Hurricane Harvey

[The Grand Nudger]

Tell that to Border Patrol?  They had hoped to use the hurricane to drive immigrants like cattle, lol. Turned out to be worse than expected, they abandoned their posts like bitches.

[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.

[LadyForCamus]

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.

Where are you, Thump?  How badly are you feeling all of this?

[vorlon13]

Man, this mess in Texas is dredging up a bunch of memories I have from 2011 that I am not eager to be having. And it's overwhelming those folks in Texas are going to have to deal with the effects of this for years and years.

Around here, most everything is put back together, roads fixed, buildings rehabbed, fences and everything else restored

- however -

one thing they cannot fix is all the dead trees on the Missouri bottoms. There are hundreds of thousands of them. Ones along roads were taken down before they fell and caused a problem, but all along the Missouri, there are dead trunks and branches everywhere, north of Council Bluffs is a huge ugly swath were all the trees died and have fallen down and new gnarled growth is trying to reclaim the area. No one around here talks about it, but it's a constant reminder of our awful summer.

I don't know if the trees will die en masse in Houston, I hope not, but something like that will be evident for decades after their flooding is over, a grim reminder of all the crap they are going through now.

[vorlon13]

And what can flood water do to a highway?

We had this when the water went down:



The flowing water undermined the pavement and it crumbled to pieces.  And the water was only a foot deep and it did this.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Where are you, Thump?  How badly are you feeling all of this?

Like I said, things are mellow where I am, about 30 miles NW of Austin, and about 250 miles inland. We've had about 3 1/4" of rain, and I'm sitting on high ground. We're lucky around these parts.

[vorlon13]

More math:

The Missouri River here (Omaha) had to carry ~40 cubic kilometers of water during our 100 day flood in 2011. Texas has had 3 times that much water in the last month!!

The Missouri River here is normally around 600 feet across, during 2011 it spread for miles to either side. And it did it for over 100 days. Texas has received enough rain this month to repeat our flood for nearly an entire year. It's just staggering how much water they have to deal with.

The amount of flood water in Texas is approximately equal to a 'worst case scenario' flood for the Missouri River system where Fort Peck, Garrison, and Oahe Dams all fail and unleash all their stored water at once.

This Texas flooding is absolutely epic in it's magnitude.


About the worst thing they could imagine in 2011 was for the levee surrounding Council Bluffs IA to fail and immediately inundate the city and leave 30,000 people refugees. That didn't happen, the levee system was reinforced and even the national guard patrolled it continuously all summer to protect it. Texas, OTOH, is living out that worst case scenario multiplied by "I don't know" how many more times.

[vorlon13]

Not sure why we are making this about politics when people's lives are on the line and their homes being destroyed. In times like these, it's best to remember that we are all human rather than concern ourselves over who voted for who.

People live by various creeds, if you will, and advocating we respect the creeds of others doesn't seem that controversial to me. Folks espousing denying others solace and succor during a disaster might very well be outraged and feel disrespected if similar gestures are made towards them in their hour of trial.

It's just simple respect.  No anger or vengeance, just respect.

[Jackalope]

I have two separate families of friends in and near Houston, and our corporate office is there. The friends are on relatively dry higher ground and are OK. No word from the corporate office. I expect they're flooded and without power.

[Clueless Morgan]

We had a pretty horrible flood back in 1996.  The Columbia came over the levees in a lot of places, the Willamette came over the seawall in downtown Portland.  Lower lying areas were just fucked.  The basement parking garage at work was completely flooded.   We had 6 inches of water in our raised-floor data center, and our office was flooded about a foot deep, including our operations center.  We sandbagged and did what we could but the water just goes where it wants.

Phew, I remember that flood.  My neighborhood creek flooded at least 3 feet deep over the only street to my house but my neighbor's mom still managed to get us to school.

Are you catching rain water? Yum Yum!

In Texas?  Do you know how much we pollute?  lol

The pollution should mostly have been washed out of the air by the leading edge of the hurricane, it should be relatively clean water compared to the sewage-water alternative.

Plus what's a little toxin when you're facing dehydration and death. 

Live Man, Live!!!!

And poo-water.  Take the easy way out and catch the rain before you give yourself dysentery or something.

In any case, glad you were able to find some bottled water.  Makes me think I should stock up for the Cascadia Quake.  

Not sure why we are making this about politics when people's lives are on the line and their homes being destroyed. In times like these, it's best to remember that we are all human rather than concern ourselves over who voted for who.

I totally understand the sentiment and generally agree that these things shouldn't be political, but when politicians cut funding for disaster prevention and/or management or, like Trump did, eliminate regulations that would prevent future natural disasters from being much worse it makes natural disasters inherently political.

So long as we have politicians in charge of regulating infrastructure and funding disaster relief, natural disasters will be political.  It's unfortunate but that's reality.