Hurricane Harvey

[Thumpalumpacus]

It's been 6 years since our 103 day Missouri River flood of 2011.  I really feel for those folks in Texas, the nursing home by Houston brought tears.

As bad as it was here for so  long, at least the Army Corp of Engineers gave us enough of a warning in time for sand bags and orderly evacuations to ameliorate the waters.  Damn, Texas it is so widespread and the time scale so compressed, hard to see what they could have done.  Warning time is so important, with the long lead times farmers organized and built levees and added to existing levees with equipment they had on hand.  And our flood zone, while hundreds of miles long, was at most less than 15 miles wide, easy to move equipment into and out of from adjoining high ground.  So much of east Texas is just flat, no where to get away from it, and no surrounding area to provide support and logistics.

And Texas is seeing more and more road damage, that is really tough, it makes everything else so complicated when the roads are impassable.


I never dreamt I would ever look back on our fucking 103 days of fucking flood that year and say we were lucky, but we were.


Jesus, what a nightmare for Texas . . . . .

And it's even more complicated because much of southeast Texas is swampy and waterlogged, and set atop a clay substrate -- especially the case in the Houston area. And there's really no defense to be mounted against this sort of rainfall. There's very poor drainage and a high water-table.