Shoutout to Second, part II
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Wednesday, March 10, 2021 18:31
VIEWED: 13498
PAGE 1 of 1
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/06/climate/flood-toxic-che
micals.html
Floods Are Getting Worse, and 2,500
Chemical Sites Lie in the Water’s Path
By HIROKO TABUCHI, NADJA POPOVICH, BLACKI MIGLIOZZI and ANDREW W. LEHREN FEB. 6, 2018
Anchored in flood-prone areas in every American state are more than 2,500 sites that handle toxic chemicals, a New York Times analysis of federal floodplain and industrial data shows. About 1,400 are located in areas at highest risk of flooding.
As flood danger grows — the consequence of a warming climate — the risk is that there will be more toxic spills like the one that struck Baytown, Tex., where Hurricane Harvey swamped a chemicals plant, releasing lye. Or like the ones at a Florida fertilizer plant that leaked phosphoric acid and an Ohio refinery that released benzene.
Flooding nationwide is likely to worsen because of climate change, an exhaustive scientific report by the federal government warned last year. Heavy rainfall is increasing in intensity and frequency.
At the same time, rising sea levels combined with more frequent and extensive flooding from coastal storms like hurricanes may increase the risk to chemical facilities near waterways.
The Times analysis looked at sites listed in the federal Toxic Release Inventory, which covers more than 21,600 facilities across the country that handle large amounts of toxic chemicals harmful to health or the environment.
Of those sites, more than 1,400 were in locations the Federal Emergency Management Agency considers to have a high risk of flooding. An additional 1,100 sites were in areas of moderate risk. Other industrial complexes lie just outside these defined flood-risk zones, obscuring their vulnerability as flood patterns shift and expand.
The presence of chemical sites in areas vulnerable to flooding is a holdover from an age where the advantages to industry of proximity to rivers and oceans — for transportation and trade, or for a ready supply of cooling water — seemingly outweighed the risks.
“Waterfronts are changing as a result of sea level rise,” said Jeanne Herb, an environmental policy expert at Rutgers University who has researched hazards posed by climate-related flooding to industries in New Jersey. “More often than not, these are facilities are on the water for a reason,” she said. “So how do we make sure that there are protections in place? That’s the big question.”
Federal law does not explicitly require sites in floodplains that handle toxic chemicals to take extra precautions against flooding. Nor do most states or local governments have such requirements.
President Barack Obama signed an executive order in 2015 requiring planners of federally funded buildings, roads and other infrastructure to account for the impact of possible flooding from rising sea levels or more extreme precipitation. President Trump rescinded those rules last year.
The Times analysis focused on facilities on the federal toxic release database, which tracks sites handling chemicals that could be harmful to health and the environment if released. The list does not include properties like Superfund sites or wastewater facilities, or chemical sites where the predominant risks are fire or explosion, as opposed to toxic pollution.
The Times also examined reports of oil and chemical spills tallied by the National Response Center, which is run by the Coast Guard. Companies are required by law to report spills to the N.R.C., although that database has been criticized as incomplete.
Still, the data does provide a glimpse into the thousands of spills that occur across the country each year.
By the time the murky flood waters had receded from the sprawling Chevron Phillips chemical plant in Baytown, 34,000 pounds of sodium hydroxide and 300 pounds of benzene — both highly toxic — had escaped through a damaged valve. The plant, a joint venture between Chevron and Phillips 66, is one of many that filled the region’s streets with a stew of chemicals, debris and waste in the days after Hurricane Harvey a
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Quote:That plant is at a bend in Cedar Bayou. During the flood the bayou didn't follow the bend, instead it took a shortcut across the plant.
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
By the time the murky flood waters had receded from the sprawling Chevron Phillips chemical plant in Baytown, 34,000 pounds of sodium hydroxide and 300 pounds of benzene — both highly toxic — had escaped through a damaged valve. The plant, a joint venture between Chevron and Phillips 66, is one of many that filled the region’s streets with a stew of chemicals, debris and waste in the days after Hurricane Harvey and its torrential rains.
Employees later pumped some of the tainted water into 80 steel tanks. But most of the product “was lost in the floodwater,” David Gray, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesman based in Dallas, said in an email.
A Chevron Phillips spokesman, Bryce Hallowell, declined to give further details of the spill. He stressed that the plant “was at the center of this incredibly powerful storm.”
The chemical site lies in a moderate-risk flood zone, defined by the government as having a 0.2 percent chance of flooding in any year. It was at least the third time in three years that the Chevron Phillips facility blamed heavy downpours for chemical leaks.
The spills underscore the vulnerability of America’s coastal industries to rising sea levels and extreme weather. This is the case along the Gulf Coast because the country’s oil, gas and petrochemicals industries are concentrated there.
http://bit.ly/2Eq4nR8
There is something called the Ike Dike, which hasn't been built because a bunch of whiny little Republican cheapskates say "that it is simply too expensive (some estimates place the cost between $3 billion and $4 billion) and its efficacy is not established." Too bad it will never get built in time to prevent a hundred billion in eventual hurricane damage. But think of all the money that was saved by not building it! 4 billion!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ike_Dike
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Disaster relief back on the table as part of budget deal in Congress
By Kevin Diaz, February 7, 2018 10:57pm
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Disaster-relief-b
ack-on-the-table-as-part-of-12559929.php
WASHINGTON – A major budget deal brokered by Senate leaders Wednesday was a long time coming, but it could sweeten the pot for the victims of Hurricane Harvey and other natural disasters.
The Senate agreement could provide nearly $90 billion in aid for Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and other states and territories hit by storms and wildfires. That would be about a 10 percent bump from the $81 billion disaster aid package passed in December by the House.
While the Senate package contains more relief dollars, it is still not as much as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and lawmakers in other storm hit areas would like.
Texas officials have estimated the damage from Harvey at upwards of $120 billion, and the new disaster bill, like an earlier $35 billion appropriation, directs resources to all of the disaster regions, including Florida and Puerto Rico.
Altogether, Congress has approved about $50 billion in aid so far to help in the recovery from Harvey and other natural calamities in 2017. The latest funding proposal would bring that up to $140 billion.
Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, has pushed for more money to be directed to Texas and the Gulf region hit by Harvey, though he did not publicly specify an amount.
In a floor speech Wednesday, Cornyn called the budget agreement "long overdue," saying the new aid package would "strengthen" the House-passed disaster bill.
Houston Republican John Culberson, who helped craft the House-passed disaster bill in December, said the additional spending in the Senate package could be a boon both for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and local property owners.
"That would mean property owners would get relief much more quickly and the Corps will have the money they need to finish every federally authorized flood control project in Harris County," he said
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Good idea starting this thread G. Second must have lost his bookmark to the first one since it finally fell off the front RWED page after 6 months of him virtue signalling to himself on a daily basis. Let's see if he can keep this one on top until 2019!
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Wrong again, 6ix! The first thread ("Shout out to Second - hope you are doing well") disappeared on January 26th in a database error: http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61883
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Good idea starting this thread G. Second must have lost his bookmark to the first one since it finally fell off the front RWED page after 6 months of him virtue signalling to himself on a daily basis. Let's see if he can keep this one on top until 2019!
Do Right, Be Right. :)
And what is 6ixStringJack signaling? ("after 6 months of him virtue signalling to himself on a daily basis") That he's free floating soul, detached from a natural disaster that will repeat at irregular intervals until the American political process finally pays to prevent future disasters? I remember many occasions when 6ix whined about the cost, without ever taking note the damage was many times the cost that could have prevented the damage from ever happening.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Second must have lost his bookmark to the first one since it finally fell off the front RWED page after 6 months of him virtue signalling
You haven't seen the Black Mirror episode The Black Museum yet, have you?
Lemme know when you do.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Wishimay:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Second must have lost his bookmark to the first one since it finally fell off the front RWED page after 6 months of him virtue signalling
You haven't seen the Black Mirror episode The Black Museum yet, have you?
Lemme know when you do.
No I haven't. Color me intrigued.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:From The Black Museum plot synopsis: Parker grew tired of the stuffed toy and abandoned it, with Carrie’s consciousness trapped inside. The transfer of Carrie into the stuffed monkey was declared illegal. Carrie is still inside the stuffed monkey, since it is also illegal to delete her. When Fireflyfans.net gets deleted permanently, it won't be a crime or even a minor tragedy.
Originally posted by Wishimay:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Second must have lost his bookmark to the first one since it finally fell off the front RWED page after 6 months of him virtue signalling
You haven't seen the Black Mirror episode The Black Museum yet, have you?
Lemme know when you do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror)#Plot
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Not reading it, but thanks for trying to spoil it for me!
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Then watch it:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Not reading it, but thanks for trying to spoil it for me!
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://thepiratebay.org/search/Black%20Mirror%20PSA/0/99/0
It is the final episode of Season 4. Episode 6. And what plot I summarized is not even a tenth of what happens in that episode.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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County officials don't see a need to complete flood projects. They are the exact same people who don't even want to add fire safety to their buildings.
www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Houston-Fire-Marshal-sounds-t
he-alarm-on-12559168.php
The former Harris County jail — now used for county offices that are open to the public — has been flagged for fire code violations by the Houston Fire Marshal, the second county building this week to come under scrutiny for safety violations.
Red warning stickers were posted on the glass entry doors to the former jail this week after the Houston Chronicle began questioning safety at the nearby Harris County Family Law Center, a building that was pressed into service after Hurricane Harvey despite not having sprinkler systems or sufficient exits.
The former jail, at 1301 Franklin, does not have a sprinkler system either. Although it has long housed a small office for the district clerk, additional workers were moved in from the district attorney’s and public defender’s offices after Hurricane Harvey devastated other county buildings.
“WARNING,” the red signs state. “This building is not code compliant with Houston Fire Code 2012.”
Code 2012 requires sprinkler systems and fire alarms in public buildings above a certain height.
City and county officials have steadfastly maintained the law center and the jail are safe.
“The official position of the HFD is that the City of Houston and Harris County officials have worked closely on this issue to assure public safety and to continue providing critical governmental services during the recovery phase from Tropical Storm Harvey,” Houston Fire Chief Samuel Peña said in a statement.
But fire marshals continue to post warning stickers and insist that fire monitors walk the halls of the buildings and schedule special training sessions to develop fire-fighting strategies. On Wednesday, three district chiefs and their crews examined the seven floors of the Family Law Center, at 1115 Congress near San Jacinto, and scheduled a return trip Saturday to map out a strategy.
People who use the buildings said the heightened awareness was overdue, especially at the family law courthouse, which now houses 16 misdemeanor courts and is often packed when courts are in session.
“Of course I’m concerned — this is a disaster waiting to happen,” said Tucker Graves, president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association. “I know we had to go somewhere, but that probably wasn’t the place to go. That place was supposed to be torn down.”
Graves said he is worried the dangerous conditions will continue until 2019, when the 20-story Criminal Justice Center can be reopened after damage from Hurricane Harvey is repaired.
The Family Law Center had been slated for demolition and only a few offices remained. The courts and other offices were moved in after Harvey.
-----
There is no authority to red tag the entire county, like the Fire Dept did a building, telling the county it has a flooding problem it needs to fix now, not put off year after year because, you know, major floods are even rarer than major building fires. This building has never had a major fire. Why fix what ain't broken?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Nearly six months after Harvey, traction made for potential solutions to Houston's chronic flooding
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Nearly-six
-months-after-Harvey-some-traction-for-12567647.php
AUSTIN - Local and state leaders are moving toward a major, lengthy and costly overhaul of the region's flood defenses that includes regulating development, massive buyouts of flood-prone properties and flood-prevention projects that have been discussed for decades but never built.
Few of the initiatives will be complete before hurricane season starts in June, but nearly six months after Hurricane Harvey ripped through the Texas Gulf Coast and devastated the nation's fourth-largest city, leaders are seeking to address long-ignored shortcomings laid bare by one of the most intense rainstorms in U.S. history.
Gov. Greg Abbott says he can write a check for a third reservoir to better protect areas west of Houston from inundation as well as attempt to avoid the types of releases from Addicks and Barker dams that swamped Houston downstream during Harvey.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner wants to join Harris County in strengthening regulation on the region's rapid development to protect the city's population from floodwaters and alleviate the burden on taxpayers to repair and rebuild flood-prone properties.
Harris County leaders want a major bond issue - and a corresponding increase in property taxes - this year to pay for bayou drainage projects and, possibly, broad buyouts in flood-prone areas.
There's also broad support for legislation that would require buyers of property in reservoir flood pools, which are dry much of the time, to be notified of flooding risks; 30,000 homes have been built in the flood pools of Addicks and Barker, and many owners say they had no idea they were living in an area designed to hold water during times of heavy rain. More than 9,000 of those homes flooded during Harvey.
Some of the local response has been slowed as officials waited to see what Congress will be willing to fund, a logjam that started to break late in the week with the approval of nearly $90 billion for victims of this year's storms and natural disasters - much of it for recovery, not prevention. But state and local officials tell the Houston Chronicle they remain committed to broader improvements.
"I don't think we can stop future rain from coming down," Abbott said on a dry day earlier this month. "I do think we can rebuild this larger Harris County area in a way that will gather water and redirect water and expedite the flow of water in ways that will greatly reduce flooding."
In December, the Chronicle published "Developing Storm," a seven-part series that showed how the actions - and inaction - of the region's leaders had magnified the impact of Harvey through lax regulation of development and failure to fund prevention projects. Officials in the Netherlands, known for their flood-prevention success, said that while major programs can take decades to complete, the window to get the work started after a major disaster lasts about a year.
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After Harvey, the majority still opposes more taxes for flood control projects.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/After-Harv
ey-slight-majority-still-opposes-more-12605690.php
Support for higher taxes varied based on hypothetical amounts. The survey found that 19 percent would pay $12 more in property tax each year; 12 percent would pay $25 more; 15 percent would pay an extra $50. But 46 percent were unwilling to pay any additional tax. Eight percent didn't respond.
