Posted on 08/26/2017 4:39:50 AM PDT by NautiNurse
Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Rockport TX about 10:00PM CDT Friday night. Top sustained winds were 130mph. Rockport High School sustained heavy damage when a portion of the roof collapsed. A senior housing complex collapsed. The Rockport courthouse sustained major damage with “a cargo trailer halfway in the building.” Multiple tornadoes reported in the Houston/Galveston areas. There are reports of scattered structural fires and a shooting was reported in Corpus Christi. Residents along the San Bernard River were advised to evacuate and most TX Gulf coast counties are under flash flood watches.
Many locations are under a boil-water notice. Power outages are widespread. President Donald Trump promptly granted a Disaster Declaration to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s request. More than 700 members of the Texas Army and Air National Guards, Texas State Guard and the Texas Military Department have been activated and are positioning themselves throughout the state ahead of Hurricane Harvey and its anticipated landfall later this week. Ahead of the storm, FEMA sent supplies from its warehouse in Fort Worth to a staging point at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio.
Mash image to find lots of satellite imagery links
Public Advisories
Severe Weather Watches and Warnings TX
NHC Discussions
NHC Local Hurricane Statements Corpus Christi
NHC Local Hurricane Statements Galveston
Buoy Data near Harvey
Thread I: Potentially Catastrophic Hurricane Harvey Approaches Texas Gulf Coast
That right there is lunch for a family or two!
(Tastes like chicken!)
:-)
At what point to you think people should be responsible for evacuating themselves rather than wait til someone tells them to?
When my kids were being raised I didn’t wait for the schools to call of in blizzard conditions......I chose to keep them home. In all those years only once did they not turn all the buses around and send those kids home....
I determine what is safe or not...and in an area that is prone to flooding where people are given a week to get out with repeated warnings over and over again monster levels of water in feet, not inches, are coming......I’d sure as heck evacuated.....
People are instructed to listen to local officials. And unfortunately Houston’s mayor went full Nagin on them. Never go full Nagin.
There are people that are capable of planning, have the physical mobility, reliable transportation, destination planning and resources, and pre-planned arrangements and there are those that don’t have those things.
You see people without savings, reliable cars, relatives and friends that will take them in and planned arrangements for dogs, tropical fish tanks, and handicapped family members all the time. These people have to be ordered to evacuate as they cannot self-evacuate.
Barker DAM just went over 30 inches
rainfall rates increasing to .33 to .4 per hour in the water shed
atticks a little less .25 inches per hour
SE harris county has 1.5 HR rates ..downtown about 1/2 per hR rates
the bad is the key..got to watch how it evolves/moves
I thought the Mayor was sensible on Saturday explaining why evacuation was not ordered in light of past experiences.
I appreciate your joke but it seemed to me that Abbot may have misspoke but he did not cause a panic.
Well, sure, trying to get virtually everyone to leave at once won’t work. Pick out the most vulnerable, maybe 200-300k* at first, and send them out in stages as much as possible. The tech to do this at a has existed for a while.
*Not everyone will take the suggestion - I’d think the local rate of compliance can be estimated - maybe out of 400k notified, 250k would leave? The idea is to incur a manageable problem to reduce the much bigger problem, later.
And it went beyond your scenario. The Houston mayor raised the specter of it being more dangerous to be caught on the roads in an evacuation than staying in place. I know the Rita evac fiasco was on everyone’s mind, but it doesn’t have to be a full evacuation, as this was never forecast to be a catastrophic wind event in the Houston area. Evacuation of 500 year floodplains would have been manageable and would have made the current emergency easier to handle.
The mayor was envisioning another full evac like Rita. That was not needed. A targeted evacuation of floodplains would have been manageable and would have made the current emergency that much less of a problem. I would think there would be someone in city government to realize this was not an either/or scenario.
despite the outflows the rain of increase on both dams remains steady..and may be increasing ever so slightly...likely due to the current rain
The list of subdivisions needing to evacuate around the reservoir pools was very long.
Rainfall total at Houston Airport since 7:00AM Saturday: 25 inches
http://w1.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KIAH.html
In a city that's going to change with each storm. There are numerous places in Houston that have taken on water, then been fixed. Others have gotten worse. But there's no way to know in advance except a few of the most obvious ones, under the dikes, etc.
You are making the perfect the enemy of the good. There are existing floodplain maps, the city could have used those.
are there any live webcams of the dams?
Following the first forecast error resulting in a false alarm, folks are much less compliant with the original plan.
I haven’t seen webcams at the dams. Last night there was a reporter with camera at Barker dam.
Yes I’m aware of that as it was discussed back thread......posted about Rita ....
There were mandatory evacuations in areas....and volunteer evacuations....that puts the responsibility on the people to comply or to determine what they will do for their own safety.
If stayed and flooded...being on your roof is still much safer than being stuck on traffic filled flooded roads. IMO.
But more to the point....this entire event went beyond what even the authorites could call as it’s ever changing...at most they can project.... ....you’re dealing with natures force and nobody controls where that will go or what it will do.....therefore you need to decide yourself what you will do to remain safe.....
You’re going to see a wave of MEs following the current band of precip across the area.
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