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Hurricane Harvey Live Thread Part II
Various ^ | 8/26/2017 | Various

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


TOPICS: Extended News; Front Page News; News/Current Events; US: Texas
KEYWORDS: harvey; hurricane; hurricaneharvey; livehurricaneharvey; nautinurse
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To: caww

Divers? Shutting a gate they claim they want open wider?

I think Weather Channel is onto this. They had an aerial shot of the cofferdam and partial breach at Barker up, off to one,side, under a heading of “Previously”.


2,121 posted on 08/31/2017 6:36:09 PM PDT by jeffers
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To: jeffers

If... many media outlets have been using old, stock footage of these gates, and none of this excavation of the primary embankment is new, since landfall, then I am guilty of a heinous mistake in assuming ACE is preparing deliberate breaches.


2,122 posted on 08/31/2017 7:06:18 PM PDT by jeffers
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To: jeffers
I just saw an ABC13 KTRK report on FEMA making computers available at the GRB Convention Center for people who need access to file claims.

The reporter said that people who are not evacuees can still go to the GRB to use the FEMA computers if they lost their own phones or computers.

I'm thinking... why make them go downtown to the GRB? Can't FEMA send representatives to regional libraries around town and borrow those computers? This way, people can go to their local libraries instead of trekking all the way downtown just to meet with FEMA.

There must be enough Federal FEMA workers that they can go out into the communities and set up stations at local libraries with their computers.

-PJ

2,123 posted on 08/31/2017 7:19:36 PM PDT by Political Junkie Too (The 1st Amendment gives the People the right to a free press, not CNN the right to the 1st question.)
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To: jeffers

Ok.


2,124 posted on 08/31/2017 7:21:23 PM PDT by caww
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To: jeffers

...IF...


2,125 posted on 08/31/2017 7:35:44 PM PDT by SE Mom (Screaming Eagle mom)
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To: jeffers

The diver is at Columbia Lakes not at the two reservoirs.
And from the video I do not see a breach at either Addicks or Barker. Color me skeptical.


2,126 posted on 08/31/2017 7:51:49 PM PDT by CedarDave (Alt-left hates presidents pics on paper money. I'll gladly collect those offensive bills from them!)
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To: SE Mom

Proof I’m an idiot, at 1:34 in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLQDfv4Dfgc

Green grass, growing on the west facing elevation, of the excavation into the old Addicks embankment. They dug this out days or weeks ago. News outlets have been using stock footage, perhaps from before the storm, that show the old embankment intact, and billing them as “Breaking News”.

That’s on them. My comments are on me, and I apologize for them. Sorry for any confusion.

What I’m pretty sure we see here, is them cutting the old embankment down to base level, in prep for building a new gate structure and then rebuilding a new section of embankment over the top of it. Then there’s backflow from the large current releases, flooding the worksite.

Still, some potential issues with those old gates and dams. For one thing, they look like soda straws, trying to drain an ocean, when the camera zooms out. Debris, for another. But nothing imminent or unusual. My bad. Stand down.


2,127 posted on 08/31/2017 7:52:30 PM PDT by jeffers
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To: jeffers

My post to you was referencing your youtube link at #2121.


2,128 posted on 08/31/2017 7:55:39 PM PDT by CedarDave (Alt-left hates presidents pics on paper money. I'll gladly collect those offensive bills from them!)
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To: jeffers

Meant your #2108.

(Jeez, get with it Dave.)


2,129 posted on 08/31/2017 7:58:10 PM PDT by CedarDave (Alt-left hates presidents pics on paper money. I'll gladly collect those offensive bills from them!)
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To: CedarDave

See post 2127. I didn’t claim a breach, instead, preparations for a deliberate breach, which I’ve retracted. The evolution of my mistake is apparant thru the thread.

Too tired to walk thru it now. I will emphasize...no breach, no preps for deliberate breach, nothing but tiny, old gates, straining to unload a big detention pond after a thousand year flood, a disgruntled Cajon Navy member, and mismarked video footage.

All is...well, maybe not well, but mostly, however ACE says it is.

Apologies.


2,130 posted on 08/31/2017 8:00:25 PM PDT by jeffers
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To: jeffers

I’m tired too; gotta check a groundwater monitoring network next to a river in the morning so shouldn’t be trying to figure this out, but agree with your last remarks. However, two comments:

At Addicks water from the water-filled cofferdam appears to have drained from there into the water coming from the release gates. At minute 1:04 at lower left you can see a small braided channel, now drying, as evidence of that. Also at 1:04, notice the brown scar at top left center with no green grass. At 1:46 there is telltale evidence of water draining from the area of the scar as shown by debris fan where it meets the cofferdam water. I wonder if there was slumpage similar to what you have with landslides in the US northwest. These occur when water infiltrates until a less permeable layer is encountered and the seepage water then acts a lubricant overcoming soil friction allowing slumping to occur. Though it appears no water is seeping from the other side, there was movement of soil from that slope and that has to be worrying to ACE.

Also notice the water rushing out at minute 2:18. It’s not identified except being at Addicks. From the lamppost shadows, I have to conclude its water coming out of the northeast emergency spillway (water that started spilling when it rose to a level of 108.00 feet). Certainly it’s a lot more than the small volume I would expect to see. Sort of reminiscent of water going over the emergency spillway at Oroville Dam.


2,131 posted on 08/31/2017 8:48:14 PM PDT by CedarDave (Alt-left hates presidents pics on paper money. I'll gladly collect those offensive bills from them!)
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To: jeffers

Understood and thanks for the detailed explanation. It can be easy to get distorted views of reality these days. In all areas. Appreciate anyone staying open to new facts and information.


