Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Joel Achenbach @ WashingtonPost.com, Aug. 27
[....] The storm has produced catastrophic flooding across thousands of square miles of south and Southeast Texas. Rain continues to fall in historic quantities. Rivers are rising to levels never before seen. People have taken refuge in attics or on rooftops awaiting rescue.
“This will be a devastating disaster, probably the worst disaster the state’s seen,” Long told The Washington Post on Sunday in a telephone interview from FEMA headquarters in Washington.
“The recovery to this event is going to last many years, to be able to help Texas and the people impacted by this event achieve a new normal,” Long said [....]
Comments
First, a reminder NO PAYWALL @ WaPo for at least 24 more hrs. (And NYTimes has no paywall on any storm coverage.) Then another WaPo link:
by artappraiser on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 3:05pm
I drove early Monday morning to Driggs Idaho to see totality of eclipse. Zero delay, everybody was already there, sorta like Houston. I hauled ass at instant that totality changed to a tiny crescent. First five miles back took two and a half hours. Houston metroplex has what, something like eleven million people?
by A Guy Called LULU on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 3:34pm
First five miles back took two and a half hours
Feel the pain! Breathlessly watching that temperature dial on the dash, and then the nervousness doing that irritates the human bladder, out of contact lens eyedrops, vision starting to blur....
I can see myself choosing to be stranded on top my roof over being stranded in a car on the highway.
And probably would not choose to leave early enough to avoid traffic because finding another place to stay would cost too much.
Also because of problems of site, I have handled numerous minor floods to my basement office, like up to 4", so that makes me a bit arrogant and willing to risk. Not that it's not been horrible when that happens, i dread it, but you just get used to having to deal with it.
It is also very frightening to be stranded in traffic when you are not a young peak health specimen. As you age, you start to realize how dependent you've become on civilization, while not qualifying as "handicapped", you start to realize that if you did not have all kinds of things you would be dead long ago.
by artappraiser on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 4:11pm
I sincerely hope he's as bad at history as the President:
The Great Galveston Hurricane was a Category 4 storm, with winds of up to 145 mph (233 km/h), which made landfall on September 8, 1900, in Galveston, Texas, in the United States, leaving about 6,000 to 12,000 dead. It remains to the present day the deadliest natural disaster in US history [...]
by artappraiser on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 3:13pm
When a Story Becomes Your Own Disaster
By Clifford Kraus 16 minutes ago @ NYTimes.com
A New York Times reporter found the lines between correspondent and disaster victim blurred when his quiet Houston-area neighborhood turned into a raging river.
by artappraiser on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 3:22pm
The Anthropocene may be turning into the Aquapocene. The epoch of deluges.
A Houston resident claimed this is the 5th "hundred year flood", in the last 20 years.
See this, gentrification by elevation, Miami:
Whether it's climate change or an eye for good real estate returns, historically black communities on higher ground are increasingly in the sights of speculators and investors. Real estate investment may no longer be just about the next hot neighborhood, it may also now be about the next dry neighborhood.
by NCD on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 3:43pm
yeah I have an aquaintance who is always ragging on how stupid owning property in Florida is. And he is the type who gets all his info. from like the WSJ and Financial Times, not a conspiracy type nor a political type. From what he reads he thinks it will all be "underwater" very soon, within a decade. On the other hand, I have a close relative an expert in real estate who owns there, low near the ocean, too, and he scoffs. He is 57 and he's thinking "will happen after we are gone."
by artappraiser on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 4:06pm
On hundred-year floods. You keep using that word, but it doesn't mean what you think it means.
And another article notes, if you put in a parking lot, you just changed the floodplain. So it's all shifting.
by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 08/28/2017 - 4:40am
CNN is good to check with their Live Updates because they get local people sourcing trying with videos to report for national attention, see whether they are getting help or not, things like this:
by artappraiser on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 4:29pm
weatherman on CNN TV just said that the National Weather service has put out 111 tornado warnings!
by artappraiser on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 4:28pm
They are also watching other tropical depressions forming in the Gulf and southern Atlantic. We need some walls alright, but not across the dessert. This storm might have been magnitudes worse if it had struck a ways further up the coast causing greater tidal surge up the Houston ship channel. I haven't heard anything about how badly the refineries and chemical plants have been affected but putting them out of commission for any extended time has been predicted to significantly effect entire world's economy.
by A Guy Called LULU on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 4:41pm
As I recall, one prediction was that a two week shutdown would spike gasoline to seven dollars a gallon.
by A Guy Called LULU on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 4:43pm
This is interesting, excerpt from a recent A.P. wire update, they do have some dams where they can alter the route of flooding:
by artappraiser on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 8:57pm
“This event is … beyond anything experienced”: The National Weather Service‘s ominous warning on Harvey
by artappraiser on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 5:40pm
by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 8:15pm
Maybe the religious right will start to see this as God's displeasure with their idiotic choice.
In Texas, no less - they were supposed to be seceding to get away from Godless America - instead God's floating them off into the oil-spilled Gulf of Mexico himself - didn't even warn them to build an ark.
You remember the big ha-ha that Al Gore mistook one meetig with the FEMA director for another, showed he was a "liar". That was back in the days when Presidents knew how their FEMA directors were, and what their jobs were, and didn't arrange campaign appearances or birthday parties or twitterstorms during major natural disasters.
I once pissed-off a Detroit-native Catholic friend by saying maybe God has John Paul I "recalled". Wonder if I can recycle the joke somehow in our current setting.
by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 08/28/2017 - 4:54am
Flood insurance splits GOP, spurs bipartisan dealmaking as deadline looms
Dozens of Republicans have fought proposals by the House Financial Services Committee that they say would make flood insurance unaffordable.
@ Politico.com, 08/27/2017 06:56 AM EDT
by artappraiser on Sun, 08/27/2017 - 8:23pm