Storm in a tea cup: The weather thread

[Tubby Isaacs]

Jesus, look at the population growth in Montgomery County, next to Harris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_County,_Texas

[anton pulisov]

Yeah, Houston has been growing like crazy with little or no planning.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Family on the move, found a route that's passable (for the moment!) heading NW out of Houston. La Signora's having conniptions.

[Tubby Isaacs]

For the best part of 50 years. The figures for Harris are incredible too. I was thinking some of that growth in Montgomery would be people moving out of Houston proper. Not a bit of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_County,_Texas

[Tubby Isaacs]

Family on the move, found a route that's passable (for the moment!) heading NW out of Houston. La Signora's having conniptions.

Sounds better. Apart from the conniptions. Hope everybody OK otherwise.

My brother has lots of in-laws at his place on relatively high ground outside Willis.

[ursus arctos]

US counties are very odd, and I don't really understand them. There's no consistency at all, even within a state. In Texas, for example, Harris County has roughly 4 million residents, and Loving County has something around 100. How can they be expected to provide the same function?

In many cases, the boundaries were set by surveyors at a time when very few, if any, white settlers were present and settlement patterns were dramatically different. The boundaries of Montgomery County, for instance, were established in 1837, only a year after the Alamo. In a more rational system, new counties would be established as population increased, but the county bureaucracies are so well-established that that is considered anathema.

[Tubby Isaacs]

They seem to really need some sort of "Greater Houston" unit.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Sounds better. Apart from the conniptions. Hope everybody OK otherwise.

My brother has lots of in-laws at his place on relatively high ground outside Willis.

Hope so. Though last time I looked the storm was projected to move slowly in a North-Westerly direction. I trust my step-son-in-law though, he's a very calm and organised individual and has almost certainly comprehensively thought this move through.

[Amor de Cosmos]

They're now safe in a hotel a couple of hundred miles outside Houston.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Excellent news.

[anton pulisov]

Safety first.

And some good news regardig H**vey. Finally the first prediction that has the thing pissing off somewhere else:



Also missing New Orleans thankfully. The pumps broke down in New Orleans a few weeks ago and there was some minor to moderate flooding due to rainfall. Yes, literally nothing has changed since Katrina.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Well, I'm sure that Trump Infrastructure Plan will sort it.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Good short piece on the US Flood Insurance Program and its upcoming problems.

[San Bernardhinault]

That's hidden behind a paywall that I've not paid to get past, so I won't comment on it directly.

But I have been thinking about the Flood Insurance Program, and how it's a weird case of the government effectively handing out massive subsidies to people who've been building in places they shouldn't. It is effectively the federal government subsidising the massive population growth in Texas, allowing Texas to build huge amounts of dirt cheap property in unregulated housing tracts. People don't need to pay the real cost of insurance in these places. It shows what bullshit the libertarian argument is - because it still needs the backstop of the central government to pay when things fuck up.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Here's the article. Basically reinforces your comments:

"One of the first things visitors notice about Houston is the humidity – a stagnant, clingy cover that gets worse in the dog days of summer. It's a bit like being at sea, but never actually seeing the water.

That is, until a tropical storm such as Harvey hits.

The city was built in and around low-lying swamps and bayous, nestled inland from the Gulf of Mexico. Were it not for the oil business and air conditioning, it's a safe bet Houston wouldn't be the fourth-largest city in the United States.

And federal flood insurance, of course.

The U.S. National Flood Insurance Program was created nearly 50 years ago because private insurers were balking at protecting homeowners from catastrophic losses in the country's most flood-prone areas, such as New Orleans, La. and Houston. But critics have long complained that the program bails out Americans, sometimes multiple times over, for living where they should not. Repeat claims account for up to a quarter of payouts.

Worse, subsidized flood insurance has encouraged rampant new and often high-end development – in bayous, barrier islands and other low-lying, but highly desirable, coastal areas. The program has become a federal giveaway to the moneyed and the powerful.

This destructive cycle of build, subsidize and rebuild makes flooding worse as vast natural drainage areas are covered over with concrete and structures. When the rains come, the water has nowhere to go but up.

Houston is feeling the direct consequences. Harvey marks the third 500-year flood to hit the city in the past three years.

"Storms are natural events, but floods are usually man-made disasters," journalist Michael Grunwald argued this week in online publication Politico. "That's because flood damage depends not only on how much water is involved, but on how many people and structures are in its path and how prior human intervention had affected the path."

The federal flood-insurance scheme was in deep trouble long before Harvey.

But this monster storm, which has already dumped nearly 125 centimetres of rain on the Houston area, could blow it up. The program is running a nearly $25-billion (U.S.) deficit, swelled by claims from hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012. Because premiums are set artificially low, the government must keep borrowing more to cover payouts.

With sea levels rising and extreme weather events becoming more frequent because of global warming, these claims are coming fast and furious.

The U.S. Congress knows the situation is unsustainable. But as with the health-care issue, lawmakers have struggled mightily to do the right thing, repeatedly bowing to pressure from residents and politicians in parts of the country that rely on the subsidies and discounts. Ending the program would reportedly send coastal property values plunging by more than $1.2-trillion.

