Gulf Coasters, Be Safe!

[Scott Dolan]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

 

Here's a corollary concern, presented for information purposes only: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/29/a-storm-made-in-washington-215549

And the biggest problem there is private insurers putting the squeeze on the government by refusing flood insurance in many areas. It was a big problem in Florida because homes there are so damned expensive, and most of the Gulf Coastal towns are actually below sea level.

Either way, there is plenty of blame to go around. It's all part of the "it'll never happen here" syndrome. Mark my words, we'll see all kinds of changes made in Texas after this. Building codes, mostly. But give it 3-5 years and you'll see most of them overturned...by the voters! 

There's an enormous housing community in Charlotte Harbor called Deep Creek. Kind of upper mid class. Well, one of the deed restrictions there was that all homes had to have concrete/clay roof tile. None of that asphalt bullshit the peasantry lines their shacks with! When Charley came through with 145mph straight lines, and gusts up to 175mph, those look at me roof tiles became incredibly dangerous projectiles that ended up doing even more damage. Later in the year, Charlotte County voted to remove the deed restriction mandating those tiles. 

Three years later, after much uproar from the people, they relented and put the restriction back in place. 

Those who do not learn from their mistakes...

[rostasi]

Chemical Plant Near Houston Warns It’s About To Explode

"Flooding swamped backup generators, and volatile chemicals are getting warm enough to ignite. “There’s no way to prevent it,” the CEO said."

"...something likely to happen in the next six days, Arkema North America CEO Richard Rowe said."

[kinuta]

Some of the latest footage really brings home the sheer enormity of the flood damage.

Sympathy to all involved.

We are no strangers to typhoons and tropical storms, we are having one as I type, but Houston's nightmare dwarfs our petty concerns.

[Soulstation1]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/shivering-girl-3-found-clinging-011520356.html

[Scott Dolan]

Heartbreaking...

[JSngry]

Texans’ do-it-ourselves rescue effort defines Hurricane Harvey

HOUSTON — As a torrential rain poured from the sky last Sunday, Keri Henry sat in her snug West University Place living room nervously checking Facebook. Floodwaters were rising, emergency lines were jammed, and people were posting desperate pleas for help: “Two elderly people trapped in a one story on their kitchen counters since noon.” “Seven people trapped in second floor.”

Henry grabbed a notepad and began scratching down details, thinking she would connect the people in trouble with other Facebook users offering boats and high-water vehicles. Within hours, the 36-year-old freelance food stylist was running a one-woman command center from her sofa.

“I see some people commenting on one post and other people commenting on another post, and it just clicked,” Henry said. “I had no idea what I was doing but no choice except to do it.”

Henry was part of an unprecedented do-it-yourself relief effort that came to define Hurricane Harvey. After the storm blew into Houston, a remarkable network of boat owners with smartphones, worried neighbors with laptops and digital wizards with mapping software popped up to summon and support an army of Good Samaritans who motored, rowed and waded into dangerous waters to save family, friends and total strangers.

Texas officials, in turn, repeatedly emphasized the importance of personal responsibility. They warned people not to call 911 unless their life was in immediate peril. The top elected official in Tyler County, northeast of Houston, told people not to expect a rescue if they defied evacuation orders. His subtle-as-buckshot words on Facebook: “GET OUT OR DIE!”

Across Southeast Texas, police, firefighters, the National Guard, the Coast Guard and other agencies responded with immense force. But in a storm of Harvey’s sheer monstrousness — hundreds of miles across, lingering for days with bucketing rain that swallowed roads and initially kept rescue aircraft grounded — no government response could ever have been enough.

So ordinary people took up the challenge.

“The thing that’s been completely different from anything I’ve ever seen is the way the community has responded. I can’t explain to you how awesome it has been,” said Houston Police Capt. Yasar Bashir, who stood in a West Houston neighborhood last week watching a volunteer flotilla of boats rescuing victims.

Police were working nonstop, “but we can’t do it all,” Bashir said. “It’s because of the citizens that we were able to get everyone out.”

The citizen rescue campaign was made possible by technology that didn’t exist in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans....

Full article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/texans-do-it-ourselves-rescue-effort-defines-hurricane-harvey/2017/09/02/f41bb8ee-8f2f-11e7-8df5-c2e5cf46c1e2_story.html?utm_term=.9ab8a62247b9

 

[Big Beat Steve]

Just wondering:

Texans’ do-it-ourselves rescue effort defines Hurricane Harvey

"Defines" oder "defies"?