2,132 posted on 08/31/2017 9:04:22 PM PDT by SE Mom (Screaming Eagle mom)
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To: jeffers

No sign so far of them breaching Addicks. The Cajun probably didn’t lie, but either spread gossip or else they—flood control—changed their mind.


2,133 posted on 08/31/2017 9:21:54 PM PDT by Greetings_Puny_Humans (I mostly come out at night... mostly.)
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To: CedarDave

There’s a drainage ditch at the toe of the Addicks downstream face, which is currently flowing a lot more than I’d like to see, but I’ll hope that’s backwash, curling around from the gate release. Not seepage.

When they cut the old embankment, they already knew they’d want to compact soils evenly around the new gate structure one layer at a time, and there, the new outlet channel they’ll have to construct would be an obstruction, if they’d piled all the spoil on one side or the other, so they divided it.

They used the eastern half to construct the ramp down to outlet level, and just piled the western half down in the drainage ditch, blocking it, not realizing Harvey was coming, and on up the embankment itself.

I’m not up on slump nechanics, but I could see your description in action, you have loose spoil, over a 60 year old compacted, grassy, monitored slope, exactly the conditions you specify for soil mobility, with Harvey itself providing the lubricant.

Your other reference, is, I believe, a much closer shot of an angle similar to that seen at 1:23. I’m not 100% clear of the mechanics of that myself. Water is clearly spilling over the right (looking downstream) spillway training wall, back into the spillway, but I’m hard pressed to account for the dynamics of that.

Best shot...south moving outflow at velocity, dammed up by the roadway bridge between spillway and I-10, further in the distance, rebounds north, up both left and right side, outside the main channel. On the left, it’s turned east by the embankment itself and left spillway training wall. On the right, it can’t flow west, because of the ramp mentioned above. It piles up, against the toe of the embankment, and with nowhere else to go, flows back over the right training wall into the spillway. It always feels counter-intuitive to me when liquids exhibit laminar flow uphill, for extended periods, but it does happen, and I think it’s happening here.

Open to other ideas though.

What do you make of the two guys near the top of the downstream face, 0:36 to 0:58?


2,134 posted on 09/01/2017 12:09:20 AM PDT by jeffers
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To: caww

That’s very cool, but it makes me itch to get into the 1 meter per pixel (or better) take from that same source, centered under the O and U in Houston, in your pic.

;-)


2,135 posted on 09/01/2017 12:16:31 AM PDT by jeffers
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To: Hattie; Repeal The 17th; NautiNurse; caww; SE Mom; All

I understand that a Mayor (Houston?) has been criticized for not declaring a mandatory evacuation. What I have read is that there had been terrible problems with the last evacuation with people dying on the roads (flooding?). There are other dangerous things that people choose to do, and then many thousands of dollars are spent on rescue. I have wondered in the past why they don’t have a “danger, you might be on your own” form to sign.

I climbed Mt. Washington for my 18th birthday in July. The conditions were cold, and visibility above tree line was very poor and the marking cairns hard to see. My father walked as far toward where he believed he would find the next cairn and still see me and my 8 and 10 year old brothers. Then one of the children would join him. He would walk some more and stop, then my other
brother would walk to my first brother. Then one child would walk to my father, and stop while my father advanced some more. By that time he could see the next cairn and I would gather up the chain and meet at that next cairn. They were selling a book at the station describing over 150 people who had died on that mountain. Very informative on what not to do. Some had fallen off cliffs in the fog, others had tried to walk down through the forest which started as less than knee high but soon became waist and head high and impassible, and they froze or starved. Either they were traveling alone or were not as smart as my father. At the top of the mountain a camp troop came in and all the kids were in shorts with cherry red knees and shivering. Shame on the adult leader.


2,136 posted on 09/01/2017 12:21:53 AM PDT by gleeaikin
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To: Greetings_Puny_Humans

I agree, no sense in him driving and boating, for free, just to tell tales now, it doesn’t fit. At the same time, data feeds he has access to probably aren’t over blueprints or in boardrooms, he’s getting scuttlebutt at the front line.

I should have known better. The shock of not believing him, then seeing the whole original stretch of those cofferdams go missing “overnight” reeled me right in.

One clue I should have picked up on...the ends of that cut in the embankment are beautifully dressed, right down to waterline. Not at ALL what we’d see from an emergency excavation, in the dark, in a hurry. That is careful, daily toil, with plenty of coffeebreaks to look it over and pretty it all up.


2,137 posted on 09/01/2017 12:27:04 AM PDT by jeffers
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To: Political Junkie Too

Ahhh, paperwork, right...we stuffed that in a file cabinet, and pounded some shims in the cracks to keep it closed up.

It’s holdin, for now...and we got a crowbar to jam in there if it gets loose.

:-).


2,138 posted on 09/01/2017 12:32:42 AM PDT by jeffers
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To: SE Mom

Go Eagles!

:-)


2,139 posted on 09/01/2017 12:33:30 AM PDT by jeffers
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To: jeffers

“...and it will take weeks or months dor these floodwaters to recede...”

Well...the new Addicks temporary level sensor lives on a seperate page, which includes another figure labelled “ reservoir storage acre feet.”

https://waterdata.usgs.gov/tx/nwis/uv/?site_no=08073000

Figure they give, from 0130 8/29/17, is 178,000 acrefeet. Seems maybe low, but let’s plug it in.

178,000 times 208 times 208 (1 acre) is 7,700,992,000 cubic feet.

At 8000 cubic feet per second controlled gate outflow, it’ll take...hmm carry the one...962,624 seconds to unload the reservoir. Divided by 3600 seconds per hour, divided by 24 hrs per day...

11 days, 3 hours, 23 minutes, 45.6 seconds. Set your watches.


2,140 posted on 09/01/2017 12:57:25 AM PDT by jeffers
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