You can get callous to hurricanes and tropical storms. My parents will not leave for any of them.... they say they have survived and dealt with them for 50+ years and will do the same until they are just too old.... so not shocked that some in St. Pete are not leaving.
Trump withheld disaster aid for California wildfires until his senior director on the NSC informed him that Orange County had more Trump supporters than Iowa. This is simply who he is. This isn't secondhand information; Mark Harvey, the former director and source, explicitly shared this with E&E News.
Yeah as someone who grew up south of Houston who has been through many hurricanes it’s hard to leave especially when you know your house and your drainage situation etc. Where the mistake is often made is being able to predict infrastructure challenges with water power etc. We saw it with Harvey where even weeks later it just wreaked havoc where you wish you would have just moved in with a family member for a few weeks rather than putting yourself through the horrible experience of not being able to bathe for weeks, etc etc. living out of a suitcase as your kids house in DFW is way better than having no power or water at your house in League City. Not much you can do with older people who don’t want to leave their homes for whatever situation comes up. My father in law refused to move from their house out in the sticks when his health was starting to fade and refused our pleas to move him close where we could take care of him and also make sure he had access to healthcare he didn’t have out in the sticks. We all had to live with the nightmare that was predictable at the end of his life. He would still likely be with us today and we would have saved thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of our lives leaving out lives in disarray just because he refused to leave his home out in the sticks and move close to the rest of the family. This is just the reality especially with older folks. You can remind them of how it will impact you when the inevitable happens but in the end you just have to make a plan to help your older loved ones as much as you can and not live with the grief that you could have done more.
My grandpa sat in his Ford pickup during Gilbert with a cartoon of camel unfiltered and a case of Budweiser in his cooler. He was fine. But stubborn
I'm far enough inland that I'm never that concerned about the wind or the storm surge from a hurricane. It's the flooding that is concerning. I've been through two floods. The first one was up to the roof when I was too young to know anything. The second one was 18" inside the house, but it wasn't from a hurricane; it was from a modern, crazy 1-in-200-year rainstorm (that seems to keep on repeating every 5 years). Rita didn't concern me where I was (the mass fear in Houston was way overblown, but few listened to me when I said to just stay put). The ONLY hurricane that concerned me was Harvey when I saw the forecast that it would park in Houston for five days. I did not want to experience flooding again and was lucky to be spared.
Yeah I think the real areas that you don't necessarily need to freak out about, but be aware of are where your home is in regards to flood plain down creek or whatever from one of the major dams. Here in DFW it's very concerning how much of the city of Dallas would be destroyed if one of the major dams failed. When it comes to tornados either from actual pop up storms, or during a hurricane yeah... be aware when it's possibly going to be unsafe from heavy winds/tornadoes, but it's the flooding that will destroy your life, and kill you. Even if you think climate change is a hoax, you still should be active with your local and state officials to invest in infrastructure to maintain, and improve these dams. There's a ton of work that'll be happening over the next 10 years in Texas to build more and more dams especially around the Colorado river areas west of Houston, and on the East side of the state with the Trinity, etc. This is important for farmers in Texas to have enough water in the region to sustain our ag business, but the state needs to be smarter moving forward about proper safety measures. Back in the day, Texas was so concerned about daming up enough of the creeks so Dallas could grow in population that they didn't really build the right kind of dams to sustain the flooding that was possible with climate change. Now lookup the Lewisville Dam and see how horribly maintained it is, and what kind of danger it poses to Dallas if there ever is a Helena type of storm that goes up coast like Helena did in NC. Being prepared in a beachside community for storm surge is one thing. You live in Galveston, or Freeport... you know your house is on borrowed time. It's the preparation around major cities that really concerns me moving forward. At least in Florida the cities have been built in a way that they sort of expect every home in the state to at some point have at least 5 feet of storm surge which is why all homes built there now are solid concrete walls. Texas needs to get with it, and shore up our state or we'll be fcked at some point.
This is the thing with disasters. You can survive them until you don't. I'll repeat again disasters are inherently unpredictable and I've seen some bizarre stuffs like a whole waterfront destroyed after the 2004 tsunami and one building standing, with buildings behind it destroyed. You can't keep on counting on luck though and even though you might've been fine 5 other storms is no guarantee you survive the 6th. Also you have to consider in a disaster like a hurricane or major flood it's not just you putting your life at risk. If you get in trouble first responders will try to help you. Your decision to ride it out potentially puts their lives at risk. This is why in some storms like Helene authorities are now saying right your name and other identifying info on yourself in permanent marker. They can't guarantee they will save you so you might as well be able to be identified if your body is found.
And this is why it was so important to get those infrastructure bills passed. It's not just dams too but there are many bridges that are old and crumbling, water treatment facilities and as we see in Western NC mountain roads very vulnerable to landslides. A lot of US infrastructure is aging and / or inadequate to current needs.
Yep. Asheville is a huge wake up call to not just costal cities but what affect a hurricane can have 300 miles from the coast simple because the warmer oceans create denser clouds that are going to drop more and more rain the warmer the ocean gets. It’s not just Galveston or even Houston that’s vulnerable.
To be fair, the rainfalls that are resulting from climate change have creeped the hell up and I don't think it was easily predictable back in the day. Also, lets be realistic, retroactively updating infrastructure costs a lot of money, so the government has not spent enough money in these areas. I really wish we could spend so much more than whatever we were provided in the infrastructure bill. It's a great start, but man, construction costs just keep going up and it's really hard to keep up. Plus, you have to sell to the public increases in taxes or figure out areas where you can make budget costs and allocate more money to improving our infrastructure. Here in Houston we have so much to do and the manpower to do it is just not there. I'm busier than I ever been in my life and no matter how much we keep staffing up, it's still very difficult to keep up with demand and schedules. Plus, getting these projects on the ground takes so long, that a cost estimate that I may have conducted 5 years ago is so out of date that the project budget is no longer there and we can only build a portion of it. I have a project that I been waiting for 2 years a permit from USACE. 2 freaking years man. It's a project that will provide relief to some heavily impacted flooded areas, but here I am waiting for the federal government to hand me a permit and the problem is that due to the recent rulings with the Sackett decision, it pretty much put the agency in chaos for a few months to figure out where they had jurisdiction or not. We really need to make it easier to get past the bureaucratic red tape if we are going to accomplish some serious rebuilding in the next few decades of our nation.
I still think Biden is secretly mad about the orchestrated force out and letting the chips out of the bag every once in a while
It sounds like you’re a civil engineer. I agree with most of this and yes we need a lot more infrastructure. The bills that were passed are a start but there is much more needed.
Infrastructure investment seems like a win win to me. Is there a plan for an additional package. I know Biden got one passed in 2021??
It doesn’t seem like either campaign is focussing on infrastructure. Off the top of my head not sure if there is plan for another major Package.
I thought I saw something that Biden wants to remove all lead pipes and replace them in the next ten years. If they plan on trucking the replacement pipes from anywhere in NY state around me, they will fall off the truck from all the potholes. Snowplows take a toll on roads around here. someone needs to figure out a snow removal system that does not destroy the top layer of pavement. Once there is a pothole and moisture gets in freezing and thawing, the expansion and contraction truly destroys the roads.
Typical gop stratbook. Deny additional funding to a certain federal agency and then btch to the sheeples that agency sucks/isn't doing its job. Rinse and repeat.
That's the entire platform. Government sucks, so elect me and I'll break it even more so you don't notice while I steal all these funds for myself.
