There’s no easy answer but this will take a decades long commitment to building new energy infrastructure and flood mitigation infrastructure. One thing I’ve always recommended is building more distributed and multimodal power generation. So instead of relying upon big giant power plants a distributed network of power plants generating from different type of sources for redundancy. Also improved efficiency and along with passive heating and cooling design for houses. So if you lose power your house won’t turn into an oven. A few years ago when work was slow I was working on a conceptual design for a house in Houston that would deal better with floods and also include passive cooling and other environmental factors. I’ll see if I can dig those up and post them.
It's so weird to me that people find it odd that direct hits from hurricanes cause power outages....as if that's some shocking thing or a failing of the power grid. I hate to break it to you guys, but there's really nothing that is going to stop power outages when you get directly hit by the eyewall of a hurricane and it snaps trees in half taking out power lines across the city. I think a lot of rain only hurricanes that don't even hit Houston at all such as Harvey or super weak tropical depressions have given people a false impression of what getting hit by a hurricane is actually like. Beryl was a direct hit to the west side of Houston which put the entirety of Houston on the dirty side of the storm...pretty much the worst place a hurricane can hit the city. The entire city experienced wind speeds of 80 to 90 MPH and places on the west side had sustained winds of over 60 MPH....that's literally always going to cause widespread power outages. Now add to this the fact that the storm wasn't even supposed to hit Houston at all....so there was no way to properly plan for it, and you get pretty much a worse case scenario. If, like other hurricanes in the past, you had a week or more lead up to the storm with Houston expected to take the hit, then you have everything set up and ready to go....instead the storm was supposed to hit Mexico....then Brownsville, then Corpus, then Victoria....then about a day before the storm they start talking about Houston taking the hit. I get that there's frustration about the outages, I get that some people want to jump at an opportunity to make a crisis political, but let's be smarter than that. If you want to be mad at something, be mad at the storm models for failing to predict where the storm was going to make landfall until it was too late to properly get everything in place.
I was there in the early 90s. In its hey day Alief ISD was da bomb. I loved it there. In PE they would play M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice (or whatever else was popular hip hop at the time) during hoola hoop wars.
Okay but why do places like Florida do much better with electric outtages than Houston? Flooding I get with their soil being more absorbant + areas in Houston still pumping out groundwater.
That state could give two ***** about Houston. I don't know why anyone in the Houston area votes for Abbott. This guy appointed state funds to build the "national" juneteenth museum in dfw versus htown or galveston. the state only cares about what's along I-35.
Typically they get plenty of warning and there's no city in the entire state of Florida anywhere near as populous as Houston. Houston had something like 2 million people out of electricity due to this storm....if 100% of Florida's 3 largest population cities were out of power, it wouldn't equal 2 million people. It's just not apples to apples. When New Jersey got hit by Hurricane Sandy it had comparable power outages and that was an even weaker storm than Beryl. Hurricane Rita was A LOT stronger than Sandy or Beryl....but it didn't matter because it hit in the middle of nowhere. It's different when a major city gets hit by a storm than when it hits BFE.
Random personal damage metric - the number of large trees Ive seen uprooted around town over the last couple of days is as large as Ive seen for any other major storm. The city got a direct hit, while for most of the larger hurricanes seem to be glancing blows at worst. Was "only" cat 1, but we got it right in the face.
Breh you realize you are just looking at city limits right? Greater Houston as of 2023 was at 7.5M people. Florida's largest metro Miami was at 6.2M people. Their next largest Tampa is at 3.6M and Orlando at 3M. Those are the 3 largest population centers in Florida. The state has 8M less people than Texas which means they are missing a DFW somewhere. In other words, both states are close to the same size population wise, so yes Florida has plenty of people they need to power during storm outtages. I've always wondered why Houston wasn't built more like South Florida (I know now...costs). The Houston area should have more detention ponds, lakes, sidewalks, less parking lots but more parking garages that take up less space, etc., just like South Florida. I think the flooding would not have been that bad. What we see now is the culmination of decades worth of unplanned growth and an electric company that cares about profit versus the people they serve. Harvey would have taken a similar path but it decided to go out into the ocean which put more of Houston on the stalled "clean" side. Ike was the closest to Beryl but made landfall much further east which sparred the city
Bobby is typically a moron on this board. It should come as no surprise he doesn't offer useful solutions. Or any modicum of compassion.
I'm unsurprised at the really dumb responses, I know we're not dealing with the best or brightest around here. It is what it is. Go back to crying about not having electricity after major weather disasters over and over again, just not something I can relate to because I plan ahead and I realize what happens when there's major storms literally anywhere.
Go back to calling people's children r****ds. I'm honestly surprised you're still on this board, lol.
Houston hasn't had a direct hit since 2008 with Ike. One advantage Florida has is the routine hurricanes wash out the weak points. More communities have underground utilities and hurricane mitigation is taken more seriously. Before hurricanes hit, utilities from all over the south east deploy in strategic locations. There is a mall lot near me that usually houses well over a hundred bucket trucks before the storms hit.
I do love when you losers continue to cry about that. It just reinforces that you aren't someone to be taken seriously.