46 percent of Anglo Republicans, compared to 20 percent of Anglo Democrats, opposed any property tax increase. And many state Republican leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, are pressing for property tax reductions.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The first half of an anticipated $1 billion in federal grants to harden the Texas coast for future storms through infrastructure projects, home buyouts or elevations and other efforts is up for grabs, state officials announced Tuesday.
Houston, Harris County and others will need to compete for the funds and will need to provide a 25 percent match, with FEMA covering 75 percent of each project.
The mitigation dollars can be used broadly for drainage projects, reservoirs, detention basins, seawalls and channel improvements, as well as more targeted programs such as home buyouts and elevations.
www.chron.com/news/politics/houston/article/Houston-Harris-County-coul
d-target-buyouts-home-12611367.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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A crash course in levees and the next Hurricane Harvey
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/fort-bend-
county-texas-levee-district-harvey-12669351.php
A land developer purchases land that floods. How can he (and his lawyer) legally cheat the future homeowners out of their money? He knows that he is selling them houses that can flood. Obviously, he misleads them about the flood risk.
The land developer tells the home owners that they won’t flood (unless the flood is more than a once per 100 year event, an addendum and caveat by the lawyer in the fine print of the contract) because he built a levee around the flood plain. The sneaky part is the land developer never pays for the levee. That would reduce his profit, which is very un-American. Instead, only the home owners pay.
Hurricane Harvey had exposed the limits of Riverstone's levee system and others across Fort Bend County. Together, they safeguard one-fifth of the county's population and $21.5 billion worth of property. Some 1,000 levee-protected homes flooded during the storm, including about one-third of the 1,760 homes in Levee Improvement District 19 or LID 19.
Before then, many Riverstone residents knew little or nothing about the levee; it was just a line on their property tax bill. After Harvey, they realized their safety depended on it.
* * *
LIDs are a vehicle to finance construction and maintenance of a levee so that homes can be built in a low-lying area exposed to flooding. Developers are the ones who push to establish levee districts.
To form LID 19, attorneys for Johnson Development submitted to the county a four-signature petition (representing the owners of a majority of the land), an engineering report and a $50 check. Fort Bend County commissioners approved the LID's creation.
A LID has legal authority to issue bonds, and residents pay taxes to retire the bond debt over time. In LID 19, taxes average $2,600 per year per household. The land developer? He paid $50, one time only.
LID 19 has $33.7 million in outstanding debt. This money did not come from the land developer.
LID 19 had $667,000 in hurricane expenses, including the cost of renting extra pumps and paying overtime to levee workers. The land developer? He paid nothing.
The county's levee systems pay annual dues to hire lobbyists to fight any move in Washington to require flood insurance for people who live behind levees. Such a move could make communities like Riverstone less profitable for land developers if home buyers were forced to understand that their houses will flood. In addition to LID taxes, homeowners would have to pay flood insurance premiums. Being forced to pay the premiums might force some of the smarter home owners to understand they bought a house that floods.
The levee itself is a grass-covered clay hill. It has floodgates that close when the Brazos is high and pumps that force out rainwater when it can't drain through the gates. It is no guarantee against flooding.
"Given enough time, any levee will eventually be overtopped or damaged by a flood that exceeds the levee's capacity," states a brochure published by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Levees in Fort Bend County were engineered to defend against a once-in-100-years storm. Harvey was much worse than that.
During the deluge, LID 19's pumps couldn't churn fast enough to keep water from pouring into homes. For a time, the Brazos threatened to overtop the levee.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Army Corps predicted Addicks and Barker flood pool lawsuits, decided not to act
By Mihir Zaveri February 27, 2018
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/houston/article/Army-Corps-pred
icted-Addicks-and-Barker-flood-12714844.php
More than two decades ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determined that property owners in the reservoir pools of Addicks and Barker dams might sue the Corps if they were flooded but had a slim likelihood of success, a conclusion that supported decisions not to pursue upgrades to the aging dams at the time, a Corps document shows.
The analysis, laid out in a previously undisclosed 11-page document entitled “Addicks and Barker Reservoirs Legal Takings Analysis,” shows that the Corps was cognizant that it could be sued, and that “Given the nature of the expensive homes that would be flooded and the quality of legal representation these owners could afford, there is always the possibility of an adverse ruling.”
Documents, however, show the Corps officials believed that a storm that could spill into homes would be so rare and irregular that it did not necessitate retrofitting the dams to avoid the potential flooding and litigation, despite mounting evidence that the dams increasingly were being constrained on both sides by the Houston area’s rapid development — increasing the amount of water they were being forced to hold back while decreasing the amount that could be released safely.
The document and the Corps’ conclusions have raised new questions after Hurricane Harvey, when the storm’s floodwaters filled the Barker and Addicks reservoirs and backed up beyond government-owned land, flooding more than 9,000 homes and businesses. Many homeowners now are suing the Corps for compensation.
Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer not involved in the litigation against the Corps after Harvey, said while case law may have changed since the Corps’ analysis, even in favor of property owners suing the federal government, the document shows that the Corps had “concern and reflection” about the potential of flooding property owners and being sued.
“It shows that the Corps clearly understood that takings, flooding property both upstream and downstream, was a real potential associated with the operation of Addicks and Barker,” said Blackburn, co-director of Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center.
Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University who has written extensively about legal takings and penned a piece analyzing the Addicks and Barker cases, said in an interview Tuesday that the document could reinforce the property owners’ claims that the Corps was aware of the consequence of its actions during Harvey.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs say that Corps documents generally show they “analyzed the problem, they’ve correctly identified the problem, they know about the problem, and they decide again and again and again to do nothing and accept the risk of litigation,” said Charles Irvine, a co-lead attorney representing property owners flooded upstream of Addicks and Barker during Harvey.
“The decision was rather than pay now, we’ll pay later,” said Daniel Charest, another co-lead attorney on the case.
Irvine and Charest declined to comment specifically on the 1995 legal analysis obtained by the Houston Chronicle in a public records request, saying it would not be appropriate to comment on the document because the government claimed it was protected by attorney-client privilege.
An Army Corps spokesman referred questions to the U.S. Department of Justice. A Justice Department spokesman declined comment, citing the pending lawsuits.
Addicks and Barker Dams were built by the Corps in the 1940s, 15 miles west of Houston city limits to hold back storm runoff and protect Houston below the dams from flooding.
During heavy storms, water builds up in the reservoirs, which is called the “flood pool.” The reservoirs are not bounded by walls or banks, so in an extreme storm, the flood pool can extend into the residential neig
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Investigate Harvey
www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Why-Congress-needs
-to-investigate-what-happened-12721426.php
Updated: March 1, 2018 8:12pm
A congressional probe is needed to thoroughly review Houston’s greatest disaster.
What did the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers know, and when did it know it?
That’s a good starting point for congressional investigators probing the catastrophe that befell the Houston area after Hurricane Harvey slammed into the Texas coast.
This editorial page originally called for a congressional inquiry last fall, less than a month after the storm. Now U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, the Houston-area Republican congressman who serves as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has announced he will hold hearings into some new revelations reported by the Chronicle this week about what the Army Corps knew in the hours before Harvey.
That’s welcome news, but we would urge the committee members to broaden their focus and look beyond the Corps. We need a definitive study of all of the events surrounding this disaster, particularly how decisions made by local, state and federal officials affected people living in the storm’s path.
What we’ve learned lately has only amplified the need for this investigation. The Chronicle’s Lise Olsen reported this week that Corps officials delayed disclosing an internal forecast predicting the storm would fill the two reservoirs and flood nearby neighborhoods. On Thursday, Aug. 24, the Corps projected that Barker Reservoir would spill beyond government-owned land. On Friday there was a similar dire prediction about the Addicks Reservoir. But it wasn’t until Saturday that authorities in Fort Bend County, after a briefing on the latest Corps forecast, issued the first flood advisory for neighborhoods next to Barker. And it wasn’t until Sunday that Harris County officials began issuing similar warnings for subdivisions upstream from both of the reservoirs.
Meanwhile, the Chronicle’s Mihir Zaveri reported that documents drawn up more than two decades ago show the Army Corps analyzed the legal risk it would face if homes flooded in the reservoir pools of the Addicks and Barker dams. The analysis basically concluded the people who could afford those expensive houses could also afford expensive lawyers, so the government could end up losing lawsuits filed by flood victims. But Corps officials decided storms that could flood homes would happen so rarely they didn’t need to retrofit the dams. That decision came despite evidence that real estate developments were raising the amount of water behind the dams and lowering the amount of water they could safely release.
So it’s abundantly clear that the chain of events contributing to this disaster began years before the storm crossed the coastline. That’s only one of many areas of inquiry McCaul’s committee should explore.
We need to know whether the dams protecting Houston are safe. Corps officials were worried about the prospect of a catastrophic dam failure that could have killed thousands of people, but we have no idea how close the Houston area came to such a calamity and how the Corps can ensure we never come that close again.
We need to know whether the Corps was justified in releasing water from the reservoirs during the storm. Given the dire consequences of a dam failure, that may well have been the right decision, but any questions about it should be definitively answered in a congressional review.
We need to know why so many people living around the reservoirs were caught by surprise when their homes began flooding; local officials concede there has to be a better way to warn people before the water starts rising in their neighborhoods.
In short, we need an exhaustive and thorough report on what happened in the Houston area before, during and after Hurricane Harvey. Indeed, it’s fair to ask how our congressional delegation itself has fallen short on the job of mitigating flooding danger in the decades before this disaster. We’re counting on a congressional investigat
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In Hurricane Harvey’s aftermath, public officials have coalesced around quickly completing the projects on Brays, Hunting and White Oak bayous and Clear Creek — miles of widening, straightening and deepening, as well as digging out numerous detention basins that will keep significantly more rain and runoff within the waterways’ banks and out of thousands of flood-prone homes.
The projects, all partnerships between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Harris County Flood Control District, total nearly $1 billion. They are decades in the making, as each has been slowed or paused due to federal funding that has ranged from inconsistent to nonexistent.
Momentum built in February to finish the projects after Congress appropriated $10.4 billion in money for the Corps specifically for flood control projects in disaster-affected areas, like Harris County. If all four projects are fully funded, as some hope they now will be, the district estimates it could finish Brays, White Oak and Hunting bayous within five years, and expects the Corps to finish Clear Creek in five to 10 years.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/houston/article/Despite-massive
-projects-to-upgrade-Houston-12725685.php
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Nice.
I wonder what they'll owe the Federal Government for that 10 Billion.
There's no free lunches.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Here is another plan that would cost $10 billion. Funny about how similar the numbers are. It's as if 10 billion is biggest number they can think of:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nice.
I wonder what they'll owe the Federal Government for that 10 Billion.
There's no free lunches.
The floodplains work — if only we didn't develop in them
John S. Jacob, March 5, 2018
www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/The-floodplains-wo
rk-if-only-we-didn-t-12728492.php
Flooding during Harvey was not a random occurrence. Heavy rainfall — averaging 35 inches in Harris County— was widespread, but the flooding was not. The deepest flooding, the kind where rescue boats were needed, was where the bayous and creeks overflowed their banks and flooded the adjacent low-lying areas.
There were also many areas that flooded as a result of poorly maintained or designed urban drainage systems. But these were a small fraction of the overall flooding.
Those low-lying areas are the natural floodplains excavated by our bayous and creeks over many thousands of years. It flooded here long before we, or even the Karankawa, ever showed up. Over the millennia, the bayous naturally widened their valleys, or floodplains, to where the system could easily absorb a storm like Harvey.
That system is still here — and it handled Harvey very well. We were the ones who didn't handle it well. If we had not given over most of our floodplains to development, Harvey would still have caused us grief — but it would not have been much more than a nuisance. We would have had to stay home for 2 or 3 days, but we would have avoided a great deal of trauma.
It seems we have never been content to let this natural system work for us. For some, those wide, natural floodplains were just too much land to allow to sit there without making any money. So when we widened channels, or put substantial retention basins upstream, we didn't leave a buffer of unoccupied land beyond what we considered to be the reduced floodplains. We built right up to the edge of our "new and improved floodplains." We didn't think we would ever get more than a 100-year event.
Now we know different.
Harvey was an unimaginable storm. Now we know we were sorely lacking in imagination. But it is not so hard to imagine another Harvey. Can we imagine that the infrastructure we have built, and continue to build, to handle 100-year storms will handle another Harvey? We are not even sure how to label Harvey — was it a 1000-year storm? A 50,000-year storm? Maybe we should just call it a BFS — big freaking storm.
Reclaiming the floodplains will be painful. This will hurt some neighborhoods. How many homes overall might need to be bought out? Some estimates suggest that 100,000 homes were damaged by Harvey, but let's say 50,000 were as a minimum. At $200,000 each, that would be $10 billion dollars. A sizeable amount, but an amount that could be easily amortized over 50 years. But there will be a payoff, a payoff well beyond the avoided costs of flooded structures in future storms.
The larger payoff would be the interlacing of vibrant green and urban corridors across all sectors of our metropolis. All of us would then live close to wide open green spaces . . .
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Obviously money shouldn't be spent rebuilding in flood planes.
If they really want to do something meaningful, now would be the time to lock up anybody involved in ignoring those flood planes and costing American taxpayers 10 billion dollars. Politicians, lobbyists, builders, etc.
Lock them up and try to recover as much of that 10 billion as they can from the people who profited from it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Very forceful thinking, 6ix, but before the government can start locking up land developers and home-owners in the flood plain, the first step is to make it illegal to build in the flood plain or to sell your house in the flood plain to a sucker. There is a problem with making it illegal. The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution includes a provision known as the Takings Clause, which states that "private property shall not be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Obviously money shouldn't be spent rebuilding in flood planes.
If they really want to do something meaningful, now would be the time to lock up anybody involved in ignoring those flood planes and costing American taxpayers 10 billion dollars. Politicians, lobbyists, builders, etc.
Lock them up and try to recover as much of that 10 billion as they can from the people who profited from it.
