My wife’s aunt lives in Houston and works for Conoco. We’re hoping things are alright with her as we haven’t heard anything yet.
Sounds like its hour by hour. OK one hour and then the next the water comes up but islands all over. If they can get through tomorrow, the water should start receding.
Latest estimate is 500,000 flood-totaled cars, twice as many as from Sandy. Beware…
OK4450 and anyone else trying to locate missing people in the flood zones (or any large disaster)…
Call your LOCAL/nearest Red Cross chapter.
Speak to Family Services.
Request tracking/notification regarding the person/persons involved.
Red Cross builds a data base of all intake persons at Red Cross shelters that can be cross checked. It may take time but if your missing person is or has been in a Red Cross shelter, they can find out and give you info.
Be patient. This is one of the largest disaster response jobs.
I’m years away from working with Red Cross disaster services so I don’t know if they now can cross reference shelter intake info with other organizations running shelters. And ad hoc pop-up shelters neighbors organize won’t have that sort of coordinated info.
But earlier today a friend of a friend of family used my suggestion and within hours knew the location and safety status of her elderly Alzheimers mother who had been evacuated from a nursing home.
Hope this info helps you OK4450. My prayers for your family member.
P.S. I used to volunteer with Red Cross disaster communications in the floods of '93 and '95 here in St. Louis. I also have a dozen family in affected parts of TX from Houston to Beaumont to near Galvaston.
1 Like
Thinking about the flooding… Cities are made of asphalt and concrete, both waterproof. Thus all rainfall has to exit via storm drains, which will load up the rivers they dump into.
I wonder if more emphasis should be given to porous materials for roads and sidewalks, which allow water to drain into the water table. I know there is such a thing as porous asphalt but perhaps it should be mandated. Sidewalks of brick over gravel are porous. Perhaps concrete could be formed with lots of 1" holes filled with sand.
Addendum, there is Porous Concrete, see google.
The downside of this is that the foundations will shift due to the water flow. I’ve walked on brick sidewalks that are like walking on a mountain trail, lots of small (up to 6 inch) hills and valleys.
Where I used to live they started mandating permeable surfaces and limiting the amount of non-permeable. This drives cluster developments. The problem with storms like this is the rainfall rate far exceeds the permeability rate of anything including plain dirt. Most of it runs off or settles in depressions to slowly permeate the soil. Once saturated, it just sits there.
2 Likes
What Houston is going through is more than problems caused by pavement. Another factor is that they’ve been developing on marshlands that used to help with drainage. That’s what happens when you get rid of your state’s environmental protection agency and give in to developers without considering the environmental impact of developing on wetlands.
Speaking of cars, I am totally sympathetic to anyone who doesn’t own one not being able to get out of the way of this storm, but if I lived anywhere near the coast of Texas, I would have evacuated to Dallas days before this storm made landfall rather than stick around. My life is worth more than anything in my home, and this storm made it to category 3 status with plenty of time to get out of Houston, even by Greyhound bus.
I don’t blame city officials for not ordering a mandatory evacuation because they’d then be responsible for causing a panic and getting everyone out who can’t get out themselves, but living in a coastal city should mean having a plan and being prepared. My plan is to put up my shutters and check NOAA’s “tropical storm wind strength probability” map. When the probability of tropical storm force winds in my current location is over 50%, I evacuate at least 75 miles inland. Then the chase is on, and if I find myself inside that 50% probability section again, I hit the road.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how much pavement you have once the ground is saturated, and Houston is wayyyyy past that point.
1 Like
The mayor of Houston correctly called this a “thousand year storm”. The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has to add two new colors to represent total rainfall amounts because this storm has exceeded the graphic codes that they’ve used for decades.
Your thought is a good one, but the floods from this storm could not have been predicted or controlled. Even NOAA was thrown off guard. Attempting to mitigate future floods of this magnitude through mandates will serve no purpose other than to drive up costs and taxes and restrict development. IMHO mandates aren’t the answer. Honestly, I don’t think there is one.
All we can do is pray.
4 Likes
What TSMB said. There is nothing that can be done to deal with four FEET or more of rain over hundreds of square miles. The largest deluge to hit the US on record.
