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Houston Officials Shunned US Army Corps Warnings Days Before Harvey; Alerted 100K+ Homes (tr)
truepundit ^ | 8/28/2017 | truepundit

Posted on 08/29/2017 5:07:42 AM PDT by RummyChick

The mayor of Houston and Harris County officials were advised two days before Hurricane Harvey made landfall that the storm was brewing into a likely “catastrophic” 5-day weather event that would flood at least 100,000 homes and paralyze Houston.

Yet city and county officials refused to call for a mandatory or even voluntary evacuation of Houston.

The result: Houston and parts of Harris county look like flooded battlefields, with residents clinging to rooftops of their homes while rescue workers — both professional and volunteer — risk their lives to save untold thousands in distress.

Houston and Harris county’s four commissioners were briefed on Thursday morning, August 24 after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned officials that Hurricane Harvey, which at that point had not made landfall, was shaping up to impact the region even worse than Hurricane Allison in 2001. That storm killed 22 in Houston, left 30,000 residents stranded, and damaged over $5 billion of property.

The officials were given ample time to evacuate the city, federal officials and correspondences examined by True Pundit confirmed.

(Excerpt) Read more at truepundit.com ...


TOPICS: Government
KEYWORDS: harvey; ooda; prepper; preppers
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To: pepsionice

Posters keep saying no evacuation plan would work, no one follows the rules. I think that’s defeatist talk. If necessary you barricade the entrances to the major road and move the barricades sequentially.

I refuse to believe there is no way to evacuate if you start 3 days before the hurricane landfall with the vulnerable populations and the low lying areas. Maybe we are looking at it backwards. Perhaps we need drainage ditches to the ocean. What I do know is we have an army corps of engineers and they should be doing disaster plan consultation. Pump maintenance has been ignored and that alone indicts the city governing officials with criminal negligence.


121 posted on 08/29/2017 7:59:45 AM PDT by JayGalt (Let Trump Be Trump)
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To: RummyChick

The Addicks levee is like 60 feet high. Definitely the highest land for several miles, with the closest comparable high ground being in Waller.

I’ve biked all around there, on both sides of the levee. A failure of that levee will have a profoud impact on all people downstream. The large oaks on the upstream side of the levee will be completely, 100% under water right now.


122 posted on 08/29/2017 8:03:15 AM PDT by T-Bone Texan (Trump's election does not release you from your prepping responsibilites!)
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To: WVMnteer

I am in zip 77025. Whole area to west and north is flooded.

The bayou is about a mile north of me. Every home between me and bayou got flooded. The fancy neighborhoods just north of bayou got flooded severely too, between Stella Link nad Buffalo Bayou.

610 freeway is flooded at the corner by S. Post Oak.

Daughters school is flooded and was gonna try to make my way there by bike. They are at 4900 jackwood 77096. I think if I ride on the freeway I can wade through the floodwaters there and then it becomes an elevated freeway sonn after.


123 posted on 08/29/2017 8:18:35 AM PDT by T-Bone Texan (Trump's election does not release you from your prepping responsibilites!)
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To: WVMnteer

PS: just to me east is NRG stadium. Around there are some hinky apartments. That is where the ghetto people are coming from. They are on bikes. They act like they are not afraid. The ones I saw, on my street, gave me hard looks when I gave THEM hard looks.


124 posted on 08/29/2017 8:21:43 AM PDT by T-Bone Texan (Trump's election does not release you from your prepping responsibilites!)
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To: RummyChick

On a pragmatic level, it is hard to keep a gun dry when. I am raking muck in the rain.

Mulling getting out the air rifle. Just don’t want it to get rusty.


125 posted on 08/29/2017 8:24:28 AM PDT by T-Bone Texan (Trump's election does not release you from your prepping responsibilites!)
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To: ealgeone

New Orleans also said they had one-thousand cops on the payroll, and eventually we learned that they were short 150 (ghost employees who didn’t exist).


126 posted on 08/29/2017 8:44:35 AM PDT by pepsionice
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To: T-Bone Texan
memorial drive
Did the fancy mansions get flooded?


