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
Yes, and they actually opened the Addicks gate at 1:30 am, not 2 as planned.
Volumes spoken?
I think of engineers as being very competent and want your assessment to be accurate.
As to leaks, the guys out there on the scene- various storm chasers maybe and guys doing “citizen journalism” are one possibility (I don’t mean tinfoil coneheads who probably already have YouTubes up about secret cloud seeding).
Queers and dykes hardest hit
This evacuation thing...
I see little engineering type analysis of how to approach this question / problem for an area like the Houston area. (Far more than just the city of Houston is involved.) First, one asks the right questions:
How many people actually need to be evacuated or at least temporarily relocated? Maybe 1 million, worst case??
What is the transportation system’s capacity to move people, starting with the most vulnerable areas first (sort of a “people per hour” dynamic analysis.) (This is a very complex question. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_flow )
However, some empirical data for any given area should be available...
Cannot military air & medical assets be brought in to clear evacuation accident scenes quickly? (I keep thinking of that scene from “You Only Live Twice” where the bad guys’ car ends up in the bay(!), but that’s FAR from the only sort of actions that can be taken.)
How can Information Tech be better employed to organize evacuation / relocation of vulnerable residents? This is a biggie - maybe as you say, Gov’t can’t save you - but if I get repeated text messages that my house is 80% likely to be in 10 ft. of water in (say) 60 hours, and maybe I’m given an optimum time to leave given various destinations (traffic managment) - well... things like that might help.
And so on...
Of course, there’s also stupidity to be overcome. I was willing to be somewhat “lenient” in judgement of Houston’s mayor, until I heard him say his evacuation decisions were based on the predicted path of Harvey NOT hitting Houston. Good Lord! Does this man not listen to / watch the forecasts or understand days out that in this case the big threat was the rain / flooding, and where that flooding was likely to occur? Is he so ignorant of Houston’s history of flooding in much lesser events? Can he not comprehend a simple map showing Houston right in the predicted area of incredibly high rainfall? Ditto for inundation maps. Even if only 200k additional of the most vulnerable (ie., water over rooftops) residents could have been evacuated, it would have helped a lot. I’m sorry, this guy should be bounced out on his butt.
I surely had a couple of raised eyebrows this morning with unexpected news of Barker.
2211 high water rescues to date—with no confirmed fatalities related to those rescues. SAR rocks!
Hey, GPH, are you ok there, in your neighborhood?
I was looking at sat views last night - It just stuns me that so much development was allowed in those buffer capacity areas you mention.
BTW,I want to thank you for the in depth info.! I’m not a CE — only had a couple related classes, many years ago — but I can certainly appreciate what goes into it.
another 1 to 1.5 inches has fallen over western Harris county the past 6 hours..Barker DAM now a hair under 30 inches for the event
got to get the center more east to get that rain out of there
keep in the max inflow of 132,000 cfs during the Tax day flood was just for a short while....i heard inlflows this morning were 30,000 but not sure if that was just Barker
A few general observations before I break to check some boxes off here.
1. We may be approaching “loose lips” territory. Mass evacs are a delicate dance , even before landfall, with contraflow working perfectly.
2. Uncontrollable emergency spillways at the upper ends of each impoundment, imply a theoretical lake level at which inflow, estimated at 132kcfs in 2016, will equal outflow down Buffalo Bayou thru DT Houston.
3. I now see that janetjanet has had a much better handle of the potential here than I have, for several days. Probably others as well.
oops, bad link.
Whoa—is there a specific bayou/lake/water source that would cause Hobby flooding?
Fake news about hobby airport, please ignore. Have asked post to be removed.
"Why didn't Abbot/Trump order a mandatory evacuation?" is a question we are likely to hear. Apart from the likelihood of deaths from that many people suddenly filling the roadways going west (being in a flooded, blocked roadway is not necessarily safe), people evacuating the coast would also be blocked by the traffic (note, Houston is about 50 miles from the coast).
Bay City evacuation deadline is now at top of the hour. Anticipated that homes will be inundated with ten feet of water.
ok—thanks
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