Two Supreme Court decisions offer clear guidance on situations that will categorically constitute a taking. In one decision, the Court held that regulations that deprive a person of all ability to develop or utilize his or her property for any economic purposes goes too far and requires just compensation.
www.progressivereform.org/perspTakings.cfm
In Texas that amendment has been used time after time to thwart local regulations about building. It seems like the quick, easy, and cheap way, but I don't think locking up land developers, who usually have very competent lawyers aware of the Takings Clause, will work. They will be stopped the hard and expensive way: by the government paying them a huge price for the land and any buildings in the flood plain.
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I don't know how things are done in Texas regarding flood planes, but in Illinois and Indiana, at least in the counties somewhat surrounding Chicago, you are unable to knock down and rebuild a home on land that is deemed a flood plane. You can rehab an existing dwelling to your heart's content, but if the home falls into such disrepair that the foundation is no good anymore than your land is pretty much worthless.
I do see the problem with this, as much as I agree that it should be this way. Because I bought my home with cash, I wasn't aware it was on a flood plane with no bank to force FEMA insurance on me. The bank selling it to me was under no obligation to reveal that, and I thought I did my due diligence when I was looking at tax property cards and the one for this house said that it wasn't on a flood plane.
Fortunately, the house and foundation is sound, so that's pretty much moot. But if I were hit by a tornado and it was destroyed, I'm not exactly sure what my homeowners insurance would do. I'd likely be relocated. God knows where. Kind of scary to think about, honestly.
I'm not really talking about home owners selling their homes to other people here. So long as the people buying them know what they're getting into, I think that's fair. I'm talking more about land developers.
Although I also understand that this is a problem...
My suggestion, so that the land owners of flood plane land don't get wiped out, is to find alternative uses for that land. Maybe they could build solar and wind farms on the land instead of houses?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:In the Kingwood subdivision of Houston, the whole area would be of better use to sand miners than for renewable energy. There are sand pits all around that area. Houses should have never been built there. The next story talks about dredging the sand out of the river to protect the houses from more flooding. Here is a map: https://goo.gl/maps/oZVaSG1a1Qq Most of the area close to the river is still green forest or golf courses, with some obvious sand pits in the forest, but one land-developer decided to build Kingwood in the flood plain.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
My suggestion, so that the land owners of flood plane land don't get wiped out, is to find alternative uses for that land. Maybe they could build solar and wind farms on the land instead of houses?
There are new floodable houses being built as recently as 2015: Kingwood developer plans 500-acre expansion in northeast suburb
www.bizjournals.com/houston/morning_call/2015/08/kingwood-developer-pl
ans-500acre-expansion-in.html
Quote:Personally, a home-owner who resells to the next sucker is even worse than a land-developer who sells to the first sucker. The land-developer can truthfully tell the salesmen that the house never flooded, while the home-owner knows for certain it does flood.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm not really talking about home owners selling their homes to other people here. So long as the people buying them know what they're getting into, I think that's fair. I'm talking more about land developers.
Although I also understand that this is a problem...
I have read stories about flooded homes in Kingwood being resold to new suckers. The homeowners want to speed up that process of swindling the next generation and the best way is to get Harris County involved. Nobody in the following story will admit to what they are really doing to the next guy. Instead, they give fake explanations, while hiding their real motivation to make the maximum amount of money reselling a flooded house and to hell with the next sucker. Besides, another Harvey might not ever happen, they tell themselves.
Dredging San Jacinto River for flood protection a ‘priority,’ officials say
By Mike Snyder
Updated: March 7, 2018 11:32pm
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Dredging-San-Jacinto-River-for-f
lood-protection-a-12736746.php
Houston and Harris County officials are pursuing the removal of sediment from the San Jacinto River as a “top priority,” citing an urgent need to protect communities near Lake Houston from a repeat of the calamitous flooding they endured during Hurricane Harvey.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said he has spoken to state officials about potential funding of a dredging project that would increase the river’s capacity to hold floodwaters. A planned county flood control bond issue is another possible funding source, Emmett said.
“This needs to become a top priority project,” Emmett said in an interview this week.
Mayor Sylvester Turner offered similar assurances to several hundred residents at a community meeting in Kingwood Tuesday night. Turner said he had spoken to Gov. Greg Abbott earlier Tuesday about the pressing need to remove sediment from the river.
“We talked about the dredging issue and dealing with that in real time instead of putting it off for years and years and years,” Turner said. The mayor said he hopes dredging can commence within about a month.
The Houston Chronicle reported Sunday that many Lake Houston-area residents and community leaders were concerned that their needs had not been given enough priority in post-Harvey discussions about flood protection. The vulnerability of these communities was underscored last week, when the San Jacinto rose out of its banks in Kingwood after a storm that dropped less than a half-inch of rain.
“I can imagine the anxiety that created,” Turner said.
More than 16,000 homes and 3,300 businesses in Kingwood, Humble and other towns and developments near Lake Houston were da
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In the Kingwood subdivision of Houston, the whole area would be of better use to sand miners than for renewable energy. There are sand pits all around that area. Houses should have never been built there. The next story talks about dredging the sand out of the river to protect the houses from more flooding. Here is a map: https://goo.gl/maps/oZVaSG1a1Qq Most of the area close to the river is still green forest or golf courses, with some obvious sand pits in the forest, but one land-developer decided to build Kingwood in the flood plain.
Fair enough. I wasn't saying that renewable energy was THE answer. Just one possible answer.
Quote:
Personally, a home-owner who resells to the next sucker is even worse than a land-developer who sells to the first sucker. The land-developer can truthfully tell the salesmen that the house never flooded, while the home-owner knows for certain it does flood.
I disagree for several reasons. In most cases, the home is the single largest expense that somebody ever has in their lives. You can't just go and have the government deem their land condemned and ruin their lives.
Also, in many, many cases, people who own homes on a flood plane can truthfully say the home has never been flooded. There are wildly varying degrees of what is deemed a flood plane. Just because somebody lived 20 or 30 years in a home deemed on a flood plane, it doesn't mean that they are lying about it when they sell the house.
The people who buy the home will know about it, whether or not the home owner divulges that information and even if the property tax card is erroneous like mine was. Their bank will not give them a home loan unless they also get FEMA flood insurance. The only people who can really get duped are people like me who bought a home with cash. In that rare instance my advice would be to either talk to the neighbors about it, or contact FEMA directly because they will not only give you an answer but they will provide you with the dates and total amounts of any payouts for the home upon request.
In the case of the Huston floods, I agree with you. But the fix to this is to condemn all of those homes on day 1 after the flood, forcing the insurance company to build the new homes on a land that is not a flood plane and that is reasonably close to where the old home was.
The replacement value that they were insuring would not cover their exact home when you figure the new land that has to be purchased before the home is built. I think at this point you could talk about some type of government buy-back program where these devastated areas of land could be purchased and re-purposed, with the proceeds of whatever they turn the land into going to fund this program, and later becoming a stream of revenue for the local governments once it is paid for. This buy-back of land could offset at least some of the cost of the new land for the replacement homes.
The first step though, is to make sure that land developers can no longer EVER build homes on danger zones, period.
After that, the homes that currently are should be taken care of after disasters happen through the law of attrition.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I feel a rant coming on: Most of the major life transactions for Americans in the bottom 50% involve a swindler. Some are amateur swindlers, some professionals. Real estate, banking, politics, used cars, etc., all based on swindles. The swindler knows that he doesn’t have to steal every last penny from everyone, just enough of the suckers to make a prosperous living for himself. He shows some restraint because if he gets extremely greedy, he will get caught. He can make a career because there is really no warning system provided by the government telling the bottom 50% who is a professional crook misleading them into a bad deal. Here is story about a new government operated warning system for floods. Too bad there is not a warning system for the kind of swindlers who always stop short of committing a crime and going to jail: (end-of-rant)
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The only people who can really get duped are people like me who bought a home with cash.
$9.4M awarded for flood warning
Federal cash plus local money will help mark roads
www.chron.com/news/transportation/article/Houston-wins-9-4M-for-flood-
warning-on-roads-12736772.php
The city of Houston has secured $9.4 million for the installation of high-water warning systems at 40 flood-prone sections of Houston-area streets to help drivers avoid dangerous flooding.
The award will pay for sensors, cameras and computer components at specific locations, along with warning lights and signs, set for installation this year.
During heavy rains, Houston area underpasses and roads in low-lying typically flood, leaving crews scrambling to respond and monitor locations, including barricading some streets.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, announced the federal award this week. It comes from the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program, which will award $500 million this year to projects chosen from across the country.
The funding had the support of Republican and Democratic members of the Houston congressional delegation.
“Texans have experienced some of the worst flooding in our country’s history, and this is another step in the right direction,” said Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner called the award “another significant step in making us more resilient” to major flooding.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Houston's proposed floodplain development rules would have spared thousands during Harvey, city says
By Mike Morris, Updated: March 13, 2018 5:29pm
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/houston/article/Houston-s-propo
sed-floodplain-development-rules-12747803.php
A Houston Public Works analysis of homes inundated by Hurricane Harvey in the city’s floodplains says 84 percent of the structures would have been spared if they had been built to the more stringent standards Mayor Sylvester Turner plans to put to a City Council vote later this month.
The data was distributed to council members for the first time Friday (see update below), six weeks after Turner outlined his proposal and roughly a week after the end of the city’s announced period for public feedback.
Public Works spokeswoman Alanna Reed said staff still were gathering data when the proposal was first announced, adding that efforts to verify its accuracy continued through Monday, when the department released updated figures that differed slightly from those released Friday.
“This data, there’s a lot of little details to it, there are a lot of variables,” she said. “They just want to make sure, as I do, that it’s the most accurate data that’s out there.”
Of the 31,822 flooded single-family homes Public Works examined, an estimated 48 percent of them would not have flooded during Harvey if all of them had been built to the city’s current elevation standard, which was set in 2006.
That rule requires that new or redeveloped homes sit one foot above the projected water level in a 100-year flood (also known as a storm that has a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year).
Public Works also ran scenarios based on the larger 500-year floodplain and the depth of floodwaters during a 500-year storm, which has a 0.2 percent chance of flooding in any given year.
If the homes Harvey flooded had been elevated to the projected water level in a 500-year storm, 56 percent would have been spared, the report states. Make them a foot higher than that, and 72 percent would not have flooded.
Placing the homes two feet above the 500-year flood level -- the standard Turner is proposing -- would have saved 84 percent of the homes.
Going even higher -- to the 500-year flood level plus three feet -- would have spared 93 percent of the homes analyzed.
UPDATE: The data was forwarded for distribution to the council on Friday but, due to a miscommunication, was not actually sent. Council members were to receive the updated data in final form Tuesday evening.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Harvey building repairs push back work on other city projects
By Mike Morris, Updated: March 14, 2018 2:09pm
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Harvey-building-repairs-pushes-b
ack-work-on-other-12753107.php
Efforts to renovate or replace streets, libraries, community centers, sewer plants and other facilities across Houston may be delayed for years as money that city leaders had set aside for the projects is redirected to repair facilities damaged by Hurricane Harvey.
City officials have begun the spring ritual of holding meetings in each of the 11 council districts to discuss projects listed in the city’s five-year Capital Improvement Plan. These “CIP meetings” have been rebranded “district community meetings” this year, with a heavy focus on Harvey.
The need to repair storm damage means no new projects will be added in the fifth year of this year’s capital plan, officials have said, and the timeline for many projects that had been listed in prior years now says “to be determined” on documents distributed at the community meetings.
The city must not only free up enough money in its capital plan to cover the 10 percent local match required when repairing disaster damage. Houston must set aside enough cash to do the full repair, then wait months for FEMA to send its 90 percent share as a reimbursement.
In District B, for example, that means projects at three fire stations, two libraries and three police stations likely will be delayed; six trail segments, three park upgrades and two library projects are underway and will continue.
Two fire station projects in Kingwood likely will be delayed, as will a project to replace the roof on the Flores Neighborhood Library in Second Ward.
Fifth Ward resident Ernestine Lloyd, who attended the District B gathering, said she was “let down” by the update.
“I was kind of disappointed because there’s no new projects. Apparently they’re all tied into Harvey,” Lloyd said. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. But I am disappointed that so much needs to be done in Fifth Ward and there’s nobody doing it.”
Kashmere Gardens resident Mary Trahan said she had hoped to hear what steps city officials planned to take to lessen the risk of flooding after Harvey, such as, perhaps, building a detention basin along Hunting Bayou, which runs 300 feet from her home.
The bayou broke its banks and flooded the home where Trahan and her husband live, so they moved in with their daughter in the Greenspoint area. They are still there, awaiting repairs on their house.
Trahan was happy to hear Turner address the crowd, but his update focused more on the need to speed disaster funding to Houstonians than on proposed drainage fixes. “I know people are saying, ‘Mayor, where is the money?’’ Turner said. “When I get it, you will get it.”
“He talked about money he didn’t have — well, I don’t have it either,” Trahan said, chuckling. “That’s not helping me. He spoke very well. But it’s not helping my situation.”
Broadly, Turner said he is optimistic residents will understand the city’s need to deal with Harvey’s wreckage.
“Based on the four CIP meetings that we’ve already had, it does appear that people do understand. We have limited resources,” he said. “The Harvey projects are taking priority, and so they will come to the front of the line.”
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Governor announces flood relief
By Mike Snyder, Updated 7:35 pm, Thursday, March 15, 2018
www.chron.com/neighborhood/kingwood/article/Abbott-announces-San-Jacin
to-River-flood-relief-12755613.php
Gov. Greg Abbott Thursday pledged millions of dollars for widespread property buyouts and preparations for dredging the San Jacinto River to help Lake Houston communities prevent a recurrence of the catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Harvey.
After touring the region by helicopter, the governor met with area leaders at a Kingwood community center, where he announced plans for voluntary buyouts of some 900 flood-prone homes in Harris County, including 134 in Kingwood and nearby Forest Cove. The county flood control district said the buyouts would cost about $180 million.
Abbott's office said money for the buyouts, as well as $3 million to "jump start" engineering and permitting required to dredge the river, will come from the state's hazard mitigation fund — federal money that flows through the state.
Abbott said his helicopter trip with Houston City Councilman Dave Martin — whose district includes Kingwood — provided clear evidence of the problem.
