Harvey horror: Shivering tot found clinging to drowned mom

AP ^ | Aug 30, 2017

[where's_the_Outrage?]

BEAUMONT, Texas (AP) -- Authorities found a shivering toddler clinging to the body of her drowned mother in a rain-swollen canal in Southeast Texas after the woman tried to carry her child to safety from Harvey's floods.

Capt. Brad Penisson of the fire-rescue department in Beaumont said the woman's vehicle got stuck Tuesday afternoon in the flooded parking lot of an office park just off Interstate 10. Squalls from Harvey were pounding Beaumont with up to 2 inches (5 centimeters) of rain an hour at the time with 38 mph (60 kph) gusts, according to the National Weather Service.

Penisson said a witness saw the woman take her 18-month-old daughter and try to walk to safety when the swift current of a flooded drainage canal next to the parking lot swept them both away.

[Alberta's Child]

Here's something else to consider that I've been saying for days:

In the age of cell phones and the internet, it's almost impossible to orchestrate a limited evacuation or a staged evacuation anymore. As soon as one group of people in a certain area is ordered to evacuate, word spreads like wildfire and you have everyone within 10 miles loading up their cars and hitting the road immediately.

[A Formerly Proud Canadian]

Actually, the mother was a mother, rather than a ‘birthing unit’, as many have become. She put the child’s safety ahead of her own, not something our ‘entitlement’ society often does.

[cpdiii]

Did the Houston police stop anyone from evacuating the flood-prone areas on their own?

No. If I still lived in Houston if I were in one of those areas, I would have left before the storm.

[Alberta's Child]

So would I.

Anyone who needs to be told when and where to evacuate is going to be a problem no matter what the mayor does, and where he sends them.

[WVMnteer]

Everyone keeps overlooking the timeline here.
We knew of a tropical storm/depression on Tuesday.
We knew that it had the potential to be serious on Wednesday.
It totally hit the fan on Thursday, and that’s when the stores were stripped of water and the gas stations ran out of gas.
The little tropical strom of Tuesday hit the beach as a damn Category 4 on Friday.

You could not have reasonably ordered an evacuation until Thursday. We would have been out of gas as a region four or five hours later.

Half the Metro Area would be trapped on 10, 45 and 59 five hours after that when accidents started happening and people ran out of gas. Galveston and the rest of the coast would have hit downtown Houston like a tidal wave of cars right in the middle of Thursday rush hour. By the time the people from the Eastern suburbs got home, packed, and hit the road, half a million people not from the Metro area would be bottlenecking the exchanges downtown.

This would last 24 hours at least at which point, the rain would hit, and here is the punchline:

The most dangerous place to be in Houston during a flood is the freaking interstate. Our major highways are catch basins for the heavy rains and they drain into the access roads. And the access roads would be Mad Max at this point. The highways and access roads flood first, because that is their job - to prevent the rain from drowning the neighborhoods.

An evacuation would have 2 million people trapped in their cars in a freaking outdoor bathtub.

[familyop]

"How is the survival of your child at any cost only a Texas thing? That’s pretty much shared everywhere in the western world."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law

"International status of abortion law, United Nations 2013 report."
Blue: "Legal on request."

[ghostkatz]

I have family in Houston area, north side in FM Road 1960/Kuykendall sp? area and Spring Cypress Road to west. They are safe, no real danger. Yet Greenspoint Mall down the road was flooded and had to be evacutated, so I heard.

[shanover]

I have defined stupidity more than I want to admit and Darwin has given me awards. We can ask why the poor Mother ventured outside with her child in those life threatening conditions. It will not add much to the discussion. People need to be educated on these disasters,how to avoid danger or get out of it.Every tragedy has to lead to lessons learned. All of us need to be prepared for the worst case scenario. Unfortunately,time and time again,there are those who become the victim for a wide range of reasons and circumstances.

[WVMnteer]

We debated evacuating for five minutes on Thursday, but it seemed more dangerous than staying. We were not in a glaringly red dangerous zone.

But half the Metro region is.

I think everyone thinks that Houston floods are like Mississippi River floods. Nearly everything is in danger of flooding because of how the city drains and because of how overbuilt the region is. I’m maybe seven miles from Buffalo Bayou and that’s where my water goes. I got 7 inches in 3 hours on Sunday. Once Buffalo Bayou fills, everything that dumps into it floods. And that is essentially everything.

It’s not a simple matter of finding the “low lying” areas near tributaries. It’s more along the lines of localized rainfall combined with stacking of flow.

My neighborhood never flooded. But the seven inches of rain we dumped into Buffalo bayou filled it. And that filled the reservoirs, because the reservoirs can’t dump into the bayou. And that flooded the neighborhoods behind the reservoir. Now, if another neighborhood had gotten ten inches earlier in the day, my neighborhood may have flooded because we couldn’t have drained.

But this isn’t just a matter of a river or creek overflowing its banks. It’s a question of when and where the rain falls, which is not easily predictable.

[ghostkatz]

That is my thinking, every one which would be 10s in of thousands waiting til last minute creating traffic jam from hell. Shelter in place and have tools ready to cut hole in roof to get out of attics onto roof. A car is no match for the force of rushing water, esp the little plastic toy cars we now have to drive.

