as many stores rely on christmas shopping success for a profitable year.

I'm not second guessing them - there is nothing easy about the decisions they had to make. The founder of the show was quoted as saying that she considered cancelling it, but that it was so late that many people were either here already or in transit, and wouldn't be able to get refunds, and she just couldn't bring herself to cancel it.

I don't blame her, and think that it was a reasonable to decision. I wish they could have found spaces downtown to move the exhibition. But, I don't understand why the city has invested so much in a facility that is so vulnerable to the whims of nature.

There was undoubtedly some corruption in the original planning and implementation of the building of the convention center. There ought to be some accountability, but I doubt if there ever will be. Instead, Paducah's reputation will be sullied a bit and a bunch of taxpayers' money will be squandered. But probably the center will stay where it is and everyone will go along until it happens again - maybe next year, who knows?

Another irony in a bad way is that the Paducah Sun newspaper is one of the worst in the nation at ridiculing anyone who is concerned about global warming and thinks that humans may be the major cause. I mean they are radical in making fun and criticizing anyone about that. But even as the weather makes news more frequently and severely around the globe - now touching their own community.

But they will never admit that humanity is contributing in anyway to these increasing weather extremes. And, undoubtedly, they will continue to be one of the lead skeptics about global warming and critics of those that say it is real. It's really sad, and adds to the irony of the events of the last several days and the next several days to come, because I feel that the increasing frequency and intensity of various weather events in our part of the country in the last decade is connected to changes in the climate.