"I was able to see first-hand the silt that has developed as well as the sandbars that have developed in multiple regions across the entire area," Abbott said. "Very profoundly, Dave and I witnessed a stunning number of sand mining operations all up and down the river, and were able to understand more comprehensively the way in which these sand mining operations contribute sand and silt into the river."
The property buyouts announced by Abbott will target homes in areas that are "hopelessly deep" in the floodplain, or two feet below a level of flooding that would occur during a 100-year storm, flood control district officials said. This metric refers to a storm that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year.
More than 3,800 homeowners have volunteered to be bought out after the storm, by far the highest number of requests ever fielded by the district.
In the Lake Houston area, where authorities estimate that 16,000 homes and 3,300 businesses were damaged by Harvey's floods, the focus has been on the need to remove sediment that has reduced the San Jacinto River's capacity to hold floodwaters.
Abbott said he had directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to undertake a comprehensive investigation of the sand mining facilities. The investigation has led to enforcement actions against two operators, Abbott said.
The state will ensure that all sand mining facilities have required permits and comply with legal requirements, Abbott said: "If not, we are going to shut them down."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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U.S. Army Corps of Engineers exploring excavation of Addicks and Barker reservoir flood pools
By Mihir Zaveri, Updated: March 17, 2018 8:44pm
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/U-S-Army-Corps-of-Engineers-expl
oring-excavation-12760049.php
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is quietly exploring the possibility of excavating dirt from Addicks and Barker reservoirs, reviving an oft-discussed proposal that would allow the reservoirs to hold more storm water and keep it out of nearby Houston neighborhoods.
Depending on the scope of the project, removing silt and dirt could increase the reservoirs’ capacity significantly, perhaps even doubling it, by one Corps official’s rough estimate. Whether the agency moves forward could depend in part on whether it can find someone to take all the dirt.
Addicks and Barker Dams were sculpted from the Katy prairie more than 70 years ago to protect downtown Houston from devastating floods. The dams were designed to hold storm water for brief periods before releasing it into Buffalo Bayou.
But development downstream of the dams forced the Corps to restrict releases of water into the bayou. At the same time, rapid development to the north and west paved over prairie and ranch land, causing more runoff to flow into the reservoirs. As a result, Addicks and Barker are storing larger volumes of water than their designers intended, and for longer periods.
That has stressed the aging earthen dams. It has also heightened the risk of flooding for communities adjacent to the reservoirs. Since the reservoirs are not bounded by walls or banks, water can spill beyond their boundaries during intense storms.
When Hurricane Harvey struck last August, more than 9,000 homes and businesses were inundated by reservoir water. That’s on top of the tens of thousands of properties damaged or destroyed by overflowing bayous, rivers and creeks, and by water released through the outlet works at Addicks and Barker Dams.
The idea of excavating the reservoirs has been a fixture of official reports and politicians’ to-do lists for more than 20 years. Thanks to Harvey, its time may finally have arrived.
In a notice posted on the Internet, the Army Corps said it “is evaluating the level of interest from government, industry, and others parties for the excavation and removal of alluvial soils deposited within” the reservoirs.
“The concept of the potential project is to allow for the beneficial use of material by interested parties while increasing capacity” at Addicks and Barker, the notice said.
It appeared Jan. 24, with no public announcement, on a website that advertises business opportunities with the federal government.
Corps officials won’t say anything further about their plans, including how much soil would be excavated, how much it would cost or who would pay.
The Chronicle’s requests for information were referred to the U.S. Department of Justice. A spokesman there declined to comment, citing lawsuits filed by homeowners seeking compensation from the government for damage caused by reservoir flooding.
Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack, whose Precinct 3 includes the reservoirs and areas upstream and downstream, said deepening the reservoirs would be a “wonderful thing,” although the Army Corps has not discussed it with him.
“There’s no doubt that the original capacity is definitely down from when it was dug because of all the silting that has taken place,” Radack said.
The Corps’ notice asks those interested in the soil to estimate how much they would remove, how they would excavate it and where they would eventually put it.
The government shouldn’t have trouble finding interested parties if the dirt is of a certain quality, according to David Falgere.
He’s director of pre-construction for Slack & Co. Contracting Inc., which does excavation and grading at construction sites in the Houston area.
“There’s always a market for dirt,” he said. “The thing about dirt work for those of us who do it for a living: It’s either ‘I’ve got too much dirt, what
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Houston's sprawling drainage project would help homes along White Oak Bayou
By Mike Morris, Updated: March 19, 2018 5:00am
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Houston-s-sprawling-drainage-pro
ject-would-help-12759536.php
Houston’s downtown and homes along White Oak Bayou and a key stretch of Interstate 10 would be at a dramatically lower risk of flooding if local officials can find a way to fund a dormant drainage project that has been revived after Hurricane Harvey.
The North Canal Bypass would cut a new, 1,300-foot channel just upstream of the spot where White Oak converges with Buffalo Bayou at the north end of downtown. The new channel would give the water a second route around a tight bend in the bayou past Allen’s Landing, where the collision of the two streams creates a buildup of water during storms.
The new channel would drop the projected flood level in downtown by four feet, and could help lower the water level in White Oak Bayou all the way to the 610 Loop and in Buffalo Bayou as far west as Gessner.
“That’s significant,” said Matt Zeve, of the Harris County Flood Control District. “When you just kind of pull the plug and let this water shoot across — the fastest way from Point A to B is a straight line — you relieve a tremendous amount of pressure here.”
To spread the project’s benefits upstream, particularly to the flood-prone Timbergrove and Shady Acres neighborhoods along White Oak, the plan also includes altering six bridges over the bayou, likely by rebuilding most of them higher. That would let floodwaters flow unimpeded underneath and prevent the bridges from acting as dams during storms, trapping water behind them.
There are numerous hurdles to completing the North Canal, however.
As Zeve puts it, quoting a truism among local engineers, “All the easy projects are done.”
There is the cost — some estimates put the figure at $100 million — and the fact that, though at least five government agencies would be involved in the effort in some way, none has volunteered to pay the full bill. This is despite the full bill being a tiny fraction of the cost of damage during Hurricane Harvey. In other words: a stitch in time could have saved nine.
A long history of delay and indifference
Proof of the North Canal’s complexities can be seen in how long the idea has been on the books. The project was first sketched by renowned architect Charles Tapley in the 1970s, said Anne Olson, president of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership. It was then incorporated in a master plan Olson’s nonprofit did in 2002.
A decade later, the Harris County Flood Control District commissioned a detailed study that examined the new channel and bridge replacements, and began buying the land that would be needed to dig the canal.
The district set the project aside a year ago, however, after talks broke down with Metropolitan Transit Agency over a key land swap; a large Metro bus facility sits in the path of the channel.
But that was before Harvey.
“Quite frankly, Hurricane Harvey has probably elevated everybody’s discussions on what could we do to improve the resiliency of our community,” Metro CEO Tom Lambert said. “Metro is very open to working with the county, the city and others if there are projects that can impact reducing the flood potential in Houston downtown and the region.”
Metro and county officials say they’re aware of no specific hurdle that would prevent future talks from succeeding.
Who pays?
After Houston’s “flood czar,” former councilman and drainage engineer Steve Costello, saw the channel in TxDOT’s drawings, he pushed to schedule a recurring monthly meeting among state, county and city leaders to share research on the project and try to push it forward.
“I said, ‘Hey, this has a possibility now,’” Costello said. “This is a project that would really have a tremendous impact to lower White Oak.”
The next step, Zeve and Costello said, is for the governments involved to shake hands and agree the effort is worth pursuing. Then c
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https://rethink.earth/lessons-from-hurricane-harvey/
Albert Pope, an architect at Rice University in Houston, doubts that adaptation through infrastructure fixes are sufficient to keep Houston safe from serious flood damage. He says that there’s too little undeveloped land left to accommodate new reservoirs of sufficient capacity, and that further straightening, widening, and bank-hardening can’t force bayous to carry more water. “We’re at the limits to what we can do, engineering-wise,” he says. His solution is more disruptive of the status quo, and Houston’s fix-it-with-concrete ethos. He insists that Houston should do something more transformative and remove all the buildings in its flood plains – 150,000 structures, including those on three-quarters of the acreage in Meyerland – and turn the acquired land into parks. Buying out so many people would be a “monumental task,” Pope acknowledges – and he suggests that the process should be phased in slowly, over decades, focussing first on the most risk prone structure. Pope says that the only alternative is to repair flood plain buildings after each successive flood, at great expense and with no obvious end game.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
https://rethink.earth/lessons-from-hurricane-harvey/
Albert Pope, an architect at Rice University in Houston, doubts that adaptation through infrastructure fixes are sufficient to keep Houston safe from serious flood damage. He says that there’s too little undeveloped land left to accommodate new reservoirs of sufficient capacity, and that further straightening, widening, and bank-hardening can’t force bayous to carry more water. “We’re at the limits to what we can do, engineering-wise,” he says. His solution is more disruptive of the status quo, and Houston’s fix-it-with-concrete ethos. He insists that Houston should do something more transformative and remove all the buildings in its flood plains – 150,000 structures, including those on three-quarters of the acreage in Meyerland – and turn the acquired land into parks. Buying out so many people would be a “monumental task,” Pope acknowledges – and he suggests that the process should be phased in slowly, over decades, focussing first on the most risk prone structure. Pope says that the only alternative is to repair flood plain buildings after each successive flood, at great expense and with no obvious end game.
In a nutshell. A wise after-the-fact plan that I assume would be accelerated by each flood.
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Quote:The people that built Houston so that it would flood are strongly opposed to "wise after-the-fact plan", which reminds us that it is more profitable to build in the flood zone than to either build on higher ground or to raise the first floor to a higher level. From today's Houston Chronicle:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
In a nutshell. A wise after-the-fact plan that I assume would be accelerated by each flood.
Fight over floodplain rules taps into resistance to regulation.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Fight-over-Houston-floodplain-ru
les-taps-into-12802536.php
What seemed like a stunned consensus that change was needed following Harvey is now looking like every other City Hall fight over new regulations.
Houston’s Mayor Turner is asking the city council to require all new construction in Houston’s floodplains to be built two feet above the projected water level in a 500-year storm, which is deemed to have a 0.2 percent chance of happening in any given year.
Current rules mandate that buildings be constructed one foot above the flood level in a less severe 100-year storm, and apply only within the 100-year floodplain, where properties are considered to have a 1 percent annual chance of being inundated. Minimum home elevations would be imposed within the 500-year floodplain for the first time.
“We have a development reputation of being very laissez-faire and saying you can kind of build where you’re going to want to build and build what you want to build,” said Kyle Shelton of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, which has been convening panels on flood resilience since Harvey. “This is one of the more recent really big attempts to say, ‘Hell No, there are some places where here’s what you’re going to have to do.’ Naturally, that’s going to get discussion and get pushback in Houston because it’s not something that we’ve done a lot.”
Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said the familiar pattern of the debate is unsurprising. That, he said, is because Houston’s strong-mayor form of government gives Mayor Turner control over the content of the council agenda and the city departments that draft and implement policies, and because of the “knee-jerk culture in Houston, where any regulation is initially assumed to be bad regulation.”
The same home-builders who built in a flood plain and caused $100 billion in damage want to continue business as usual. And there is much whining that old houses will lose their value because new houses built to new regulations with higher elevation on the first floor will make it far too obvious that the old houses in the neighborhood are likely to flood in the next hurricane. Realtors do NOT want flood zones to be obvious because home-buyers might not buy the home or, if the house sells, sales commissions might be lower.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Monty Python antics amok as Houston City Hall debates flooding
www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Monty-Python-antic
s-amok-as-City-Hall-debates-12803387.php
“When I started here, all there was was swamp,” Michael Palin’s scheming king declares in the 1975 comedy “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
Against the advice of his peers, he recounts how he built a castle there anyway. It sank into the swamp. So did the second. Ditto for the third. Though by this point he had become an expert on his kingdom’s topography, annual rainfall and susceptibility to flooding — not to mention the cost of rebuilding — the king commissioned a fourth castle. This one, he boasts without a hint of worry, has stayed up.
If City Council fails to pass Mayor Sylvester Turner’s new development rules, we’ll have embraced the kind of absurdity the Pythons mined for laughs. And our castles will keep sinking into the swamp.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The people that built Houston so that it would flood are strongly opposed to "wise after-the-fact plan", which reminds us that it is more profitable to build in the flood zone than to either build on higher ground or to raise the first floor to a higher level. From today's Houston Chronicle:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
In a nutshell. A wise after-the-fact plan that I assume would be accelerated by each flood.
Fight over floodplain rules taps into resistance to regulation.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Fight-over-Houston-floodplain-ru
les-taps-into-12802536.php
What seemed like a stunned consensus that change was needed following Harvey is now looking like every other City Hall fight over new regulations.
Houston’s Mayor Turner is asking the city council to require all new construction in Houston’s floodplains to be built two feet above the projected water level in a 500-year storm, which is deemed to have a 0.2 percent chance of happening in any given year.
Current rules mandate that buildings be constructed one foot above the flood level in a less severe 100-year storm, and apply only within the 100-year floodplain, where properties are considered to have a 1 percent annual chance of being inundated. Minimum home elevations would be imposed within the 500-year floodplain for the first time.
“We have a development reputation of being very laissez-faire and saying you can kind of build where you’re going to want to build and build what you want to build,” said Kyle Shelton of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, which has been convening panels on flood resilience since Harvey. “This is one of the more recent really big attempts to say, ‘Hell No, there are some places where here’s what you’re going to have to do.’ Naturally, that’s going to get discussion and get pushback in Houston because it’s not something that we’ve done a lot.”
Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said the familiar pattern of the debate is unsurprising. That, he said, is because Houston’s strong-mayor form of government gives Mayor Turner control over the content of the council agenda and the city departments that draft and implement policies, and because of the “knee-jerk culture in Houston, where any regulation is initially assumed to be bad regulation.”