I would not be surprised by this number. The Houston area is going to demand cars be sent their way. If you are in the market for new or used cars, you should probably buy now. In a matter of weeks, there will be truck loads of cars shipped to the Houston area from all over to feed the demand that they will have to replace the flooded cars. This will cause prices to go up for new and used.
Going back to the surging inventory of new and price decreasing on used due to sub prime lending, a disaster of this magnitude will soak up this capacity in the auto market.
The weather blog from KHOU on August 22 was pretty clear that this was coming. Sure, they didn’t know how many inches of rain, but they did know that the “risk of life threatening flooding is real.”
http://www.khou.com/weather/blog/tropical-impacts-on-texas-possible-this-weekend/466427112
So sure, there’s no guarantee that the storm was coming, but the facts were pretty obvious. Houston has been flooding ever since it was first built, and it will again and again. Is it really true that there was no evacuation plan? No organizing by local, state and national agencies to get everyone informed and to start a process of moving people out?
@the_same_mountainbik wrote Attempting to mitigate future floods of this magnitude through mandates will serve no purpose other than to drive up costs and taxes and restrict development. My answer is that if people want to live in flood plains and develop marsh land they should pay more taxes and costs and plan to take care of themselves. The rest of us seem to end up as the insurance company of last resort when people do things without paying attention to the realities of life.
Prayer is reassuring, but just like with a leaking head gasket, the way to fix it involves hard work and money.
2 Likes
Let’s not forget this was a category 3 hurricane traveling at 10 MPH before it made landfall. I wish I had said so at the time, but I saw this coming days before it made landfall. Granted, that isn’t long enough to plan long term, but it is long enough to get out of the storm’s way.
No, we can do much more than pray. We can mitigate (not fully prevent, but mitigate) future damage by giving the water a place to go. I realize this storm was (and continues to be) so large that there would have been flooding no matter what they did, but now the water has no place to go, and standing water is creating new hazards, such as contamination of neighborhoods from raw sewage. It’s these newly-emerging problems that could be mitigated if the flood waters had a place to go.
There is a race going on between drainage and rainfall, and right now, rainfall is winning the race. There are things that could be done to improve the odds for drainage, like improving drainage capacity, that will get the flood waters out sooner.
On a storm like this the water table is already full…I don’t see how this would be any better.
From earthquakes to blizzards to hurricanes to tornados to 120* heat the U.S. offers something to suit each of us and I’m just glad that the tornado 2 years ago missed my house by 100 yards and my neighbors had the street cleared of downed trees before dark.
Red Cross now has Safe & Well online, offering another option.
https://safeandwell.communityos.org/zf/safesearch/search
Those affected are encouraged to register themselves. You can search the website for news of loved ones.
Blizzards don’t usually kill you when your asleep in your bed waiting for the storm to pass.
My wife and I each received robodial calls phishing for donations to Harvey victims. 99.999% chance it was a scam.
Both our places of work are doing fund raises and taking donations for the Harvey victims. That’s were I’ll give and help out. I can trust where the money and donations are going.
Also be careful of the go-fund-me sites for the victims. There were hundreds of reported scam sites for Katrina. Expect more with Harvey.
The local Hy-Vee store is doing a match up to $100,000. The money will go to the Red Cross. I know some people have some problems with the RC but really they are the first ones to respond with blankets, meals, etc. When you have 5-10,000 people in one evacuation center, feeding and providing facilities is a big task. The Lutheran Church has a disaster fund too so I’ll be splitting my money with the RC, church, Sal Army, and Samaritans Purse I guess. When the water goes down, SP expects to have 1000 volunteers a day cleaning out houses, sheet rock, etc., which is where the big work will be.
I understand the reluctance of the mayor to call for an evacuation but when the Governor said to evacuate, I think he should have gotten on board, but that’s water over the dam now. When the water comes up overnight though and you’re trapped without a boat, it’s hard to understand not moving out when you have the chance. You shelter in place when it’s safe to stay where you are, but when the water comes up to the roof and you have no power or food, you can’t shelter in place.
At any rate its and individual decision to move out ahead of time.
Yeah, this will be a temporary boost to car sales that were starting to slow down.
Roof collapse?
That’s why I said usually. Roof collapses are extremely rare.