Hurricane Harvey

[Minimalist]

There seem to be "100 year floods" every year or so, now.  They may have to revise their terminology.

[paulpablo]

Difficult to imagine Houston with one meter of water.
No argument about how awful that is...but..at the same time India and Bangladesh are under monsoon floods. More than 1200 dead a few millions people evacuated.
British and U.S TV start talking about it, French...zero

Ricky gervais does a really good joke about how retarded this attitude is.

If a celebrity on twitter talks about how bad bullfighting is then some idiot will say "what about child slavery!?"
People who live in the west are talking about the recent flood in the west and so now theyre morally inferior because they haven't also spoke about another flood somewhere else that happened.

I don't actually believe that no British,American or French people are talking about the monsoons in other countries though either.

[Edwardo Piet]

And U2 frontman, Bono, wasn't impressed.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

There seem to be "100 year floods" every year or so, now.  They may have to revise their terminology.

Well, the term is defined by the history of a particular river, so a river's "100 year flood" doesn't reset the clock for any other.

[mlmooney89]

We had a "100 year flood" of the Meramac River back in '08. Only a railroad line kept it out of my back yard, ~7,000 feet from the usual banks of the river. When it was over FEMA paid to jack up all the houses by ten feet. This was chosen because the waters would cross the tracks at eight feet.

I wonder how much it would cost to jack up all those houses.

---

Most houses in Texas are wooden structures. Six feet of water will force itself through them readily.

To be fair a very large amount of houses on the Texas coast ARE jacked up to second floor level.

[Thumpalumpacus]

And U2 frontman, Bono, wasn't impressed.

He's just sore he ain't from Texas.

[Brian37]

We had a "100 year flood" of the Meramac River back in '08. Only a railroad line kept it out of my back yard, ~7,000 feet from the usual banks of the river. When it was over FEMA paid to jack up all the houses by ten feet. This was chosen because the waters would cross the tracks at eight feet.

I wonder how much it would cost to jack up all those houses.

---

Most houses in Texas are wooden structures. Six feet of water will force itself through them readily.

To be fair a very large amount of houses on the Texas coast ARE jacked up to second floor level.

Most coastal buildings are nationwide. But even with that we don't even have in California outside big businesses the same universal earthquake codes Japan has. 

It isn't enough simply to have a house on stilts. The building itself house our business needs to be both wind and flood resistant.

[Clueless Morgan]

We had a "100 year flood" of the Meramac River back in '08. Only a railroad line kept it out of my back yard, ~7,000 feet from the usual banks of the river. When it was over FEMA paid to jack up all the houses by ten feet. This was chosen because the waters would cross the tracks at eight feet.

I wonder how much it would cost to jack up all those houses.

---

Most houses in Texas are wooden structures. Six feet of water will force itself through them readily.

Especially if the house is jacked up and that first floor, which is now basically just a latticework of columns and lateral bracing, is then enclosed with exterior walls on which floodwaters can exert a lateral force.  You've saved your personal belongings from flood damage, yes, but if the floodwaters are strong enough to tear the house from its foundations even if it's on stilts, you've basically wasted your money.

Not saying it's likely that every house would or could be washed away in this situation, but you still run that risk in some areas so people need to do their due diligence in determining if jacking their house up on stilts would be worth the cost. In some cases it absolutely would be worth the money.

There seem to be "100 year floods" every year or so, now.  They may have to revise their terminology.

I heard somewhere that Houston or the Houston area has had something like 6 "100-year floods" or other "100-year" storm events in the last... maybe 10 years or something.   I can't remember the exact time frame cited.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

We had a "100 year flood" of the Meramac River back in '08. Only a railroad line kept it out of my back yard, ~7,000 feet from the usual banks of the river. When it was over FEMA paid to jack up all the houses by ten feet. This was chosen because the waters would cross the tracks at eight feet.

I wonder how much it would cost to jack up all those houses.

---

Most houses in Texas are wooden structures. Six feet of water will force itself through them readily.

To be fair a very large amount of houses on the Texas coast ARE jacked up to second floor level.

Yeah, like many other places. But inland it's not so common. Missouri has very little beachfront.

[Brian37]

To be fair a very large amount of houses on the Texas coast ARE jacked up to second floor level.

Yeah, like many other places. But inland it's not so common. Missouri has very little beachfront.

If we let the Kochs and Exxon have their way it will be.