The same home-builders who built in a flood plain and caused $100 billion in damage want to continue business as usual. And there is much whining that old houses will lose their value because new houses built to new regulations with higher elevation on the first floor will make it far too obvious that the old houses in the neighborhood are likely to flood in the next hurricane. Realtors do NOT want flood zones to be obvious because home-buyers might not buy the home or, if the house sells, sales commissions might be lower.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
What I’m getting from this is that houses should be raised THREE feet minimum, not 1 or 2 since those are considered safe.
It would be great if we (Houston) approached this problem from the pov of, “let’s show the world how this should be handled.”
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Quote:What is most likely to happen (50% chance) is that nothing will happen on the City Council: the rules will remain almost unchanged. Because 90% of the population was not flooded, doing nothing is the easiest thing to do for the majority on the City Council. The Mayor can be outmaneuvered by the realtors and builders who are very aware that 90% of the population have nearly total amnesia about the flooding. It was so long ago - last year - and the people forget so quickly.
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
What I’m getting from this is that houses should be raised THREE feet minimum, not 1 or 2 since those are considered safe.
It would be great if we (Houston) approached this problem from the pov of, “let’s show the world how this should be handled.”
The realtors and builders of America tend to get their way, not because they have more money, but because they have more intensity compared to the American majority that can't remember or don't even care about anybody's problems other than their own. If your house didn't flood, and you are American, you probably don't want to pay even $10.00/year for flood control to help somebody that is not you. You might be willing to pay $1/year, but not much more. Why 85% of Houston homeowners have no flood insurance: https://qz.com/1063985
Only about 20% of homeowners with flood damage in the region have insurance protection. Buying insurance is too socialistic for most Americans who don't want to pay for damages to other people's homes, just their own.
www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/08/29/insurance-woes-await-flood-vic
tims-under-covered-houston-area/613239001/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Usually the Democrats run around like chickens with their heads cut off, voting randomly, while the Republicans vote their party line with Military Discipline, but not this time. One Republican voted with the Democrats to make stricter rules:
Originally posted by second:
What is most likely to happen (50% chance) is that nothing will happen on the City Council: the rules will remain almost unchanged.
City Council adopts stricter development rules for Houston’s floodplains
By Rebecca Elliott, Updated: April 4, 2018 6:17pm
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Houston-City-Council-adopts-stri
cter-flood-plain-12805504.php
Starting this fall, all new homes built in Houston’s floodplains must be elevated higher off the ground following a contentious debate and narrow vote by city council Wednesday to adopt the Bayou City’s first major regulatory response to the widespread flooding Hurricane Harvey unleashed last August.
The vote marks a shift away from Houston’s longtime aversion to constraining development, and means all new construction in the city’s floodplains will have to be built two feet above the projected water level in a 500-year storm.
The unusually tight 9-7 vote, which fell largely along party lines, came at the end of more than three hours of sometimes combative debate.
Typical overheated rhetoric during the debate: “Sold my soul? I will sell my soul to represent my district tomorrow and the next day. You have no idea what you’re talking about because you don’t know where Kingwood is, sir. Whether you say I sold out, you can call it whatever the hell you want to call it, I protect my neighborhood.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/houston/article/Nearly-half-of-
Harris-County-s-waterways-have-12813461.php
By Mihir Zaveri, Updated: April 6, 2018 8:38pm
Nearly half of Harris County’s 2,500 miles of rivers, bayous and drainage ditches do not have mapped flood plains, according to data from the county, leaving an inaccurate picture of flood risk for thousands of residents.
In most cases, the unmapped channels are smaller than prominent waterways such as Houston’s well-known bayous and rivers. Instead they are drainage ditches and narrow canals dividing homes and subdivisions spreading all across the county — the legacy of decades of development, where exceptionally flat topography required the construction of man-made channels to drain storm-water into Galveston Bay and eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
They largely have evaded the eye of authorities seeking to study and communicate flood-risk around Houston. Officials point to several reasons they have not been examined: tight funding and technology that has hampered effective mapping.
As a result, thousands of people may be living in areas at a higher risk of flooding without knowing it. While there is no way to accurately gauge the impact of the lack of flood plain maps, or what potential maps would look like, an analysis of homes flooded during Hurricane Harvey shows that nearly 6,000 homes damaged during the storm were outside any mapped flood plains, but within one-tenth of a mile of an unmapped stream.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said the smaller waterways need to be studied.
“We can’t do things the way they were done in the past,” he said. “We’re in a new world now, where we’ve got to know more about how flooding occurs, where it’s going to occur.”
Almost three-quarters of the 204,000 flooded homes and apartment buildings in Harris County were outside the federally regulated 100-year flood plain.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The top story on the front page of today's Houston Chronicle:
After Hurricane Harvey, the Harris County Flood Control District is seeking $75,000 in federal grants for a billboard campaign aimed at encouraging residents to buy insurance.
Harris County is planning a billboard campaign to encourage residents to buy flood insurance, hoping to drive home one of the costliest lessons from Hurricane Harvey.
It is a drumbeat long sounded by public officials seeking to prepare the region for floods, but the message has taken on new significance after Harvey, in which 83 percent of the 1.4 million buildings in Harris County lacked flood insurance when the storm hit, according to estimates from the flood control district.
“We should make people aware of the facts,” said Ataul Hannan, planning division director for the Harris County Flood Control District. “You cannot take away risk.”
To do that, the district wants to put up two dozen billboards along some of Harris County’s most-traveled roadways, reminding residents of the importance of flood insurance.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Plan to build hundreds of homes in west Houston flood plain returns to council
By Mike Morris, Updated: April 24, 2018 7:20am
“Basically, nothing has changed. The only thing that’s changed is that there has been more time pass since Harvey, so I think they’re expecting there being less opposition as people forget about the impact of Harvey.”
Mayor Sylvester Turner and the City Council balked at a developer’s plan to build hundreds of homes in a west Houston flood plain last fall in the weeks after Hurricane Harvey, but will take up the same proposal this week with no apparent revisions.
The homebuilder, Meritage Homes, said its plans for the Spring Brook Village development did not change because the drainage system it is building is robust enough to {what follows is a long string of small deceptions which the reporter cannot penetrate, because he is not an engineer, to get the truth. The Republicans on the City Council who pass themselves off as “Independents” ha-ha-ha probably don’t care what the truth is, but they cannot say that aloud. If you are a Democrat in Texas, you know how Republicans and “Independents” are when asked to do a sneaky favor for a wealthy homebuilder.}
Councilwoman Brenda Stardig, owner of Stardig Patrick Real Estate https://ballotpedia.org/Brenda_Stardig noted that voting down the developer’s preferred financing method — the utility district — would not prevent the site from being developed.
“My concern is that we have responsible development, and killing the MUD is not going to kill the project,” Stardig said. “I would have loved to have had a park and green space and the golf course or other recreational activities there. However, this is private property. They worked within the parameters of the ordinances.”
Aside from the optics of approving development in a flood plain so soon after Harvey, said Councilman David Robinson, an architect https://ballotpedia.org/David_W._Robinson ,“We can’t say no just because it might look bad if it adheres to existing policy.”
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Plan-to-bu
ild-hundreds-of-homes-in-west-Houston-12858540.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Plan to build hundreds of homes in west Houston flood plain returns to council
By Mike Morris, Updated: April 24, 2018 7:20am
“Basically, nothing has changed. The only thing that’s changed is that there has been more time pass since Harvey, so I think they’re expecting there being less opposition as people forget about the impact of Harvey.”
Mayor Sylvester Turner and the City Council balked at a developer’s plan to build hundreds of homes in a west Houston flood plain last fall in the weeks after Hurricane Harvey, but will take up the same proposal this week with no apparent revisions.
The homebuilder, Meritage Homes, said its plans for the Spring Brook Village development did not change because the drainage system it is building is robust enough to {what follows is a long string of small deceptions which the reporter cannot penetrate, because he is not an engineer, to get the truth. The Republicans on the City Council who pass themselves off as “Independents” ha-ha-ha probably don’t care what the truth is, but they cannot say that aloud. If you are a Democrat in Texas, you know how Republicans and “Independents” are when asked to do a sneaky favor for a wealthy homebuilder.}
Councilwoman Brenda Stardig, owner of Stardig Patrick Real Estate https://ballotpedia.org/Brenda_Stardig noted that voting down the developer’s preferred financing method — the utility district — would not prevent the site from being developed.
“My concern is that we have responsible development, and killing the MUD is not going to kill the project,” Stardig said. “I would have loved to have had a park and green space and the golf course or other recreational activities there. However, this is private property. They worked within the parameters of the ordinances.”
Aside from the optics of approving development in a flood plain so soon after Harvey, said Councilman David Robinson, an architect https://ballotpedia.org/David_W._Robinson ,“We can’t say no just because it might look bad if it adheres to existing policy.”
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Plan-to-bu
ild-hundreds-of-homes-in-west-Houston-12858540.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Maybe, in the future, there *was* no mass exodus from Earth? Maybe there was no great extinction Event? Maybe smart people got tired of rolling their eyes and built ships and loaded them up with other smart people and just left the dummies behind to face the fate of their own misdeeds?
Ooooo - what if there were 2 Great Leavings from Earth? The Smarts first, followed by what was left of the Dims after they'd effed it up completely? I'm sensing a scifi series here... if it hasn't already been done. Reaver origin story perhaps?
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Quote:This thread is drifting far from Houston flooding, but I saw this by Freeman Dyson on space travel:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Maybe, in the future, there *was* no mass exodus from Earth? Maybe there was no great extinction Event? Maybe smart people got tired of rolling their eyes and built ships and loaded them up with other smart people and just left the dummies behind to face the fate of their own misdeeds?
Ooooo - what if there were 2 Great Leavings from Earth? The Smarts first, followed by what was left of the Dims after they'd effed it up completely? I'm sensing a scifi series here... if it hasn't already been done. Reaver origin story perhaps?
One possibility is that groups of parents will be able to give birth to genetically modified children, hoping to give them advantages in the game of life. The children might be healthier or longer-lived or more intellectually gifted than other children, and they might no longer interbreed with natural-born children. The other possibility is that groups of people will emigrate from planet Earth and build societies far away in the depths of space. West considers neither of these possibilities. His view of the future sees humans remaining forever a single species confined to a single planet. If the future resembles the past, humans will be diversifying into many species and spreading out over the universe, as our hominin ancestors diversified and spread over this planet.
So long as we remain on planet Earth, there are strong social, political, and ethical reasons to forbid genetic modification of children by parents. If we are scattered in isolated communities far away, those reasons would no longer be relevant to our experience. A group of humans colonizing a cold and airless world would probably not hesitate to use genetic engineering to adapt their children to the environment. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the nineteenth-century prophet of space colonization, already imagined the colonists endowed with green leaves to replace lungs and with moving-picture skin patterns to replace voices. How long will it take for the technologies of space transportation and genetic engineering to bring Tsiolkovsky’s dreams to reality?
Advances in technology are unpredictable, but two hundred years is a reasonable guess for cheap and widely available space travel and genetically modified babies—perhaps one hundred years to develop the science and another hundred years to develop the applications. It is likely that in two hundred years public highways will be carrying passengers and freight around the solar system, with a large enough volume of traffic to make them affordable to ordinary people. At the same time, farmers will be breeding microbes, as well as plants and animals designed to live together in robust artificial ecologies. The option to include humans in the ecology will always be available.
Freeman Dyson continues here: www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/10/the-key-to-everything/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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City Council unanimously backs plan to build homes in flood plain
By Mike Morris, Updated: April 25, 2018 6:53pm
The vote, which occurred without discussion, will let the developers create a municipal utility district to issue bonds to pay for roads, water, sewer and drainage infrastructure on the former Pine Crest Golf Course, where homebuilder Meritage Homes and land developer MetroNational plan to build some 900 homes.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/City-Counc
il-unanimously-backs-plan-to-build-12863712.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The top story on the front page of today's Houston Chronicle:
After Hurricane Harvey, the Harris County Flood Control District is seeking $75,000 in federal grants for a billboard campaign aimed at encouraging residents to buy insurance.
Harris County is planning a billboard campaign to encourage residents to buy flood insurance, hoping to drive home one of the costliest lessons from Hurricane Harvey.
It is a drumbeat long sounded by public officials seeking to prepare the region for floods, but the message has taken on new significance after Harvey, in which 83 percent of the 1.4 million buildings in Harris County lacked flood insurance when the storm hit, according to estimates from the flood control district.
“We should make people aware of the facts,” said Ataul Hannan, planning division director for the Harris County Flood Control District. “You cannot take away risk.”
To do that, the district wants to put up two dozen billboards along some of Harris County’s most-traveled roadways, reminding residents of the importance of flood insurance.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Do the banks in Texas not require you to have flood insurance if you're loaning money from them, or does everybody in Harris County own their homes with cash?
If this is a case where the flood planes are not properly zoned, that's something to strongly consider re-zoning.
This would probably get a lot of pushback from people that owned the houses though. It would mean that unless they owned their homes free and clear that they would be forced to pay for insurance they were getting away without paying before.
Are FEMA zoning maps and other information easily obtainable and readable in Harris County and Texas in general? It's hard to have a solid opinion on any of this without knowing details like that.
Where I live, I can easily go online and see a FEMA map of every house in my city that is color coded as to the severity of any homes on the flood plane. These color codes actually determine what level of insurance you'd have to pay. Colorless means that you're not in a flood zone and don't need to pay. GREEN means that you're in the lowest risk flood zone and would pay only a fraction of about 1/4 to 1/3 what the people in RED zones would have to pay. These aren't hand drawn maps either. They use GoogleMaps.
I think the first step here is to ensure that something like this is done everywhere in the country if it isn't being done already. If it is already being done, I think billboards should be going up making people aware of their ability to go online and see what level of flood zone their home is on, and especially to see what level a home they're thinking about buying is on.
This information wouldn't only be beneficial when it comes to insurance issues. It would also help people who didn't realize they might be at risk take some preventative measures to mitigate or at least minimize any damage they'd receive if the worst were to occur.
For instance, I'm on a GREEN zone. Because of the work the city/county has done creating and maintaining man-made ditches to mitigate the water, the chances that the streets around here would actually flood are almost non-existant barring a Noah's Arc type scenario.