127 posted on 08/29/2017 8:46:56 AM PDT by RummyChick (can we switch Don,Jr for Prince Kush and his flak jacket. From Yacht Party to Warzone ready to wear.)
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To: Rome2000

I’d hazard a guess that most women their age have buried two husbands.


128 posted on 08/29/2017 9:15:00 AM PDT by DuncanWaring (The Lord uses the good ones; the bad ones use the Lord.)
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To: T-Bone Texan

I didn’t mean to come across as harsh. I’m in Katy in Cinco. My nerves are frayed and I’m operating on low sleep. I can see that neighborhood causing some concern.

I did just watch a press conference. It seems there have been some limited attempts at looting and a few robberies. I’m pretty impressed overall with how the area is handling this and don’t want to give the impression that roving bands of hoodlums are clubbing people. Overall, the response has been pretty terrific to one of the more horrific disasters on record.

My neighborhood came through really well (knock on wood). By dumb luck, I’m sort of right in the middle of a square of Buffalo Bayou, Mayde Creek, and the Barker reservoir. Everything would need to overflow miles to reach me. I’m still extremely worried - particularly about the reservoir. But so far, I have no right to complain about anything at all.

I would be curious about your thoughts on what I said about the continuing development here. That side of town especially is nothing but roads and parking lots. There is simply no place for the water to go at this point. I mean, maybe we should tear down the Astrodome and making it a retaining pond or something. (Obviously, I need a nap and a beer).


129 posted on 08/29/2017 9:15:10 AM PDT by WVMnteer
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To: KC Burke

There are developments abutting them that NEVER should have been built. Those reservoirs were built to spare downtown Houston and we essentially brought downtown Houston to them.

Those neighborhoods are going to be flooded for months when this is all over.


130 posted on 08/29/2017 9:17:51 AM PDT by WVMnteer
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To: JayGalt

It’s not that you can’t get people out of their homes. It’s that you can’t get them moving once they are on the freeways. One fender bender on 10 and it would be backed up for 50 miles.

I have friends who live near the Brazos that have been evacuated twice this year.

The problem is not getting the people out. The problem is where the people are living in the first place, and the fact that we can no longer drain the water from heavy rains, let alone hurricanes.


131 posted on 08/29/2017 9:23:08 AM PDT by WVMnteer
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To: WVMnteer

I know : (
New Orleans had a proposal to rebuild a short distance away, out of the flood zone but didn’t step up.
Seems like we should be able to do better but people cling to the familiar.


132 posted on 08/29/2017 9:28:46 AM PDT by JayGalt (Let Trump Be Trump)
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To: RummyChick
The mayor of Houston and Harris County officials were advised two days before Hurricane Harvey made landfall

This conversation is useless without the context of a timeline.

This Wikipedia timeline says that Harvey wasn't even a tropical depression on Tuesday. It was still a disorganized tropical wave.

They are suggesting that Houston should have evacuated on Tuesday or Wednesday when Harvey was just a tropical wave in the Bay of Campeche? That would be an extreme undertaking for a tropical wave that is 700 miles away.

The other calls for evacuation were not because of rain, but because of wind and storm surge damage from landfall. Corpus Christi was evacuating. Rockport was evacuating. South Padre Island was evacuating voluntarily. Galveston was talking about evacuating. But Houston was not considering evacuating due to the fear of high wind and storm surge damage because we are a lot further inland.

Harvey didn't become a hurricane until Thursday, which is too late to start evacuating a city like Houston. Even if they called for an evacuation on Wednesday, all of us were treating Wednesday like a normal Houston workday. We would all have to get home to our families before an evacuation could begin, so it wouldn't effectively begin until Thursday.

We've all seen the photos of Houston evacuating from Rita. If the evacuation began on Thursday, it would become like the scene with the Roman Chariot in the Red Sea in the movie The Ten Commandments when the waters came.

People don't realize that the freeways here are designed as emergency water catch-basins. If an evacuation started on Thursday, cars would be backed up on Saturday when the roads began to fill.

In my opinion, there is NO reasonable possibility to call for an evacuation of Houston given the time available and the facts of the storm as they were.

