It could be argued that these things are drawing more eyes to the letter though than would have read it otherwise.
I know what you mean, but I’d rather people treat Götterdämmerung with more gravitas.
“Crushing” = half
I wonder what words they’d use for people like Reagan or one of the Bushes? “Reality sundering!!!”
Still holding out optimism his senile ass expires publicly crapping his pants.
You forgot to add, “…on national television.”
EDIT: On second thought, the adjective “publicly” pretty much covers it, since almost everyone has a smartphone these days.
Yeah. Just say, “It is my belief that these actions rise to the level of impeachment and I hope Congress acts accordingly.” Secret messages diminish the resignation.
If Trump gets Houston response right he might get a second term. Muahahaha!
Fantastic first post ever, SunnyDay! I can tell you’re going to be a delight to have here.
I love the irony of the first post by a guy named SunnyDay is about massive rain storms.
How bad is this storm? The coverage over here makes it look worse than Katrina in some ways, but it could just be it’s hitting a more densely populated area?
I mean you’ve got to admit, that’s some grade A optimism.
I’m not sure what your question is, exactly? It will likely affect A LOT more than Katrina and cause more damage (at least measured in dollars). Isn’t that the main measure of “bad”? Or do you mean some sort of other measure like wind speed or inches of rain? Is a giant storm that hits unpopulated areas all that significant?
I guess it also depends on whether the results were predictable, mitigatable, or inevitable.
In the case of Katrina a big part of the scandal is how much of the damage could have been prevented if the levee’s had been maintained and updated, based on recommendations to the Army Corps of Engineers. We’ll see if in the aftermath if there was anything comparable in Houston.
But from the perspective of post disaster response it looks different to have a massive disaster that was beyond mitigation, than one that is overall less destructive, but could have been prevented in some ways.
I’m sure it wasn’t a well formed question, because I don’t know enough to ask an informed one. I was trying to get a sense of if this is much bigger (area? rainfall?) or if it’s hitting a more populated area, or both?
And I do think that the same amount of monetary damage spread out across a bigger area is less bad. It usually means less lives lost and ruined.
It’s the rainfall combined with the lay of the land in Houston. It’s going to be really bad when all is said and done. Trump going tomorrow is ridiculous. I assume he’ll be checking on the condition of any remaining confederate monuments.
We won’t really know the extent of it for a few more days. It’s looking really bad, though.
Yeah, as Kevin said, we won’t really know for some time. However, the number of people it’s impacting is almost assuredly going to be higher than Katrina just due to population differences in the affected areas.
This. Katrina was a powerful storm, but a lot of it had to do with the uniqueness of New Orleans being below sea level. I’m no expert on this, but I believe the vast majority of the damage with Katrina was from the flooding resulting from the levees breaking.
In Houston, the amount of water the storm has dumped is unbelievable. They have actually had to open up some of their reservoirs to let water out, which is going to flood a lot of homes. Whether that’s something that could have been prevented, I don’t know, but from all the coverage I’ve seen, the sense is that this storm isn’t a scenario that would have been readily predicted (like with the chart above showing 3.5 feet of water above the historic high). The Katrina scenario was predicted for years, but ignored.
This article does hint at some amount of poor preparation: The “500-year” flood, explained: why Houston was so underprepared for Hurricane Harvey - Vox
Houston is not Cedar Rapids. For nearly a decade — ever since Hurricane Ike narrowly missed Houston in 2008 — city and state officials and experts have been warning that Houston wasn’t even prepared for a 15-year storm.
In 2016, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune collaborated on a project detailing how bad the damage from an Ike-caliber storm would be — and how little Houston had done to mitigate it. “We’ve done nothing to shore up the coastline, to add resiliency … to do anything,” Phil Bedient, a Rice University professor who co-directs the Storm Surge Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center, told ProPublica.
Even the things the city of Houston was trying to do weren’t working — the mitigation plan called to discourage building within the 100-year floodplain, but 7,000 homes were built since 2010 in low-lying areas of the city. And while the Army Corps of Engineers and Harris County had launched a partnership to widen channels and build bridges in the Brays Bayou area to reduce the impact of flooding, the city was unable to muster the resources to build new seawall or floodgates — which Bedient and other experts agreed would be needed to mitigate the damage of a 100-year or 500-year storm.
In other words, for two years in a row, Houston saw 500-year floods and didn’t do enough to prepare for the next one. Now it’s dealing with what could be a 1,000-year flood — the sort of storm that no city could ever prepare for, but that could absolutely cripple a city that wasn’t even prepared for a much smaller and more common disaster.
Interesting. If you have a “500-year flood” two years in a row, it seems reasonable to me to question whether the standard is correct.