But what it does mean for me is that I absolutely have to have a sump pump in working order 24/7 because the house was built with livable area in the basement. Even a moderate amount of rain would end up flooding my home if I were away for a few weeks and the power went out during average seasonal spring rain.
It would be good for people to easily find this type of information out so they can plan ahead. The upfront costs of having a battery backed up sump and a second well could mean spending hundreds to a thousand bucks now so you don't have to spe
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Quote:Why 85% of Houston homeowners have no flood insurance
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Do the banks in Texas not require you to have flood insurance if you're loaning money from them, or does everybody in Harris County own their homes with cash?
If this is a case where the flood planes are not properly zoned, that's something to strongly consider re-zoning.
This would probably get a lot of pushback from people that owned the houses though. It would mean that unless they owned their homes free and clear that they would be forced to pay for insurance they were getting away without paying before.
Are FEMA zoning maps and other information easily obtainable and readable in Harris County and Texas in general? It's hard to have a solid opinion on any of this without knowing details like that.
Where I live, I can easily go online and see a FEMA map of every house in my city that is color coded as to the severity of any homes on the flood plane. These color codes actually determine what level of insurance you'd have to pay. Colorless means that you're not in a flood zone and don't need to pay. GREEN means that you're in the lowest risk flood zone and would pay only a fraction of about 1/4 to 1/3 what the people in RED zones would have to pay. These aren't hand drawn maps either. They use GoogleMaps.
I think the first step here is to ensure that something like this is done everywhere in the country if it isn't being done already. If it is already being done, I think billboards should be going up making people aware of their ability to go online and see what level of flood zone their home is on, and especially to see what level a home they're thinking about buying is on.
This information wouldn't only be beneficial when it comes to insurance issues. It would also help people who didn't realize they might be at risk take some preventative measures to mitigate or at least minimize any damage they'd receive if the worst were to occur.
For instance, I'm on a GREEN zone. Because of the work the city/county has done creating and maintaining man-made ditches to mitigate the water, the chances that the streets around here would actually flood are almost non-existant barring a Noah's Arc type scenario.
But what it does mean for me is that I absolutely have to have a sump pump in working order 24/7 because the house was built with livable area in the basement. Even a moderate amount of rain would end up flooding my home if I were away for a few weeks and the power went out during average seasonal spring rain.
It would be good for people to easily find this type of information out so they can plan ahead. The upfront costs of having a battery backed up sump and a second well could mean spending hundreds to a thousand bucks now so you don't have to spend tens of thousands for flood damage after the fact. It also might mean that you don't buy a house in the first place because you're just not willing to take the risk at all.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://qz.com/1063985
Only 28% of the homes in “high-risk” areas for flooding had insurance.
There is an excellent map of the 500 year flood zone. The map and the reality of Hurricane Harvey were in excellent agreement.
www.harriscountyfemt.org/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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They need to upgrade that map. The maximum zoom level leaves a lot to be desired.
The map I'm talking about can zoom in to just a city block and shows actual satellite imagery of every home. For instance, I'm one of several homes at the end of my block that are green-zone, while most of the houses the other way are not in the flood zone at all. Several blocks behind me is the lowest part of the area and houses there are in red zone.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You mean a map like this? https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search?AddressQuery=601%20W%20Main%20St%2C
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
They need to upgrade that map. The maximum zoom level leaves a lot to be desired.
The map I'm talking about can zoom in to just a city block and shows actual satellite imagery of every home. For instance, I'm one of several homes at the end of my block that are green-zone, while most of the houses the other way are not in the flood zone at all. Several blocks behind me is the lowest part of the area and houses there are in red zone.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
%20Baytown%2C%20TX#searchresultsanchor
If the house will be around for 100 years, this kind of map is only good for a year because sea level is rising along the coast and the ground is sinking because of wells, both water and oil. This map, with all the superfine details, won't be right 10 years from now. If you're buying a house, don't buy one a few feet outside the flood zone. In time, you will be inside the flood zone.
If you want actual elevations, there is Google Earth for Chrome: https://goo.gl/MXt3vr
www.google.com/earth/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
They need to upgrade that map. The maximum zoom level leaves a lot to be desired.
The map I'm talking about can zoom in to just a city block and shows actual satellite imagery of every home. For instance, I'm one of several homes at the end of my block that are green-zone, while most of the houses the other way are not in the flood zone at all. Several blocks behind me is the lowest part of the area and houses there are in red zone.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
You mean a map like this? https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search?AddressQuery=601%20W%20Main%20St%2C
%20Baytown%2C%20TX#searchresultsanchor
Oh good. That's exactly what I meant.
Quote:
If the house will be around for 100 years, this kind of map is only good for a year because sea level is rising along the coast and the ground is sinking because of wells, both water and oil. This map, with all the superfine details, won't be right 10 years from now.
Yeah. You're probably right. These things should constantly be updated. Do you know if they are in Texas? I know that they are by me at least every 3 years since it's happened twice that I'm aware of since I've moved in. I think I'm the only person on my block that doesn't really want to be moved out of the flood zone since I don't pay for insurance and I got a good amount off of my property taxes by proving that I was in the flood zone when the township said I wasn't.
Quote:
If you're buying a house, don't buy one a few feet outside the flood zone. In time, you will be inside the flood zone.
That's great advice. If I had to do it all over again I would have looked into this a lot more. My dumb ass took the township on their word that I wasn't in a flood zone. I didn't know about maps like these until a year or two after I moved in when my sump failed and I had to replace it in two feet of freezing water, bare ass naked so I didn't get hypothermia.
Honestly, this is something that should be added to the list of things we teach our kids in high school.
I suggest that we give the kids at least a one semester class that covers things like flood zones, securing loans, building credit, being responsible with credit, knowing what a predatory loan is and staying far away from them, doing their own tax returns, what a 401k is and how to invest in it (at least to always take advantage of your company match), budgeting, using the internet to pay your bills, setting up automatic payments for at least the minimum monthly payment, etc., etc., etc...
So much dumb shit our kids are taught, and we don't even teach them how to take care of themselves when they're adults.
Sigh......
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:What do you do with the kids that flunk the final test of this class? I know that 99% of kids will flunk and the remaining 1% will take over America because it already happened in my lifetime. A real life example: I loaned Hobson $458,750 and have been repaid $30,250. Hobson also got from me a free copy of "The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need" (2017). It would be the study guide for 6ixStringJack's high school class. I kept my 40 year old copy. www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544781937/
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Honestly, this is something that should be added to the list of things we teach our kids in high school.
I suggest that we give the kids at least a one semester class that covers things like flood zones, securing loans, building credit, being responsible with credit, knowing what a predatory loan is and staying far away from them, doing their own tax returns, what a 401k is and how to invest in it (at least to always take advantage of your company match), budgeting, using the internet to pay your bills, setting up automatic payments for at least the minimum monthly payment, etc., etc., etc...
So much dumb shit our kids are taught, and we don't even teach them how to take care of themselves when they're adults.
Sigh......
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Every step of the way, Hobson made bad decisions, ones that I said were too risky even before the decisions were finalized. Hobson's excuse was always, "But what else can I do?" I would explain, but nothing was learned.
No amount of advice or instruction made any real-world difference to Hobson. I will never be paid back and Hobson has run up another $125,000 in debt with people who have less patience. Hobson is exactly like 99% of Americans: a typical bonehead with insufficient correct knowledge about how the world really works, even after 58 years of life experience and weeks of instruction. I find it completely unsurprising that Americans will buy a house that can flood, then will not purchase flood insurance because they believe they are someone extra-special who God is watching over.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:What do you do with the kids that flunk the final test of this class? I know that 99% of kids will flunk and the remaining 1% will take over America because it already happened in my lifetime. A real life example: I loaned Hobson $458,750 and have been repaid $30,250. Hobson also got from me a free copy of "The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need" (2017). It would be the study guide for 6ixStringJack's high school class. I kept my 40 year old copy. www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544781937/
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Honestly, this is something that should be added to the list of things we teach our kids in high school.
I suggest that we give the kids at least a one semester class that covers things like flood zones, securing loans, building credit, being responsible with credit, knowing what a predatory loan is and staying far away from them, doing their own tax returns, what a 401k is and how to invest in it (at least to always take advantage of your company match), budgeting, using the internet to pay your bills, setting up automatic payments for at least the minimum monthly payment, etc., etc., etc...
So much dumb shit our kids are taught, and we don't even teach them how to take care of themselves when they're adults.
Sigh......
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Every step of the way, Hobson made bad decisions, ones that I said were too risky even before the decisions were finalized. Hobson's excuse was always, "But what else can I do?" I would explain, but nothing was learned.
No amount of advice or instruction made any real-world difference to Hobson. I will never be paid back and Hobson has run up another $125,000 in debt with people who have less patience. Hobson is exactly like 99% of Americans: a typical bonehead with insufficient correct knowledge about how the world really works, even after 58 years of life experience and weeks of instruction.
Sounds to me like Hobson took you for a ride and that you're the fool. I don't know how you supposedly got rich if that's how you handle your business.
I could easily live off of that $420,000 you're never going to get back for the rest of my life without ever having to work another day.
Quote:
I find it completely unsurprising that Americans will buy a house that can flood, then will not purchase flood insurance because they believe they are someone extra-special who God is watching over.
Nobody is watching over me.
My house isn't built on top of drilled oil or close to the ocean. I've got everything backed up and an extra generator to boot. It all cost me what one year of flood insurance would cost.
Unless you live in hurricane country, flood insurance is for stupid and/or lazy people.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:80% living in hurricane country don't have flood insurance. So how smart could they be? They will vote against flood control bonds, too. I believe they might be so stupid that they will not even know about an upcoming vote. The only way it will pass is if the stupid people don't vote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Unless you live in hurricane country, flood insurance is for stupid and/or lazy people.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Harris County Commissioners Court voted Tuesday to seek a special election on Aug. 25 for what likely will be a multi-billion-dollar bond package that, if approved by voters, would be the largest local investment in the region's flood control system after Hurricane Harvey.
"Why August 25?" Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said. "It's the one year anniversary of Harvey. I don't think we want to go a year and not be able to say we're doing something. People who care about mitigation, resilience, flood control, they'll be energized and they'll want to go out [and vote]. Will there be somebody who wants to stand in the face of what we went through during Harvey and say 'I want to be against it'? I kind of dare them to do it."
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/houston/article/Harris-County-v
otes-in-favor-of-Aug-25-for-12878181.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Houston area continues to eye third reservoir to control flooding
By Mike Snyder, Updated: May 7, 2018 5:00am
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Houston-ar
ea-continues-to-eye-third-reservoir-to-12889397.php
Estimates of the cost of a third reservoir have hovered around $500 million, and officials generally say the funds should come from the state or federal government (because land developers want to shift the cost to anybody but themselves). Theoretically, a third reservoir could be among the projects included in a multibillion-dollar Harris County flood bond election scheduled for Aug. 25.
Even before Hurricane Harvey dumped 14 months’ worth of rain on the Houston area in four days, government and business leaders were discussing the need to build a third reservoir west of the city — a key step in completing a 78-year-old plan to protect the heart of Houston from devastating floods.
That 1940 plan by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers included several projects that were never built, including a reservoir on White Oak Bayou, a levee on Cypress Creek, and about 50 miles of canals.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwD3neJF25tRbFlfQUtFb1NmbGs/view
The commissioner acknowledged potential tension between the need to take action before memories of Harvey fade, and the risks of making huge investments without fully exploring the benefits and risks of each project.
These questions were highlighted in a report last month by the Greater Houston Flood Mitigation Consortium, a panel of experts examining flooding issues. The report noted that a third reservoir concept known as “Plan 5,” discussed in a 2015 Harris County Flood Control District study, was designed chiefly to enable new development rather than to protect places where people already lived and worked.
The essence of this dispute is whether to focus on planning to meet the needs of future residents or on enhancing the lives of those already here (because land developers want all the benefits to go only to themselves).
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:80% living in hurricane country don't have flood insurance. So how smart could they be? They will vote against flood control bonds, too. I believe they might be so stupid that they will not even know about an upcoming vote. The only way it will pass is if the stupid people don't vote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Unless you live in hurricane country, flood insurance is for stupid and/or lazy people.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Harris County Commissioners Court voted Tuesday to seek a special election on Aug. 25 for what likely will be a multi-billion-dollar bond package that, if approved by voters, would be the largest local investment in the region's flood control system after Hurricane Harvey.
"Why August 25?" Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said. "It's the one year anniversary of Harvey. I don't think we want to go a year and not be able to say we're doing something. People who care about mitigation, resilience, flood control, they'll be energized and they'll want to go out [and vote]. Will there be somebody who wants to stand in the face of what we went through during Harvey and say 'I want to be against it'? I kind of dare them to do it."
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/houston/article/Harris-County-v
otes-in-favor-of-Aug-25-for-12878181.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
That actually sounds like a good idea. I hope it passes.
Unfortunately, they waited a year. Most people have short term memories that only last about 3 weeks.
As for the judge saying "I kind of dare them to do it.".... I wonder if that's a threat? Your vote is (supposedly) anonymous, so you're not actually standing up and saying anything to anybody when you cast it.
Is he saying that he's going to out anybody who votes against this? I do believe that would be a first in American history. I also believe he wouldn't be a judge for very long afterward either. He'd likely be in prison.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The judge knows Texans all too often say "NO!" to taxes. I think the bond only has a 50/50 chance of approval by the voters. A Rice University survey last year found that less than 10 percent of Houston region residents suffered serious damage to their homes during Harvey ( 204,000 homes, apartments and businesses flooded). Almost 49 percent of those surveyed did not support an increase in property taxes to pay for flood control projects and that's where my estimated 50/50 chance of election failure came from.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That actually sounds like a good idea. I hope it passes.
Unfortunately, they waited a year. Most people have short term memories that only last about 3 weeks.
As for the judge saying "I kind of dare them to do it.".... I wonder if that's a threat? Your vote is (supposedly) anonymous, so you're not actually standing up and saying anything to anybody when you cast it.
