Today I am safely ensconced in our lovely, warm, homey home listening to rain. Not feeling great so I slept until 7:30am today. And, I took an hour and a half nap today. I may even go to bed early tonight. This is a sure sign I am not feeling great. Just a scratchy throat and very, very tired.
This last week we have experienced Hurricane Harvey. It is a monster storm and has wreaked havoc that will take years to restore. He came up through the Gulf of Mexico and brought lots and lots of water with him. Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 Hurricane along the Texas Gulf Coast. Then he stopped over Houston. I listened to one meteorologist described that it was like a top spinning on a flat surface. If the top came to a rut in the surface it would follow it and move on. Since there is no rut like that in the Houston area, Harvey just sat and spinned and spinned, all the while bringing more water from the Gulf to rain on Houston. Bayous, creeks, canals, and storm drains filled and overflowed. Flood gates were opened to release water to control the flooding that was coming no matter what. And flood it did. Another meteorologist said Houston was like a series of islands where the highest ground was and each island was surrounded by water.
My niece was working at a hospital in Houston. She was called in and told to be prepared to stay for the weekend. When the day came when she should have gone home, she couldn't. The hospital was surrounded by water and the roads between her home and the hospital were flooded. She stayed several more days before she was finally allowed to leave. Even at that she wasn't sure she could find dry roads between the hospital and her home. She did and was very happy to be home with her hubby and four children.
My nephew posted several videos of them rafting meat from the freezer of one home to another that was not flooded. The water they were in was waist deep.
I saw another picture of a shark swimming down a street that was flooded several feet deep. Yike!! Another picture was a person who owned one of those lawn ornaments that is an alligator that positioned down in your grass. Under these conditions the people trying to do a rescue were sure they had an alligator to navigate. This is not far-fetched. In Beaumont they have an alligator farm. Their two largest alligators were in pens and locked up. The hundreds of others were roaming in a huge enclosure and, if and when that flooded, there would be nothing they could do to keep them contained.
One very clever person took large black garbage bags (like you would put in a big garbage can) and filled them with flood water, leaving a little air at the top. They pulled those and placed them around their front door like sand bags to keep the flood waters out. Necessity is the mother of invention.
I liked these two pictures showing the increase in water level over a few days. You just can't keep up with that kind of water increase.
The rain totals were measured in feet, not inches. The Washington Post stated in an article on August 30th that 24.5 trillion gallons of water had fallen on Texas and Louisiana. That breaks down to 19 trillion gallons over Houston and the Texas coast and 5.5 trillion in Louisiana. For perspective, if all that water were put into a cube, it would measure 2.8 miles on each side!! That is a lot of water.
Now, Harvey is moving on up through Tennessee and into Kentucky and on up the Ohio Valley. We were told to just stay inside today if you could and to anticipate flooding. Our creek is not flooded yet. But the rain is supposed to stay around through tomorrow. I was expecting thunder and lightning. None. We have had some winds that were strong. But a steady rain falls outside as I write this Blog entry. As Papa says, "If it floods your home, the rest of us are really in trouble. We sit on a nice hill and are very protected unless it covers the bridge into our development.
This is truly a piece of history we are living through.
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