Who is really to blame for Houston?
 

Not to belittle the tragedy that is taking place in Houston now, but who is really to blame?
My wife told me about a Texas A&M prof that has been worried about just this type of thing for quite a while. I googled and found this article:

https://one.arch.tamu.edu/news/2017/6/28/houston-flood-risk-expands-disaster/

Somebody got rich building those homes, but I bet they don't live there.

Blame the Sahara.

The town that I live in would be in the same trouble if we got 50+ inches of rain in the same amount of time. Being 1000+ miles from the coast, it seems less likely, but I'm sure it is possible for a non-Hurricane storm (or series of storms) could dump the same amount of rain.

Typically Hurricanes hit the coast, move inland, and dissipate. No one anticipated this one sitting half on land and half off, being able to recharge and dump rain for several days. We don't know how often this happens, but it hasn't happened before in the time we've had modern weather satellites.

I put this down to "an act of God". We had no reason to believe this would happen based on past experiences. Hindsight is 20/20, but I don't think anyone was acting collectively or individually irresponsibly.

"We" know fairly well what causes hurricanes to move and what will stall them out or get them to slightly change direction.

"We" also know that storms do some weird stuff as they move around - here's some examples - https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/weirdest-hurricane-tropical-storm-tracks

What caused this issue was the "perfect combination" of weather to get a 'cane that size to sit and stay for that long. Not an act of Blind Io, Om, Nuggan, or any other god. Just weather.

This may not have made a TON of difference, but it would've been smart if all the reservoirs in the projected area had been drawn way down by Tuesday or so... maybe sooner.

All the top weather models were saying the two high pressure areas were definitely going to make Harvey stall out and sit there for a LONG time.

Sam...it's his fault.

Maybe y'all don't realize it, but eastern NC was devastated in a similar fashion by last year's Hurricane Matthew....the difference is the number of folks in the Houston area.

Those reservoirs stay dry! They are just dams that hold back water during storms to help keep downtown from flooding. I know because I've played on those dams as a kid. They were built way back in 1938 when they were 20 miles from downtown and nothing around.

Gawd.











Nancy Pelosi will eventually step up and blame the G.O.P.

Harvey.

Yup, San Jacinto River Authority is a gang of morons. They could have drawn down Lake Conroe and Lake Houston and avoided a lot of this

Blame it on Mother Nature, and human greed.

When it comes to weather events, shiz happens. Human greed know no bounds, and no responsability.

Katrina rolled through 12 years ago a few miles east of Houston... did they really think it wouldn't happen again?

In the Portland Oregon area, which has a heavy dose of community planning, there are slides taking out housing in the west hills frequently. More government involvement doesn't seem to help when momma nature decides to throw a curveball.

Too soon. Wrong forum.
There will be lots of this in PARF in the near future.

News flash. It was a natural disaster. Why try and blame anyone?

What you should focus on is getting them the help they need without delay.

Why does someone have to be to blame? A storm stalled in an almost unheard of way because of the prevailing winds and air pressures and ended up dropping in one place all the rain that should have covered sever states. It is the most rain ever dropped in one event in North America in the entire recorded history of mankind, mostly because of the fluke of not having enough air pressure to move it along. You think people shouldn't built along the entire coast of Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida forever on the off chance that an unprecedented storm might happen by and lay waste to a relatively small area within the entire gulf (Atlantic) (Pacific) coast? Or maybe humans should be allowed to build near the coastline and build the inevitable cost of rebuilding part of the coastline into the price of human development.

The cost of rebuilding is dwarfed by the cost that would be incurred by never building any flood zone on the Gulf (Atlantic) (Pacific) coasts.

I would think at some point an engineer told an elected official this could and would happen. wonder what the response was?

should we be deeming certain areas uninhabitable? what's the frequency of catastrophic event that causes such a label? do towns have reserve funds for such things? what are the fund balances based on? if not should they be allowed to access fed $$?

This much rain in a single storm had never happened in recorded history, so I'd let the engineers off a little bit for not designing the city to absorb that much water. There is only so
Much you can do on a relatively flat landscape.

I blame Mother Nature.
Does that make me a misogynist?

While there is some truth to this, over developing, and removing most of the wetlands in an area comes with a price imo. There is no free lunch when Mother Nature is serving...

Yes, lets blame God.

That pic of billions of dollars in wrecked aircraft is staggering. Is there a market for "flood planes "?

Nothing a power wash wouldn't fix ;)

Airport picture is fake.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SiZVrTaC9Pg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Randy

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TxtBd-B4d5E" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Oops... :/

I don't think any single person or decision is to blame. I think it is a combination of very very unusual weather, warming Gulf Coast waters, development in flood plains, inadequate flood insurance and information about same, loss of wetlands, and other big and small factors.

There will be time to figure out how to prevent "the next time", and the answer may well be there is no way to do.

Yep.



This once in a hundred years stuff happens all the time now.








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It seems to me that Houston doesn't have adequate infrastructure to deal with far more frequent rain events.

Remember watching a documentary about the mississippi river basin and watershed. It talked about the water management in the delta and protecting what they could of New Orleans. AND that there was not enough capacity for the watershed and how the engineers had to decide each year what area of the watershed to hold back and then flood to keep from flooding New Orleans. I can't imagine the engineers having enough control over the rainfall to actually regulate that as well as they would like. But I would be they did what they could to minimize the impact throughout the watershed for those areas.

Al Gore. Duh.

You do not comprehend what 52 inches of rain falling in such a short time across such a large area means. The cubic acre-feet of runoff water is staggering. Lowering lake levels would not have made one iota of difference.

Texas lake levels
Lake Levels in Texas, United States

When I lived in Georgia, they didn't have snow plows. Why? Because it was cheaper to let the snow melt when it snowed--even with the loss of economic activity--than to maintain a fleet of vehicles that was only used once a decade.

Similarly, it is probably cheaper to have buildings and infrastructure designed to current standards and rebuild when this happens than to design those things to be able to deal with 52" of rain in 72 hours.

I'm pretty sure it's Bush's fault.

Melania's shoes...