Is he saying that he's going to out anybody who votes against this? I do believe that would be a first in American history. I also believe he wouldn't be a judge for very long afterward either. He'd likely be in prison.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
There was one more roadblock that the bond issue had to get around. It successfully did, but probably only because the vote was unanimous. www.houstoniamag.com/articles/2016/3/31/peoples-court-harris-country-c
ommissioners-court-april-2016 If even a single County Commissioner had voted against, I believe the Governor would not have given permission. That single-vote-veto has killed other worthy flood control projects :
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday approved Harris County's request to call a multi-billion-dollar bond election to pay for flood control measures on Aug. 25, the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Harvey.
By state law, the county needed Abbott’s permission to call the “emergency special election” in spite of his oft-stated goal of reducing property taxes. The flood control bond package almost certainly will be accompanied by an increase in Harris County’s property tax rate.
Abbott granted the county’s request to put the issue to the voters, affirming his stated belief that responding to Harvey does “qualify as an emergency” and stating that he is “committed to working with Harris County to achieve its goals in the most efficient way possible.”
“As this request for an emergency special election was duly passed by a unanimous vote of the Harris County Commissioners Court, I hereby grant approval as governor of Texas for this emergency special election to be called for bonds to fund flood-related mitigation projects that respond to Hurricane Harvey,” Abbott wrote in a letter accompanying his decision.
Abbott’s decision comes a week after Harris County Commissioners Court voted in favor of the Aug. 25 date, following months of discussion over the best timing for the election and what other federal and state funds may be available for flood control projects.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/houston/article/Gov-Abbott-OK-s
-Aug-25-for-Harris-County-12894861.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Investors large and small are snapping up thousands of properties flooded by Hurricane Harvey. From billion-dollar Wall Street funds to mom-and-pop flippers, they've already purchased at least 5,500 flooded homes, often for dimes on the dollar.
In the process, they are transforming some Houston neighborhoods into block after block of rentals. They're interrupting county plans to buy out flood-prone properties. And they're leaning on the taxpayer-funded National Flood Insurance Program to protect them from future floods.
"All we're doing is perpetuating a cycle of flooding," said Harris County Flood Control District operations chief Matt Zeve.
The practice of buying flooded houses has consequences:
It prevents or delays government agencies from buying out homeowners whose houses have repeatedly flooded. Harris County said it has already lost to private parties 88 Harvey-flooded houses it wanted to buy.
It puts renters in harm's way, since Texas law doesn't require landlords to tell tenants their homes have flooded or sit in a flood plain.
Since flood insurance is available at deep discounts through the federal government, investors are often insuring their properties on the back of the American taxpayer.
Investors aren't preparing for the next flood. They're just putting nicer finishes back on existing homes — and then insuring their investments on the taxpayer's dime.
Harris County has targeted about 3,300 homes that have flooded multiple times or are deep in the flood plain. But government-financed buyouts take years. Investors can pay instant cash.
And this tension has played out for decades across the country, said Chad Berginnis, director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. In 1998, he was a planning director in Perry County, Ohio, building a buyout program after a flood damaged 70 percent of the homes in a 1,000-person village there.
"My main competitor was someone I would call the local slumlord," Berginnis said. And that investor, he said, was quite successful.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/houston-ha
rvey-flood-homes-real-estate-investor-12901718.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
It puts renters in harm's way, since Texas law doesn't require landlords to tell tenants their homes have flooded or sit in a flood plain.
Since flood insurance is available at deep discounts through the federal government, investors are often insuring their properties on the back of the American taxpayer.
Nice trick not having to tell renters about living in a flood plain - I bet there's a good $tory there.
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With hurricane season right around the corner, Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn said Wednesday he is introducing legislation to expedite a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study on a coastal barrier to mitigate storm damage along the Texas coast.
The measure, the Coastal Texas Protection Act, is directed at advancing the construction of a long-awaited "Ike Dike" or Coastal Spine – proposed after Hurricane Ike in 2008 – to better protect the Gulf Coast from storm damage. Ten years passed so quickly and the study has not been started. Engineering will start years after the study is completed. Construction will start years after the design is completed and be finished sometime after we are all dead from hurricane after hurricane after hurricane.
"We've been working with local stakeholders as well as state officials to try to encourage this process to move along quickly," Cornyn said. Of course you have, you pinhead GOP Senator.
The proposed system of flood gates, dikes and sea walls has an estimated price tag of around $11 billion for the six-county coastal region surrounding Galveston and Houston. The project has taken on greater urgency since Hurricane Harvey hit the region with severe flooding last August. So very urgent that it took only ten years for a Texas Senator to notice what Texas needs from the Federal Government.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/article/Post-Harvey-Cornyn-bill
-would-speed-Ike-Dike-12919985.php
In other news, the governor of Texas will NOT use the Rainy Day Fund. The Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay for 75 percent of the costs of projects. The local officials, in their letter to Gov. Abbott, want the state to tap into its Economic Stabilization Fund -- known as the Rainy Day Fund -- to cover the remaining 25 percent of the costs. "The states of Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia, Georgia and Colorado have provided for local matches in situations utilizing the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program," the letter continues, asking Texas to pony up state funds, as well.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said that without a state match, some local governments will not be able to use the grants at all. Gov. Greg Abbott immediately responded with a letter of his own to Houston: Stop complaining. Abbott does not wish to spend money that he controls. He prefers that local governments spend their own money, but most don't have anything similar to the governor's Rainy Day Fund.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Abbott-local-offi
cials-in-new-fight-over-Harvey-12919020.php
“The tone of the governor’s letter is troublesome, and I don’t think it recognizes reality. All of us are merely seeking to speed up recovery and to take the burden off local taxpayers,” Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said. “Why that deserves a lecture I don’t know.”
www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Abbott-criticizes-Hou
ston-s-Harvey-response-12920659.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Harris County leaders want more aggressive buyout program to ward off investor purchases of flooded homes
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Harris-Cou
nty-leaders-want-more-aggressive-buyout-12923703.php
Updated: May 18, 2018 4:25am
Investors are buying thousands of Harvey-flooded properties, transforming some Houston neighborhoods into block after block of rentals, interrupting county plans to buy out flood-prone properties and leaning on the flood insurance program to protect them from future floods.
“It’s very disturbing,” said state Rep. Garnet Coleman, a Democrat who represents central and southeast Houston. “The money needs to come faster. Everything is too slow.”
None of the $10 billion approved by Congress for long-term flood recovery in Texas has made it to local governments, leaving homeowners in a lurch and neighborhoods open to investor speculation.
James Wade, head of the Harris County Flood Control buyout program, said “These are homes at such high risk of flooding. People are in harm’s way.” Since most homes in the flood plain are insured by the National Flood Insurance Program, buyouts end the cycle of repetitive insurance payments and save taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per house.
The county now prioritizes 70 neighborhoods with about 5,500 parcels and 3,300 homes. Every one of those areas flooded during Harvey; buying the homes would cost about $700 million.
Congress has approved $10 billion since Hurricane Harvey hit Houston for long-term storm recovery, including $5 billion it passed in September in Housing and Urban Development funds, some of which is earmarked specifically for buyouts.
But none of that money has yet made it to Houston. The county is now considering including as many as 3,500 buyouts in its upcoming multi-billion dollar bond issue, which would be paid for by local property taxes.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Second, you truly are someone who posts on behalf of the little guy and that's awesome. At times though I think some go to negative because there is so much social injustice. It builds a wall and blocks any negotiations with the other side.
It's why I believe the middle of the road must rule if any progress is to be made. Look at where we are now compared to where we come from. Change is slow but it has and continues to happen.
T 
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Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:
Second, you truly are someone who posts on behalf of the little guy and that's awesome. At times though I think some go to negative because there is so much social injustice. It builds a wall and blocks any negotiations with the other side.
It's why I believe the middle of the road must rule if any progress is to be made. Look at where we are now compared to where we come from. Change is slow but it has and continues to happen.
T
There are three ways to handle problems: Buy your way out, fight your way out, or the most popular way to handle problems in America: fruitlessly simmer at the injustice with the hope that time will wear away your problem in a few decades or the problematical people will compromise before their death by old age, which doesn’t work nearly as well as buying a solution. And fighting has obvious disadvantages. Examples of the right and wrong way to handle a problem:
The British purchased the end of slavery, borrowing in the form of bonds the equivalent of £100 billion to buy the slaves’ freedom. The British spent two centuries paying back those bonds, but they got instant freedom from slavery. The American way, fighting a Civil War, cost 625,000 dead, and many of the slaves and their descendants remained in semi-slavery for more than a century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/12-stunning-civil-war-facts/
That is the introduction to latest story of Houston flooding. I would call this buying a solution, but it has elements of fighting for a solution because the outcome of a lawsuit is uncertain:
485 homeowners file suit against The Woodlands developer, Howard Hughes Corporation following flooding
By Wendy Cawthon | 1:49 pm May 31, 2018
The lawsuit alleges The Woodlands developers built homes in the area at “unreasonably low” elevations and that the company violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
“Despite knowingly building in a 500-year flood plain, Defendants did not develop and build homes in a manner that put them outside of a 500-year flood plain to reduce the likelihood of flooding,” the statement said. “Defendants had no set standards for determining the elevation of a house relative to its geographic location and that location’s risk of flooding. Furthermore, to the extent it did take into account standards for determining the elevation of a home, the standards were based on obsolete, antiquated data instead of newer, more reliable data that was readily available.”
A representative from The Howard Hughes Corporation said the company does not comment on pending or legal matters. (A very profitable policy because the 485 homeowners might never get to trial.)
https://communityimpact.com/houston/the-woodlands/development-construc
tion/2018/05/31/485-homeowners-file-suit-against-the-woodlands-developer-howard-hughes-corporation-following-flooding/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:
Second, you truly are someone who posts on behalf of the little guy and that's awesome. At times though I think some go to negative because there is so much social injustice. It builds a wall and blocks any negotiations with the other side.
It's why I believe the middle of the road must rule if any progress is to be made. Look at where we are now compared to where we come from. Change is slow but it has and continues to happen.
Yup. Second doing his part posting links on a website that gets 10 regulars to it. He'd be better off tweeting if he's going to virtue signal all day long.
If you believe him about how rich he has, he's the only person who has any power here to help any of these people.
But he doesn't. He's said on many occasion he's very happy with the way things are going because of the massive tax breaks that Trump gave him that he's not doing any good deeds with.
Second's posts about this subject here are worth no more than everybody who Tweeted "Our hearts go out to Puerto Rico" months ago and have now totally forgot that Puerto Rico is even a thing.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, have you ever heard of Price's Law? https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:
Second, you truly are someone who posts on behalf of the little guy and that's awesome. At times though I think some go to negative because there is so much social injustice. It builds a wall and blocks any negotiations with the other side.
It's why I believe the middle of the road must rule if any progress is to be made. Look at where we are now compared to where we come from. Change is slow but it has and continues to happen.
Yup. Second doing his part posting links on a website that gets 10 regulars to it. He'd be better off tweeting if he's going to virtue signal all day long.
If you believe him about how rich he has, he's the only person who has any power here to help any of these people.
But he doesn't. He's said on many occasion he's very happy with the way things are going because of the massive tax breaks that Trump gave him that he's not doing any good deeds with.
Second's posts about this subject here are worth no more than everybody who Tweeted "Our hearts go out to Puerto Rico" months ago and have now totally forgot that Puerto Rico is even a thing.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The law is that 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people participating in the work. With 100 people, the square root is 10. Ten people are doing 50% of the work and ninety people do 50%.
If there was a million dollars to divide with those 100 people, then the top ten should get half a million ($50,000 each) and the bottom ninety should get half a million ($5,556 each).
Seems virtuous to me. If 6ixStringJack wasn't bitching about how unfair the Democrats are to him, but instead did more of America's work, his slice would be bigger, maybe even $50,000 per year.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I subscribe to the Pareto Principal.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
For instance, you get richer simply because you already have money. The term "The Rich Get Richer" is based off of the Pareto Principal.
Meanwhile, people like me (and a TON of us) do all of the work, while people like you reap all the benefits.
It doesn't matter that you're worthless to society and a garbage human being. You will continue to benefit no matter who is in office. This is why you're constantly plagued with guilt. Maybe you should choose to do something to actually help somebody less fortunate than you today instead of virtue signalling from your Ivory Tower if you actually want to feel better about yourself. I'll bet whatever Trump is doing wrong won't bother you so much if you do.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:My value is to take lying sacks of shit like Trump to court and destroy them. I have gleefully ruined Texas businessmen that cheated me. One even killed himself when I bankrupted him. He could have settled, avoiding business failure, but the sanctimonious moron insisted that a jury trial would prove I was wrong and he was right. The jury did not agree with him and now there is one less Republican in Texas.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Meanwhile, people like me (and a TON of us) do all of the work, while people like you reap all the benefits.
It doesn't matter that you're worthless to society and a garbage human being. You will continue to benefit no matter who is in office. This is why you're constantly plagued with guilt.
6ixStringJack, do you remember this story on this page?
Quote:6ixStringJack, what it means is that 485 home-owners are suing because they were deceived by a home-builder. I’m not joining with the 485 because my house didn’t flood, but it is exactly what I have done in the past to cheating, lying Republican businessmen.
The lawsuit alleges The Woodlands developers built homes in the area at “unreasonably low” elevations and that the company violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
6ixStringJack was deceived by Donald Trump. Do not repeat that nonsense about you voting for Trump because he was a troll. That makes you appear to be stupid. Are you doing anything about Trump lying, similar to the home-builders lying? Are you suing? Or, at least, not voting for him a second time? Or doing something, anything? I’m not suing because Trump didn’t deceive me. I knew he was lying when he said he would not cut the taxes of rich people such as myself. You should have known that Trump was greedy.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Why would I do anything about Trump lying? Just like your house not flooding, his lies aren't hurting me at all.
In fact, he pisses off a lot of people that I don't like at all nearly every day. So yes, purely on Troll Value I plan on voting for Trump a 2nd time.
