Our oldest son lives in Katy, which is about 25 miles West of Houston. We just talked to him and he said it has already rained over 25 inches and that they've been told that it could rain another 25 before this is over. About an hour ago he facetimed with us and you could see where the water was starting to back-up into his yard. The streets are flooded and he says he's got only about 6 to 8 inches to go before it'll start to seep into his house.
Sorry, my engineering brain took over. I should of waited until the crisis passes until I started the analysis. They'll be plenty of time for that later.
Thoughts and prayers to all residents, care givers and rescue personnel. It sounds like they need it.
Our son's house is still dry this morning but the local bayou has overflowed it's banks and water was hip deep in the streets of his neighborhood. They're being warned to watch for alligators. He says it's still raining but it has let up a little from yesterday.
Is it an engineering failure if the disaster was imminent and one did nothing to stop it?
“We’re sitting ducks. We’ve done nothing.” said Phil Bedient, an engineering professor at Rice University and co-director of the Storm Surge Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center. “We’ve done nothing to shore up the coastline, to add resiliency ... to do anything.”
Here is a webpage showing rainfall totals for the Houston area since the beginning of the storm. The Katy area, where our son lives, shows nearly 29 inches as of 9:00am CDT this morning.
In the September 2017 issue of Mechanical Engineering magazine, of ASME, there is an article on protecting the Houston area from tropical storms and hurricanes. Sorry - it requires ASME membership to view the article online or I would link it.
Since Hurricane Ike made landfall between Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula as a Category 2 with 15 foot storm surge back in September 2008, the greater Houston area has been studying and debating how to re-engineer their storm defenses...and how to fund those improvements. No doubt these events will give those discussions much more urgency.
About Houston, courtesy of the article I mentioned:
[ul]
[li]More than 90% of US offshore oil and gas production takes place in the Texas Gulf Coast area, and the Houston region contains the largest concentration of energy, petrochemical, and refining industries in the United States.[/li]
[li]Houston is home to 25% of the country's refining capacity for downstream chemical production. It's also the fastest growing liquefied natural gas industry in the nation.[/li]
[li]One third of the United States seafood harvest is taken from the Texas Coast.[/li]
[li]The NASA Johnson Space Center - home of Space Station Mission Control - is located in Houston.[/li]
[li]The greater Houston area includes the Port of Houston (ranks second in the nation), Beaumont's port (ranks fourth), and Texas City's port (ranks tenth).[/li]
[/ul]
One of the issues is that no one had ever thought that 2 to 3 feet of rain could fall in one place in one or two days. NOAA has stated that this has never occurred. According to my morning paper, enough water has fallen on just Huston alone that would take the Mississippi river 9 days to drain! And that is just the rain, not storm surge, that has fallen to date. Houston is expecting another foot or two when Harvey returns.
Most hurricane migration efforts tend to deal with storm surge. With this event, storm surge is just the provably drop in the bucket.
Perhaps not in Houston, but NOAA should be well aware that the world record for 24-hr rainfall is 71.8 inches in 1966 and the record for 48-hr rainfall is 98.2 inches in 1995. The Texas coast has been hit with many severe storms in the past, Alicia, Allen, Barry, etc., resulting in flooding and deaths in Galveston, Brownsville, etc. Even Dallas got soaked with Norma.
It seems to me that hurricanes, and flooding, in general, seem to occur so often that the attitude is more of a, "meh, we'll just rebuild the same way we did last time."
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
I think this is what it is. While we have broken a lot of cycles; the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the hydrologic cycle, etc.; it's tough to hang the fault for this on anything we have or haven't done. Unless you can tie this to climate change (I'm not going to make that reach), 3 to 4 feet of rain is 3 to 4 feet of rain.
We can't engineer our way out of that. So call this a planning disaster (we know there's the potential for this but plugged our ears and went lalalalalalalalala), or a risk management disaster (this is a 1 in 10? flood event and we are cool with everything getting destroyed when that happens), or even an emergency management disaster.
Whatever we call it, I hope the loss of life is not unnecessarily high.
I haven't made an effort to research this, but so far, I've heard nothing at all about storm surge damaging anything. And Houston is a good little ways from where the hurricane actually came in, so I don't know how much surge they had there.
When I was in high school, I think it was a hurricane blowing past on one side or the other that brought about 13" of rain to our area, but dumped about 27" of rain up in Alvin, just south of Houston. And yes, it flooded stuff. If I remember, that was 27" in 24 hours. Some of the rain numbers I'm hearing from the current situation are over the whole week or so, so it's hard to compare.
One problem with the information I see, it's obvious that there's a lot of water and flooding down there, but not obvious if that's 2% of Houston, or 10% or 90% or 98% or what.
My folks live south of there, and they haven't been flooded out- the major issue down that way has not been rain, but prediction of some of the rivers flooding from rain farther up the way.
This will take 3-4 weeks to dry out and have water levels drop. All of the rain inland has to flow back to the gulf, where there is already too much water.
And now they are dumping the reservoirs, the Corps should have been dumping them a week ago.
From the reports that I've heard/read it appears that the impact of the storm surge was not as significant as it was first feared it would be. Perhaps that was due to the slower speed that the storm was moving when it first made ground fall or perhaps it hit land during a point where the tide was either receding or was already at it's lowest level of the cycle.
![[banghead]](/data/assets/smilies/banghead.gif "[banghead] [banghead]")