It is my opinion that forecast models are just that -- assumption models that you use to test various scenario conditions. It is very hard to make the call to evacuate a city like Houston on Tuesday or Wednesday when Harvey is still a tropical wave on the far side of the Gulf of Mexico.

The mayor would have been accused of panicking if he did that with the storm so far out.

-PJ

133 posted on 08/29/2017 9:29:32 AM 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: RummyChick

If you go to fbcoem.org, they tell you the neighborhoods that feed into the reservoirs. Those can be impacted because the water has no place to go. (I am one neighborhood removed from the list but our streets are clear and the rain has mostly stopped).

The neighborhoods surrounding both reservoirs are in deep doo doo, because that’s where the overflow will go if they are breached. And Barker is supposed to breach on Thursday. (I’m a little concerned with that).

Everyone along Buffalo Bayou could be affected because the controlled releases flow into Buffalo Bayou. So, the flow increases downstream. And the flow is essentially bottlenecked upstream.

Urban flooding is actually a pretty simple idea. It’s a matter of where water flows, where it collects, and where it drains. Most of the city collects because we are low and flat (and overly built). We flow to the bayous and creeks. They drain to the Gulf.


134 posted on 08/29/2017 9:30:08 AM PDT by WVMnteer
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To: Political Junkie Too

Agreed one hundred percent.

I had a phone call with a client in Galveston on Tuesday.

I started with the normal chitchat, “What are you doing?”

She said, “Getting ready for Harvey.”

I literally said, “What are you talking about?”

There was nothing about this on the news on Monday, and I tend to shut down after 6. I didn’t have the radio on in my car on Tuesday morning. So, I didn’t know this was even a possibility until 10 AM on Tuesday. And even then, it was more of a theory.

Wednesday afternoon is when everything really crystalized. And even then, it was still a question of whether we were going to have a tropical depression/tropical storm.

If you evacuate for every potential tropical depression, you might as well move the city.

The earliest we could have evacuated was Thursday morning. And the traffic jam would have stretched from Galveston to Corsicana on 45 and Beaumont to San Antonio on 10. People would have died in their cars.


135 posted on 08/29/2017 9:36:09 AM PDT by WVMnteer
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To: RummyChick
They don't know which area of Houston the overflow of Addicks Reservoir will impact

Sen. Sheila "don'cha know who I am!" Jackson Lee doesn't know we didn't plant a flag on Mars. A few years ago a white man ran for a seat there and won because he never showed his face during the campaign and let the voters think he was black. Houston doesn't operate with a full deck. Between the Katrina trash, the BLM crowd, the EBT card abusers and half a million illegals (costing Texas 500 BILLION a year), they're pretty much a lost cause.

136 posted on 08/29/2017 9:36:54 AM PDT by bgill (CDC site, "We don't know how people are infected with Ebola.")
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To: bgill

Shelia Jackson Lee is the reason the reservoirs are over-flowing?

That’s one theory, I suppose.


137 posted on 08/29/2017 10:12:04 AM PDT by WVMnteer
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To: WVMnteer

I am on low on sleep and have been drinking beer and espresso since sunup.

The black hawks are back, taking folks away.


138 posted on 08/29/2017 10:48:42 AM PDT by T-Bone Texan (Trump's election does not release you from your prepping responsibilites!)
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To: okkev68
After Rita, people in Houston were afraid to try and evacuate again. I had coworkers stuck on the highway for 16 hours with the families. Once again, politics will be responsible for lots of suffering and death.

People died of heat stroke, stranded in their cars during Rita. Cars broken down on the roads, accidents, out of gas, no water to drink. It was a disaster.

It's easy to say "evacuate!" but to where? That Holiday Inn up the road with 500,000 rooms available?


139 posted on 08/29/2017 10:54:26 AM PDT by Drew68
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To: Drew68

That was with a few days warning and maybe half a million fewer people.

A full-scale evacuation this time would have ended up looking like a scene from The Stand or Independence Day.


140 posted on 08/29/2017 11:16:06 AM PDT by WVMnteer
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