Author Topic: Houston is a hot mess this morning  (Read 12434 times)

I'm a red panda

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 8186
  • Location: United States
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #50 on: September 02, 2017, 06:06:45 PM »
Wow!  Glad to hear you stayed dry and safe. And thank you for the news from the front.

I heard from a friend that shelters all over the country will be taking some animals from Houston so that they can be fostered until their owners are found and ready to take them back. Hopefully they'll also start a database of lost animals.

We are fostering a little terrier mix right now that was found in a flooded neighborhood. Hopefully he will find his family. If not, we may have a second dog.

That's so sweet of you.

I sent a bunch of stuff to our local shelter. They had 30 dogs from Texas shelters arrive.  People here are freaking out because they think these are displaced dogs. But they were already adoptable dogs and the shelters are making room for pets who will hopefully go back to their families soon.

Sadly, we just adopted a second dog, so a third is not an option.

Hash Brown

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 213
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #51 on: September 03, 2017, 03:03:18 PM »
I took a look at Houston's flood plain map on FEMA's website.  This the most egregious violation of common sense I was able to find...this circa -1965 neighborhood near the Astrodome:


As someone who grew up in a city where the 1937 Flood (Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee Rivers) motivated large-scale demolition of neighborhoods situated on flood plains, I look at this in total disbelief.  Slab homes?  On a flood 100-year flood plain? 

Here is what a new building looks like on a 100-year flood plain in Ohio:

ooeei

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1142
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #52 on: September 05, 2017, 08:14:02 AM »
It is now widely reported that Harvey has destroyed up to 500,000 new and used cars.  That is as many as Katrina and Sandy combined.  Telling people not to leave town was a mistake.  It simply exacerbated property damage by keeping hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the driveways of homes that were destroyed. 

The Houston bus system saved all of its buses by parking them up on freeway flyover ramps.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/opinion/harvey-flooding-mayor-evacuation.html?mcubz=0

Have you ever been to Houston around 5pm on a Friday? It's complete gridlock in most of the city, and that's a regular Friday where plenty of people aren't going anywhere. Add in the panic of a hurricane, and make it everyone in the city instead of the regular working folks, and you now have a new disaster.

120 people died purely in the evacuation last time they did it for Rita in 2005, when the city had even less people. Currently we're at 60 dead for Harvey, half as many as just the evacuation. Additionally, by the time they know we need to evacuate it's too late. Yeah they could've told everyone a week before it happened to evacuate and it might've gone okay, but if they take that strategy they're going to be evacuating the whole city multiple times a year just in case, and most of the time nothing will happen (and people will start ignoring evacuation orders). 48 hours isn't nearly enough time to evacuate everyone, and they had no idea how bad this storm would be until well within that window. Sure there were some weather channels talking about the "possibilities" of the storm getting really bad before that, but that happens with every storm.

Evacuation is one of those things that sounds really simple, but in practice is basically not possible in the timeline you have to work with.

SoundFuture

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 53
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #53 on: September 05, 2017, 08:27:37 AM »

As someone who grew up in a city where the 1937 Flood (Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee Rivers) motivated large-scale demolition of neighborhoods situated on flood plains, I look at this in total disbelief.  Slab homes?  On a flood 100-year flood plain? 


Bare in mind we have ongoing projects, like one single project that will take something on the order of 100 square miles out of the 100-year flood plain in the Greens Bayou and Buffalo Bayou watersheds by taking out an "S" curve that causes the Greens Bayou to drain into the Buffalo Bayou against the current. There will only be so many simply projects like this where you can see big gains, but I am hopefully that we'll be funding every single one of them for many years to come. 

I'm also genuinely hopeful that we'll see renewed interest in the 'coastal spine', which would protect Houston and the Port of Houston from storm surges. Because Harvey wasn't worst case, a worst case involves similar amounts of rainfall with a large storm surge into the Houston Ship Channel. You couple another rainfall event like that with a 20'+ storm surge and you'll erase US economic growth for the previous year in a single event while also killing thousands of people.

