Best wishes, Clothahump. Stay safe and I hope you and yours come through it okay.
You do realize that Houston and Fort Bend County and the southernmost-tip counties went for Hillary and that Corpus Christi’s vote was nearly evenly split last year?
In fact, I just did some back-of-the-envelope math: It looks like 1.3 million Hillary voters and 1.1 million Trump voters will be significantly affected by the hurricane, if we include Houston, Cameron and Hidalgo and Fort Bend Counties.
Aransas county, where the hurricane made landfall, voted 73% Trump. I’m sure they’ll get unlimited money to rebuild from the government they profess to hate so much.
Again, a hurricane affects far more people than those at the immediate point of first landfall. The majority are Hillary voters.
Forget the hurricane. We need to start a fund to help people who don’t instantly recognize 24-year-old Simpsons references.
IIRC, that great intellectual Rick Perry took that approach during the wildfire disaster while he was governor. The wildfires having been caused by God, obviously the right solution was to pray to God to turn them off. So he organized a big prayer meeting. All the good conservative Texans prayed, but God didn’t listen. So then Rick had to compromise his principles and ask for federal help, something that he always adamantly refuses to do when it comes to, say, federal assistance for poor people. And wouldn’t you know it, God didn’t listen but the feds did! I don’t think Rick learned anything from this. Today he is Trump’s energy secretary, no doubt still praying away like there’s no tomorrow. Remember: Climate change? God. Also, God wants more coal.
BTW, I kind of feel bad about all these digressions including my own previous lengthy one. I hope Clothahump stays safe, regardless of his politics. This is a terrible thing to be going through.
Up to their armpits now…
FWIW the most popular comments on HuffPo on the hurricane are exactly like some exhibited here. “FUCK TEXAS” I hope all their shit gets washed away and they don’t get a dime"
Nevermind the millions of people there who voted for Hillary.
There are other good reasons to deride Texas/Texans besides which way the vote went, you know.
- Cut $5 million from public schools
- Hateful abortion laws
- Negative affect on public school textbooks nationwide, due to publishers writing what Texas wants in the textbooks (accurate or not) since they’re a HUGE consumer of them
- Have you ever driven across Texas?
(I don’t hate Texas, btw, but I don’t love all of it either.)
Give me back the old jingoistic-sounding “Don’t Mess With Texas” since the latest anti-littering slogan I’ve heard was “Drive Clean Across Texas” which just rubs your nose in the fact that you have to drive clean across Texas to get to anywhere interesting. If you didn’t like putting long hours in on a driving day you could spend more than 2 days driving and still be in Texas.
I swear we spent a week driving across it in nearly 3 days.
That’s actually how Chuck Norris got his start; operating a karate school in Torrance in the late 60s/early 70s.
Look guys, I frankly wouldn’t put it past the state government to fuck over the metro areas - because we are fairly liberal and hate us. But Houston did send firefighters and water and help to New Jersey for Sandy, and we did our best to help everyone fleeing from Katrina. We made it through Ike. But for me personally, the worst flooding I remember was tropical storm Allison, who came and sat. 40 freaking inches of rain. Houston (which is not a dry place by any stretch of the imagination) normally gets 49 inches of rain annually. And the local meteorologist just said that Harvey will be so much worse than Allison. Because it’s just sitting here. And might loop around back out to the Gulf and come back and smack us again. We flooded badly in 2015. We had the Tax Day floods in 2016. And now this. Houston get most of the coverage because we have a couple of million people but there are hundreds of small communities that won’t get the coverage and are being devastated. They don’t deserve to be punished for Cruz and Cormyn.
I know for right now, I’m incredibly lucky. My neighborhood is sitting in between the bands of rain coming down. I can’t go anywhere, so if the bands shift…oh well. Clothahump is a jackass, but even jackasses don’t deserve to drown.
Harvey has parked his fat ass in just about the worst possible location for Houston.
For those interested, look at this image.
See the I-10 marker in the center with the word TOLL above it? That is the intersection of I-10 and Beltway 8 west, and it’s about 4 miles from our house and the Taekwondo school.
So far, no damage to the house. The streets are flooded and we have some water in our yard, but we still have power. We will continue to binge-watch The West Wing and keep you posted.
Best wishes to all the Texas coastal Dopers (I used to live there and have nightmarish memories of sandbags, the bayou coming out of its banks, clumps of floating fire ants and large swimming serpents) and hope the rain stops sooner than expected.
I remember vacationing in Galveston late July, early August 1989. I also remember clearing out early in the face of Hurricane Chantal.
We left with plenty of time to spare, but I remember watching the storm surge coming in as we got ready to leave. Most scary and impressive. 3 years earlier, I’d watch 20 foot swells on Lake Michigan try to devour my house. But in viewing the ocean that day, I saw real raw power in the waves.
Stay safe, TX dopers!
ProPublica has an in-depth look at how and why flooding can be so deadly in Houston.
No idea if we have any Dopers down there but mandatory evacuation issued for Brazoria County.
Why are you not evacuated?
I suspect after this event there’s going to have to be some rethinking on how development is permitted here. Despite numerous measures put in place to manage water drainage we seem to be having major or catastrophic floods on a less than ten-year average. At this rate maybe we’re going to have to be putting houses on stilts, as is done in the coastal communities.