In 2012, Congress passed legislation to gradually phase out subsidies, making policyholders shoulder more risk. But after Sandy, lawmakers reversed course and softened the rate hikes, relieving premium holders of the full risk of insurance for up to two more decades.

But the day of reckoning is approaching for federal flood insurance. Running out of cash, the program is set to lapse at the end of September – the end of the U.S. government's fiscal year.

A few months back, U.S. President Donald Trump floated what he thought was a brilliant solution. He suggested adding a surcharge to flood-insurance policies, with the proceeds going to help pay for his oft-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Killing two birds with one stone, as it were.

In the wake of Harvey's soggy destruction, Mr. Trump and Congress will find it much more difficult to punish the victims. Mr. Trump will no doubt find that getting flood victims to pay for his wall is as improbable as sticking Mexicans with the tab.

Indeed, if history is any guide, Congress will rush in with billions of dollars in special disaster relief in Harvey's wake. This, in turn, will provide flood victims with cash to rebuild, often in places that would be better off turned back into bayous.

And without reform, discounted federal flood insurance will make it all possible, once again."

[anton pulisov]

Literally just saw a guy say this on TV: "We are trying to get people out, we are looking for a route where the water is deep enough to get the boat in."

A sentence that demonstrates how fucked up everything has become.

[linus]

What one would expect from a city that still lacks basic zoning laws.

More examples.

Much better than in California actually, where neurotic zoning laws have long buried the concept of housing affordability.



What you will probably see though is that areas most susceptible to flooding will require new homes to be built on stilts, the same way it has been done in vulnerable areas in LA that were wiped out the last decade.

So I take it the right will find it in incredibly bad taste to "politicize" this tragedy by linking it to global warming.

The frequency of hurricanes hitting the eastern seaboard has been dropping the past few decades. Harvey was the first cat. 3 or higher hurricane to hit in 12 years. What was exceptional with Harvey was not its intensity, it was its path and trajectory. Not only did it hit a big city, it stalled right over it.

Interesting interactive article from a year ago:

https://projects.propublica.org/hous...ergy202&wpmm=1

[anton pulisov]

For fuck's sake man would you stop.

It went from remanents of a tropical depression to Category 4 hurricane in 66 hours because the waters in the Gulf of Mexico are so unbelievably warm. And climate change has caused sea temperature to rise. And then the hurricane flooded and/or blew away the houses of multiple people I know. We were following this thing from when it was just a collection of random clouds off the Yucatan peninsula on Monday/Tuesday. At that time, the forecasters got the path and speed of it right; landfall near Corpus Christi on Friday. But what they got totally wrong was the intensity at landfall; they predicted Tropical Storm, worst case Cat 1 storm at landfall. Because their predictions were based on a normal world.

[Satchmo Distel]

I think coastal Florida is a Houston waiting to happen because much of it is built on a swamp and it takes a while for excessive rain to drain. Some areas already flood every year even though our last big hurricane was 2005. You just have to look out of your window when you're flying into, say, Miami to see that it's playing Russian Roulette every year. What role insurance plays, I dunno, but there's a parallel with how crazy loans led to the 2008 great recession.

[Ginger Yellow]

From what I've read, it's the Carolina coast that is really pushing its luck as a direct result of the flood insurance subsidies.

[Bruno]

The frequency of hurricanes hitting the eastern seaboard has been dropping the past few decades. Harvey was the first cat. 3 or higher hurricane to hit in 12 years.

If that's true, what are the possible or likely explanations? Is it that there's no point in trying to spot a trend in a time window that short?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Neil Bush says the floods show the need for government and praises the media.

[ursus arctos]

Cedar Bayou, Texas (about 30 miles east of Houston) has recorded 51.88 inches of rain, a new record for the Continental United States.

[San Bernardhinault]

The frequency of hurricanes hitting the eastern seaboard has been dropping the past few decades. Harvey was the first cat. 3 or higher hurricane to hit in 12 years.

If that's true, what are the possible or likely explanations? Is it that there's no point in trying to spot a trend in a time window that short?

It's meaningless shit, basically. It's the kind of bullshit bluster from people who want to pretend that climate change isn't a massive problem.

It just means that over a short window the biggest hurricanes aren't getting steered over the US. Basically, it means that the US has been lucky for a bit over a decade.

In contrast, it should be noted that 5 of the 6 most active Atlantic storm seasons on record have happened in the last 2 decades. A few more storms are forming in our warm waters, and they're picking up more moisture. It's just that - at the moment - nothing is steering them on to the US eastern seaboard.

If you reduce your target area to the US Eastern Seaboard, and reduce your hurricane sample by picking Cat-3 and above, you're cherry picking enough to make it look like the problem is magically going away.

[ursus arctos]

Terrifying piece from Charles Pierce on the Gulf Coast's toxic time bomb

We're Nowhere Near Prepared for the Ecological Disaster That Harvey Is Becoming
Three decades of bad decisions have led us to this moment.