Travis

  • Magnum Stache
  • ******
  • Posts: 4219
  • Location: California
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #54 on: September 05, 2017, 07:13:16 PM »
It is now widely reported that Harvey has destroyed up to 500,000 new and used cars.  That is as many as Katrina and Sandy combined.  Telling people not to leave town was a mistake.  It simply exacerbated property damage by keeping hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the driveways of homes that were destroyed. 

The Houston bus system saved all of its buses by parking them up on freeway flyover ramps.

About 60 people are confirmed dead so far. Most of them died in their cars on the highway.  That number could have been in the hundreds if more people were on those highways like you suggested. Boo hoo that some cars got wet.

Hash Brown

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 213
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #55 on: September 06, 2017, 09:45:34 AM »
Well it appears inevitable that we taxpayers in the high-and-dry formerly industrial Midwest who have lost tens of millions of residents to the Sunbelt Hurricane Belt will be paying for Houston's disastrous permitting. Since we're paying for it, maybe we should have some say in how Houston conducts its affairs, since it didn't have the common sense to order an evacuation of its most vulnerable areas (areas where quite obviously homes should have never been built and should not be rebuilt). 

GuitarStv

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 23128
  • Age: 42
  • Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #56 on: September 06, 2017, 10:23:58 AM »
Depending upon the agency the value of a human life is somewhere between $6M and $9M.

Blue collar trades FTW.  I should have ditched engineering and studied at assassin school.

SoundFuture

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 53
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #57 on: September 06, 2017, 10:27:09 AM »
Depending upon the agency the value of a human life is somewhere between $6M and $9M.

Blue collar trades FTW.  I should have ditched engineering and studied at assassin school.

Pump up those numbers a little more and I'll start questioning my need for both kidneys.

I'm a red panda

  • Walrus Stache
  • *******
  • Posts: 8186
  • Location: United States
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #58 on: September 06, 2017, 10:30:56 AM »
Well it appears inevitable that we taxpayers in the high-and-dry formerly industrial Midwest who have lost tens of millions of residents to the Sunbelt Hurricane Belt will be paying for Houston's disastrous permitting. Since we're paying for it, maybe we should have some say in how Houston conducts its affairs, since it didn't have the common sense to order an evacuation of its most vulnerable areas (areas where quite obviously homes should have never been built and should not be rebuilt).

The Midwest sees FEMA aid for flooding on a fairly regular basis too...
And we've had aid for other things as well.

Maybe not your city; but certainly, disasters hit everywhere.

DarkandStormy

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1498
  • Age: 34
  • Location: Midwest, USA
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #59 on: September 06, 2017, 11:06:56 AM »
Well it appears inevitable that we taxpayers in the high-and-dry formerly industrial Midwest who have lost tens of millions of residents to the Sunbelt Hurricane Belt will be paying for Houston's disastrous permitting. Since we're paying for it, maybe we should have some say in how Houston conducts its affairs, since it didn't have the common sense to order an evacuation of its most vulnerable areas (areas where quite obviously homes should have never been built and should not be rebuilt).

I think you fail to grasp the concept of taxes and what it means to live in a society.  Perhaps try being a nomad in a desert or mountains somewhere?

farfromfire

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 230
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #60 on: September 06, 2017, 01:08:51 PM »
Well it appears inevitable that we taxpayers in the high-and-dry formerly industrial Midwest who have lost tens of millions of residents to the Sunbelt Hurricane Belt will be paying for Houston's disastrous permitting. Since we're paying for it, maybe we should have some say in how Houston conducts its affairs, since it didn't have the common sense to order an evacuation of its most vulnerable areas (areas where quite obviously homes should have never been built and should not be rebuilt).
Why do you continue to bring this up when this point has been explained to you on this very page?

While I agree with DarkandStormy, since you brought this up - Ohio seems to benefit from more federal aid than Texas:
https://taxfoundation.org/states-rely-most-federal-aid/

Kuznec

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 11
  • Age: 41
Re: Houston is a hot mess this morning
« Reply #61 on: September 06, 2017, 01:31:47 PM »
Texas is the source of this money.