After Sandy, I’ll never again watch a natural disaster onTV and not help.
Money is a bit tight at the moment, so I’ll wait till payday later this week. A few people at work may originally be from Texas, I’ll check tomorrrow to see whether thy have family that can use some money.
If not, I’ll find a church down there that’s accepting donations…the denomination of the church/synagogue doesn’t matter.
But I’m a big believer in going straight to those in the trenches at times like this.
Another way to donate,
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/donate-harvey-storm-relief-apple-201100342.html
Here’s a more general article about how to help, including links to watchdog sites that evaluate charities:
http://abc13.com/weather/how-to-help-the-victims-of-hurricane-harvey/2348094/
S18’s HS is opening as a shelter today. At the moment our routes to the school are all blocked by impassable road sections but if that changes we will go there to help. All is still fine in my neighborhood though, and according to the radar we may have several more hours break from the rain.
My area had major flooding last year. Several of my friends have mentioned local churches as a good way to help. Many churches ran shelters. Others did things like bring meals to people. My own church did not have a shelter it any large scale projects like that, but we had a flood fund and used it to directly assist our own members who had flooded.
I don’t understand why an evacuation order wasn’t given for Houston. You could see that hurricane coming days away, there’s always more rain on the north side of one, isn’t there? Particularly in the low lying areas. It seems like it was all so lackadaisical, until the very last, and then it was too late. I remember with Katrina, the president going on the news days before, saying, “Get out now. If you stay, you are going to die, this is serious. Get out”. Or something like that, it was very clear. But this time, it seems like it was, “No big deal, we are ready for this”. And I’m afraid this could be as bad as Katrina before it’s all over.
Can you imagine 5 million+ people trying to leave the city at once? People would have been stranded on the highway when the storm hit. It also seems the storm veered further east than expected, hitting Houston harder than anticipated.
@busdriver11, not only was there no evacuation order given…residents of Houston metro were being actively discouraged from evacuating. Stated reasons (from my NWS local forecast page) were to keep the roads clear for residents of the coastal areas under mandatory evacuation orders, and to remind people that evacuation carries its own risk.
This was the neighborhood I lived in for 23 years with no flooding of our house during that time. We moved a few miles away when we downsized and are lucky to be high and dry (so far), but so heartbroken for the city of Bellaire and the rest of Houston, which has been just devastated by Harvey. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/27/us/hurricane-harvey-houston-a-reporter-disaster.html
Sure, that would be a mess if you waited till the last minute to tell everyone to leave. But does that mean it is impossible for Houston to ever evacuate? If you can’t evacuate during a storm with this much notice, then when can you? If an voluntary evacuation is given, there will still be many who stay, lessening the impact. If you recommend evacuation days earlier, people will leave at varying times. And better stranded on the highway 100 miles away from Houston, than dying in your home.
And if you’re in a flood prone low lying area, at least you could be directed to move to higher ground. I would imagine that those living in safer areas would open their homes, schools, and facilities if they had been asked to.
If no evacuation was recommended for Houston during this terrible time, when would it ever be?
What I saw this morning is that during hurricane Rita, Houston did evacuate and people died in the evacuations. And Rita hit as a category 3 rather than 5 which had been predicted (at least as possible). Hurricanes are huge and its difficult (even with all of our tech) to predict exact paths, strengths, amounts of storm surge, rain, etc. Easy with hindsight to look back and say something different should have been done.
Is there a map that shows the areas currently flooded? My college friend lives near the Bunker Hills Elementary school.
I may have missed the update: The poster with the daughter staying at the nursing home- how is it going for them? Do they have electricity and enough meds?
I’m absolutely an outside looking in from 1500 miles away. We were exceptionally lucky in both Irene and Sandy. So please don’t think I’m minimizing your concerns.
But I imagine the first concern was protecting those on the coast from storm surge. They Knew a day or two before it hit, pretty much where on the coast the surge was likely to occur. So they had to first concentrate on getting those people out.
But from there inland,the cone widens. They didn’t know precisely where the flooding would be worst. And evacuating millions of people — children, the elderly, the disabled, those without transportation of their own – could bring the possibility that you’re sending the to an area that will be worse than where they came from. Except, of course, that you now have to replace the food and water and medications that would have been accessible at home.
I don’t envy those in Emergency Management. The reality is that the science of storms-- all sorts of storms-- simply isn’t where we need it to be.
I think the problem could have been that it has been so long since we’ve had a major hurricane hit Texas, that they have forgotten how bad it can be.
It is truly commendable all the people that are getting in their boats and going out to rescue others. If you wait around for the government to take care of everything, more people are going to die. Good for those people who are being heroes and looking out for their neighbors.
We don’t have to imagine what evacuating Houston looks like. Happened during Rita. More people died during the evacuation than in the storm itself.
You see all those interstates under water? They’d have been packed with cars.
One of the phenomena I’m most in awe of is th “Cajun Navy.” Apparently there is an informal group off boat owners who volunteer in severe floods. They trailer their boats, ride to the crisis, and get people out.
It’s all those volunteers, local and from far away, that remind me of all the good that we as a nation are capable of.
That’s so wonderful!
BD, the initial forcast for Houston was 20". Now they think it will be 50" when done. The system is slow moving and stalled over Houston. They knew it will bemoving slowly but not this slow.
I would suggest, that if evacuating Houston is impossible, because there aren’t enough freeways going out, that they put a priority upon building more roads out of there. It would be very uncomfortable to live in a place that I knew I couldn’t ever get out of, if there was a natural disaster, even one that they knew was coming days ahead of time. Just like strengthening the levees in New Orleans, these things are predictable. That storm looked to me like it stayed on the path they had been predicting for a long time.
But hey, that’s just me. I always want a backup to the backup to the backup plan, that doesn’t include people dying.
Those people make me very proud. This is the true spirit of our country.
^^ Loving the “Cajun Navy” and all those citizens who are there to lend a helping hand to those in need.
When I’m Queen of the Universe, as I one day most surely will be, I wont pour the money into more roads, I’ll pour it into research.
This time it’s Houston. It could as easily have been any of a dozen other cities. The problem is that we just don’t know.
The Weather Channel has a show called Katrina 2055. The talk about what would happen if the same storm came along 50’years later. Part of the show deals with the research being done. They talk about things like using drones to fly into the srtorms, more frequently and with less danger than the brave people who currently do it. They talk about remote control weather buoys, being placed in the path of each oncoming storm, to provide more and more accurate data. They hope to one day be able to pinpoint, to the neighborhood or block, where the storm will be. They talk about the possibility of pulling colder water from deep in the ocean, to lower the water temperature at he surface and provide less fuel for the storm therefore decreasing its intensity. All those are ideas currently being worked on. I’m sure there are many others.
Yeah, I’m a weather geek.