Mass-scale government spending is driven in large part by corporate interests. If you look at any road project, it's usually driven by commerce needs. If an individual is worried, they get insurance, which makes a profit, then pay contractors to fix their ****, which is also profit. I'm not opposed to expansion of infrastructure for commercial gain but it has to come with bettering our quality of life other than reducing rush hour congestion. There's a lot of fat to trim to make the budget available to FEMA to be proactive. Finance retention pond parks stocked with native wildlife instead of retention ponds which stay at a low level due to natural water table and make small islands with low cost pedestrian bridges between them (there's one of these in Friendswood). Add a series of seawalls on the gulf coast to break the power of storm surges. Mandate stricter drainage projects and code on large developments. In fire-prone states finance anti-wildfire departments that help to mitigate combustible undergrowth. There's so much we can do.
minimal. Scattered rain, no flooding. Some winds maybe closer to league city. Worst case scenario that area may lose power for a day. Everyone else shouldn’t really feel it.
We got so lucky in Metro Houston. If this isn't a wake up call to set up some infrastructure, I don't know what is. If this was just a bit further to the west we would be absolutely ****ed.
A strong category 4. 140mph sustained winds. They didn't get the track right thankfully, but that so called "troll" account that was hyping this up as a monster that would hit closer to Houston as a Cat 5 sure did get the rapid intensification right.
This has definitely been done in Houston and Harris County. In fact, with the latest NOAA rainfall data released, it really jacked up the larger rain events and it's requiring to build even larger detention basins. I think the regulations are fine, the problem is that you can't easily retroactively fix all the previous issues without spending large amount of money. I think developers get a lot of crap even though they are building detention basins that hold water back to predevelopment levels. Some development has been poorly executed and it also may have been under old rules. Also think, channels in this city lack conveyance capacity. Many were designed based on old empirical data that no longer applies. Also regulations were less strict on developments built pre-Allison, and as mentioned previously you can't retroactively fix that issue without spending a lot of money and quite frankly we just don't have enough funding for all of it. Once again, we are a reactive rather than a proactive society.
If only we had previous close calls and direct hits to base future infrastructure policy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Texas_hurricanes_(1980–present)
It missed us but that doesn't mean there is absolutely no threat. Don't go out golfing or for a picnic is what I mean. The bands from the hurricane will be coming through periodically giving very brief bouts of rain/wind. In these bands there can be tornadoes.