[JSngry]

Ask the Washington Post!

Seriously, while watching the local news coverage during the raining/flooding I was thinking that the citizen involvement was going to be the real story of this storm. For Katrina. you think of people trapped on their rooftops, for Harvey, I think of people in bass boats, air boats, and kayaks boating through their neighborhoods looking for people to rescue, because...why wait for help to arrive when you're already there and can provide help yourself?

As the post article mentions, we're at a level of technology now that didn't exist during Katrina. It's heartening to read how a community (communities, actually, Houston covers a lot of ground and has a very diverse population) sensed the raw potential to form networks of real-time reaction and immediately took the initiative to get busy doing just that. It would be wrong to think that this type of jump-to-it-and get-it-done drive is an exclusively Texan trait, far from it, but otoh, it is something that a lot of us in Texas sort of feel as our birthright - do for yourselves so you can do for others when they need it.

The greedy assholes who forget the second part of that equation corrupt this basic "Texas spirituality", but the citizens of Houston who got on the boats and took to the streets define it. So yeah - define!

 

[JSngry]

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2017-09-11?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top-stories

Watching the apocalyptic photographs and videos released in the wake of Hurricane Harvey this week, the cartoonist Chris Ware singled out moments of grace as inspiration for this week’s cover. Ware, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, reflected on his experience in the Lone Star State:

“I lived in San Antonio in high school, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, and attended college in Austin, occasionally driving to Houston with my fellow art students to visit museums, and sometimes alone, just for the change of scenery. I liked Houston for its big buildings, its diversity, and its slack zoning laws, which made neighborhoods unpredictable and surprising. One night, my cartoonist friend John Keen and I stopped at a restaurant-bar that was about halfway to Houston, in the very Texas-sounding town of Winchester. The parking lot was locked and loaded with about two dozen pickup trucks, and, as scrawny liberal Austinites, we braced ourselves and pushed open the saloon doors, only to find black and white farmers talking and laughing, playing poker, and shooting pool together. In a corner, an interracial couple quietly ate barbecue. This Winchester bar, we realized, was more integrated than the University of Texas we’d just left.”

 

 

 

 

[mjzee]

Re The New Yorker cover: Meh.  BFD.  TNY likes Texas when it reflects TNY's obsessions with race.  All other times, it sees us as misbegotten idiots.  Consider this long piece, which it published less than two months ago.  If you think TNY (or anyone in the Northeast) has got your Texas back, you are sadly mistaken.  "But a recurrent crop of crackpots and ideologues has fed the state’s reputation for aggressive know-nothingism and proudly retrograde politics"..."One can drive across it and be in two different states at the same time: FM Texas and AM Texas. FM Texas is the silky voice of city dwellers, the kingdom of NPR. It is progressive, blue, reasonable, secular, and smug—almost like California. AM Texas speaks to the suburbs and the rural areas: Trumpland. It’s endless bluster and endless ads. Paranoia and piety are the main items on the menu."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/americas-future-is-texas

[JSngry]

1 hour ago, mjzee said:

.  If you think TNY (or anyone in the Northeast) has got your Texas back, you are sadly mistaken.

Tell me something I don't know. Not that I want them to "have my Texas back"...Me and mine got our own, thank you.

But I ain't gonna let a good cover go to waste and I ain't gonna let it ruin my day.

 

This, however, is quite true - as far as it goes:

"But a recurrent crop of crackpots and ideologues has fed the state’s reputation for aggressive know-nothingism and proudly retrograde politics"..."One can drive across it and be in two different states at the same time: FM Texas and AM Texas. FM Texas is the silky voice of city dwellers, the kingdom of NPR. It is progressive, blue, reasonable, secular, and smug—almost like California. AM Texas speaks to the suburbs and the rural areas: Trumpland. It’s endless bluster and endless ads. Paranoia and piety are the main items on the menu."

I defy anybody who has lived in Texas and traveled it for years to find otherwise. It\ s not a value judgement, it's just the basic reality. And it's what I really, really love - and hate - about my home state. But the reality is that you don't get a chance to have one instead of the other. You either take them both or else...I don't know...,move to either Oklahoma or California. But if you stay, and if you want to feel the real Texas love, you gotta learn that beauty and ugliness are only a minute away, no matter which way you turn your radio dial.