[WVMnteer]

Tell me what in Houston is a flood prone area.

Is it the million dollar gated community four miles from me that has water up to the second floor?

The only obvious danger zone is the Brazos. And the Brazos went so high over its banks that the limited evacuation you would have done, would have been meaningless.

The reservoirs have never breached their banks in 60 years. Both did with devastating consequences. Is that a flood-prone area?

[WVMnteer]

There are maybe four natives Texan in my immediate neighborhood. We are kind of awesome without the precious Texas blood.

We had an impromptu block party at my neighbor’s house last night after the sun game out. She’s from Ghana. I’m from West Virginia. My wife is from the Northeast. We had a Jewish couple from Pennsylvania. The couple from Kentucky. The Russian couple. The native Texan. I guess the natives from West Texas, but I consider that almost another state. The Brit couple.

[Chainmail]

That was an unusually stupid and insensitive thing for you to say. Is this what we conservatives have come to?

We can only pray that nothing tragic like this ever comes into your life, right?

[Chainmail]

Why would you say something like that? Was that meant to be funny or just ordinary, everyday blasphemy

[familyop]

"Actually, the mother was a mother, rather than a ‘birthing unit’, as many have become. She put the child’s safety ahead of her own, not something our ‘entitlement’ society often does."

That's the nicest reply and very true. I stirred the pot, though. ;-)

But I have lived in some of the more libertine, "progressive" states, including western states where many of the libertine left tend to gather. I've also lived in some of the more socially conservative states. The contrast between the two cultures is stark and great. Apathy and misanthropy run more long, deep and wide in the more libertine left states.

[familyop]

The Houston area did get some very unusually heavy rain during the storm.

http://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/discussions/nfdscc1.html

“AT 900 AM CDT...THESE ARE THE MOST RECENT PRELIMINARY RAINFALL AND
WIND REPORTS FROM TROPICAL STORM HARVEY. PLEASE REFER TO NHC FOR
THE LATEST PUBLIC ADVISORIES ON HARVEY.

...SELECTED PRELIMINARY STORM TOTAL RAINFALL IN INCHES FROM 800 PM
CDT THU AUG 24 THROUGH 900 AM CDT WED AUG 30..”
...
“...TEXAS...
CEDAR BAYOU AT FM 1942 51.88
CLEAR CREEK AT I-45 49.40
DAYTON 0.2 E 49.23
MARYS CREEK AT WINDING ROAD 49.20
SANTA FE 0.7 S 46.70
PASADENA 4.4 WNW 45.74
BEAUMONT/PORT ARTHUR 45.73
HORSEPEN CREEK AT BAY AREA BLVD 45.60
SOUTH HOUSTON 4.0 SSW 44.91
BERRY BAYOU AT FOREST OAKS BLVD 44.80
BERRY BAYOU AT NEVADA 44.44
FRIENDSWOOD 2.5 NNE 44.05
LITTLE VINCE BAYOU AT BURKE RD 43.52
HOUSTON WEATHER FORECAST OFFICE 43.38
LEAGUE CITY 2.7 NE 43.32
WEBSTER 0.4 NW 43.32
LITTLE CEDAR BAYOU AT 8TH ST 42.32
ARMAND BAYOU AT GENOA-RED BLUFF RD 42.16
TURKEY CREEK AT FM 1959 42.12
ARMAND BAYOU AT PASADENA LAKE 41.20
TAYLOR LAKE AT NASA ROAD 1 40.44
MAHAW BAYOU AT ENGLIN RD 37.75
JACINTO CITY 37.60
HUNTING BAYOU AT LOOP 610 EAST 37.00
TELEPSEN 36.60
MAHAW BAYOU AT BRUSH ISLAND ROAD 36.53
FIRST COLONY 4 WSW 36.34
BEAMER DITCH HUGHES RD 36.32
LA PORTE 1 N 36.24
BAYTOWN 2 NW 35.64
MOUNT HOUSTON 35.60
HOUSTON/CLOVER FIELD 33.37
HOUSTON/INTERCONTINENTAL 31.26
KATY 6 NE 31.23
HOUSTON/WILL HOBBY 27.88
HOUSTON/D.W. HOOKS 27.01
GALVESTON/SCHOLES 22.84
COLLEGE STATION 2 SSW 19.64 “...

[familyop]

Some people believe that they’re safe from natural disasters because their geological locations. No one is safe in that sense. There are infrequent seismological activities that have not yet been studied much (examples, slightly more quick outer core jitter and weak magnetic field spots once in a great while). Even the activities of human beings are natural, by the way (e.g., nukefests between nations).

So who will get the most from insurance claims? Who knows? Will those in the states with the most revenues from retirements and tourism prevail again in getting more of the gold and emergency federal funding, too?

[SVTCobra03]

If they had left before the flooding had begun lives would have been saved.

[familyop]

"If they had left before the flooding had begun lives would have been saved."

Back the in late 1960s, a family left a city in Texas to escape from an approaching hurricane; it was a really wet one. As the family drove inland toward another city, the highway flooded something terrible. They barely made it. The city they escaped from was hardly touched.

[familyop]

The point is that Texas is huge and flat. Hurricanes are also huge.

I can’t imagine trying to evacuate from Florida. That would be dicey and horrible indeed.