I told you I'm not a Republican and I've voted Democrat before, particularly in lower level elections. The Dems have wasted 2 years though, and I don't see any potential for them to have anybody who would support anything that would make me vote for them in 2020.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/houston/article/Harris-County-r
eceives-26-5-million-for-home-12966452.php
by Zach Despart, Updated: June 4, 2018 5:18pm
Harris County will receive $26.5 million from the federal government to begin home buyouts in floodplains, the Harris County Flood Control District announced Monday.
With an additional $8.6 million in local matching funds, the flood control district estimates it will be able to purchase 169 flood-prone homes. In response to Hurricane Harvey, the flood control district has asked for a total of $163.4 million from the FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program to buy around 1,000 homes.
The funds will allow the flood control district to compete with private developers, who as of last month had already snatched up 88 properties Harris County had wanted to purchase. Many, to the flood control district's chagrin, are being flipped or converted to rentals, keeping residents in the floodplain. [Because Trump won't provide ALL the money NOW, the rich will make a fortune from flipping the cheap real estate, and the poor will eventually have their valuables flooded. While we wait for that flood, the rich will have both rental income and an eventual large insurance payment from FEMA while the poor will have housing but probably no FEMA insurance because they don't think they need it, since they don't own the property. www.fema.gov/news-release/1998/11/30/texas-renters-can-buy-flood-insur
ance-too ]
The 169 buyout targets are spread across Harris County and were chosen, the flood control district said, because they were so significantly damaged by floods previous to Harvey. Repairing the structures would cost more than 50 percent of their market value.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Who pays for those federal funds going to Harris County?
What are the plans with the bought property?
Will this money be paid back?
I'd probably want to see how well they do with $26.5 million first before I gave them over $160 million too.
I can't say I feel too bad for anybody who buys a home there or rents one out until more federal funds make their way to Harris, seeing as how there have been major floods in the area twice in the last 3 years. It's not as if it didn't get enough news coverage.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The houses that are bought with FEMA money are torn down. The house lot becomes permanently vacant. When enough house lots in a flooding neighborhood are all owned by the city, the land becomes a park. The money to buy the land comes from the money saved by the Treasury NOT needing to ever again pay for flood damage on that lot. It would be even more profitable for the government if the Federal Treasury could sue the original builder who should have never built in flood zone in the first place -- make the original builder give back all the money he cheated the original purchaser out of. But we don't live in a country where big, rich, smart and cheating builders have to pay back what they steal from gullible people. That's the way Republicans run things.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Who pays for those federal funds going to Harris County?
What are the plans with the bought property?
Will this money be paid back?
I'd probably want to see how well they do with $26.5 million first before I gave them over $160 million too.
I can't say I feel too bad for anybody who buys a home there or rents one out until more federal funds make their way to Harris, seeing as how there have been major floods in the area twice in the last 3 years. It's not as if it didn't get enough news coverage.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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If that's the case than why didn't the flood insurance payouts just buy the current flooded owners out so they could buy somewhere else, rather than rebuild on the same land?
That takes care of the ones who were insured.
For those that weren't, what is happening to them? Are they getting relief? If so, they should be forced to purchase flood insurance from now on.
Then, if and when they get flooded again, the payouts can give them the money to move somewhere else. Wash, rinse and repeat until nobody is living there anymore and the land is deemed worthless.
It wouldn't be an immediate solution and happen overnight, but I think it would be the least cost to the taxpayers.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The answer to every one of your questions is "money". Everybody is extremely stingy when it comes to solving problems if somebody other than themselves will be getting most of the money. Problems never get more than fractionally solved because of stinginess. Obviously they think it is reasonable to be stingy. Rich people are thankful that poor people think that way because it is actually the rich who would be carrying most of the burden. But the poor never seem to understand what is going on. As a rich person, I hope they never do.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
If that's the case than why didn't the flood insurance payouts just buy the current flooded owners out so they could buy somewhere else, rather than rebuild on the same land?
That takes care of the ones who were insured.
For those that weren't, what is happening to them? Are they getting relief? If so, they should be forced to purchase flood insurance from now on.
Then, if and when they get flooded again, the payouts can give them the money to move somewhere else. Wash, rinse and repeat until nobody is living there anymore and the land is deemed worthless.
It wouldn't be an immediate solution and happen overnight, but I think it would be the least cost to the taxpayers.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Local politicians hope, possibly in vain, that voters will approve a bond issue that would prevent future flooding. The bonds will cost far less than the damage. Most voters have heard of the phrases "A stitch in time saves nine" and "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" but when one ounce of flood control bonds costs a billion, the majority might not approve the bonds.
A report by the Harris County Flood Control District combines and analyzes all the available data about Harvey and its aftermath, distilling the numbers.
http://reduceflooding.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Immediate-Flood-R
eport-Final-Hurricane-Harvey-2017.pdf
With damage estimated at $125 billion, Harvey was the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005, caused $160 billion in damage. Katrina death toll was at 1,836, primarily from Louisiana (1,577) and Mississippi (238).
Officials confirmed 36 flood-related deaths across Harris County and 68 statewide.
In Harris County, Harvey flooded 154,170 single-family houses and 5,000 to 15,000 apartments, condominiums and townhouses, making it "the largest and most devastating house flooding event ever recorded" in the county. In addition, thousands of commercial structures were flooded.
As many as 24,000 additional houses might have flooded if not for previous flood control district projects, including the buyouts of more than 2,000 homes deep within floodplains.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Rich people are thankful that poor people think that way because it is actually the rich who would be carrying most of the burden. But the poor never seem to understand what is going on. As a rich person, I hope they never do.
Your duplicity never ceases to amaze.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You must be thinking I am Bill Gates, the great humanitarian because we both are rich and vote for Democrats. I am not nice to poor people I don't know. Gates is the humanitarian, not me.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Rich people are thankful that poor people think that way because it is actually the rich who would be carrying most of the burden. But the poor never seem to understand what is going on. As a rich person, I hope they never do.
Your duplicity never ceases to amaze.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
I'll make it simple enough for you to understand: 250,000 people got flooded in Harris County. 4,000,000 were not flooded. To fix the flooding problem will require bonds to be approved by all Harris County voters. The 250,000 will vote for the bonds, but around half of the 4,000,000 will vote against. It is a near certainty that the majority of the 4,000,000, who won't get any benefit from approving the bonds, will have higher taxes and don't give a damn about other Texans if caring costs money, no matter how little money. In the case of this bond election, the cost will be about $10/month per $100,000 value of real estate. Democrats tend toward being willing to pay $10, while Republicans tend toward not paying. And then there are the rich, who didn't get rich by their willingness to pay taxes for solving poor peoples' problems.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You must be thinking I am Bill Gates, the great humanitarian because we both are rich and vote for Democrats. I am not nice to poor people I don't know. Gates is the humanitarian, not me.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Rich people are thankful that poor people think that way because it is actually the rich who would be carrying most of the burden. But the poor never seem to understand what is going on. As a rich person, I hope they never do.
Your duplicity never ceases to amaze.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
I'll make it simple enough for you to understand: 250,000 people got flooded in Harris County. 4,000,000 were not flooded. To fix the flooding problem will require bonds to be approved by all Harris County voters. The 250,000 will vote for the bonds, but around half of the 4,000,000 will vote against. It is a near certainty that the majority of the 4,000,000, who won't get any benefit from approving the bonds, will have higher taxes and don't give a damn about other Texans if caring costs money, no matter how little money. In the case of this bond election, the cost will be about $10/month per $100,000 value of real estate. Democrats tend toward being willing to pay $10, while Republicans tend toward not paying. And then there are the rich, who didn't get rich by their willingness to pay taxes for solving poor peoples' problems.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I have no need of an idiot simplifying things for me.
It's a problem that will never be fixed. So I wonder why you prattle on endlessly about it. I think it's time to move on buddy.
But thanks for letting us all know once again that you're virtue signaling is bullshit and that you're just a worthless piece of trash.
You may as well just go over to the dark side and become one of the Texas Republicans you claim to hate. You have so much more in common with them than any of the Democrats you pretend to give a shit about.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The bond vote is an all-or-nothing gamble by Commissioners Court, whose members hope residents will commit to strengthening flood infrastructure after Harvey flooded 11 percent of the county’s housing stock this past August. If the bond passes, Harris County will have access to as much as $2.5 billion to make, over the next 10 to 15 years, the largest local investment in flood infrastructure in the county’s history. If the bond fails, engineers will be limited to the flood control district’s annual operations and capital budgets, which total a paltry $120 million in comparison.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I have no need of an idiot simplifying things for me.
It's a problem that will never be fixed. So I wonder why you prattle on endlessly about it. I think it's time to move on buddy.
But thanks for letting us all know once again that you're virtue signaling is bullshit and that you're just a worthless piece of trash.
You may as well just go over to the dark side and become one of the Texas Republicans you claim to hate. You have so much more in common with them than any of the Democrats you pretend to give a shit about.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
“This is the most important local vote I can remember in my lifetime,” Emmett said. “We either step up as a community and say we are going to address flooding and make our community resilient, or we kind of drib and drabble on, and it wouldn’t end well for anyone.”
The flood control district plans to work through the summer on the list of projects the bond would fund, and Emmett has pledged to publish a complete list by the time early voting begins in August. Until then, Emmett said plans may continue to change based on input from residents.
www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Harris-County-pieces-
together-flood-bond-12998859.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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A long-discussed plan to create a 60-mile coastal barrier, known as the “Ike Dike,” to protect Texas’ Gulf Coast from major hurricanes received a major boost Tuesday when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it would provide $3.9 billion for a vaguely defined project to protect the southeast Texas coastline — referred to only as “Sabine Pass to Galveston Bay.”
Jim Blackburn of Rice University's Severe Storm Prediction Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center said he looked forward to seeing how the $3.9 billion would be appropriated. He said the amount was not nearly enough to fund the “Ike Dike” project, the estimated cost of which runs upwards of $12 billion, but he said the money could be used to build levees on Galveston and Bolivar islands. The corps has not yet approved a design for the coastal spine. A preliminary proposal is expected in the coming months.
“It is irregular to appropriate funds before the internal Corps review is completed,” Blackburn said. “With the amount of money at about $4 billion, that is not enough to build the gates across Bolivar Roads, but you could build the levees with that amount of money. However, no one knows where the levee is to be placed — on the beach? Raising the roads? Behind the roads on Galveston and Bolivar? Usually there is not such uncertainty.”
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said the July 4th flooding, from a mere 4 to 6 hours of rain, highlighted the need for a $2.5 billion flood infrastructure bond that will go before voters on Aug. 25, the one-year anniversary of Harvey making landfall.
“This was a relatively minor storm that almost reached catastrophic proportions,” Blackburn said. “I don’t think it’s really sunk in that these types of storms will occur more and more often.”
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Feds-OK-4B
-for-Ike-Dike-as-July-4th-storm-13052915.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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A central lesson of Harvey: our government officials — local, state, and federal — failed over many decades to do all they could to protect this region from catastrophic flooding. Now, many current officials are trying to do right by people in the Houston area.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett and the county commissioners are among them. Early voting begins this week in connection with the $2.5 billion bond issue Harris County flood control officials have proposed in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. If voters give their approval, the bonds would pay for a long list of flood related projects throughout all of the county’s 23 watersheds, everything from major infrastructure improvements to home buyouts to a new flood warning system.
“This is our chance to tell the world we’re going to get serious about flood control,” Emmett told the Editorial Board, adding that “2.8 cents is not enough for flood control. It’s got to increase.”
The bond issue in its first year would cost the average single-family homeowner about $5 per year, scaling up to a little less than $5 per month over the course of 15 years.
More at www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Stay-mad-Houston-O
ne-year-after-Harvey-Stay-13130972.php
The comments make me think the flood control bond issue will FAIL:
Quote:
Our elected officials have created the conditions for flood (concrete roads, floodplain development, sweetheart deals with developers) but now want to be rewarded with more $$$$ for their wasteful Boondoggles? Say NO to FLOOD BONDS until they clean up their act and come out with COMPREHENSIVE solutions!
Quote:
Translation, we don't know how they are going to spend the money, but let us vote for it, and hold them accountable if we don't like how they spend the money. Just convinced me to vote no.
Quote:Since 90% of voters were not flooded, that is 90% who might feel no need for more flood control.
Vote "no" until there is an overall plan to stop building in floodplains.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Since 90% of voters were not flooded, that is 90% who might feel no need for more flood control.
True, but is there a plan in place? One that makes sense and doesn't cost 10 times what it should?
There's nothing wrong with asking those questions before voting for an additional tax on yourself. Sometimes I think you forget that 99% of the people don't live in the 1% like you. lol
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Yes, there is a plan, in great detail. But what happens is there are 23 different watersheds in Harris County. The flood control work for some of those bayous will be started and finished before others. If the voters knew the exact schedule for the work, the voters along the bayous that get worked on last may well decide that they don't want to pay anything at all until after their bayou is finished. Then the flood control bond election will fail to approve bonds.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Since 90% of voters were not flooded, that is 90% who might feel no need for more flood control.
True, but is there a plan in place? One that makes sense and doesn't cost 10 times what it should?
There's nothing wrong with asking those questions before voting for an additional tax on yourself. Sometimes I think you forget that 99% of the people don't live in the 1% like you. lol
Harris County has NOT decided which bayous will be worked on first. As soon as Harris County decides, the voters along those bayous worked on last will be absolutely disgusted with the process. They will start saying that the process is a failure and that the politicians have betrayed them.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Voters approved a $2.5 billion flood infrastructure bond a year to the day after Hurricane Harvey swamped 204,000 Harris County homes and apartments and killed more than 50 county residents.
An estimated 150,000 of Harris County's 2.3 million registered voters cast ballots, according to preliminary numbers.
204,000 flooded residences, but only 150,000 voted. That is an amazingly low voter turnout. Your house gets flooded but that still is not enough to motivate you to vote to prevent future flooding.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-weather/hurricaneharvey/article/
Harris-County-voters-pass-2-5-billion-flood-bond-13182842.php
Quote:
Estimates to completely protect the county from 100-year storms range from $25 to $30 billion. Court members agreed the $2.5 billion figure would be a significant, albeit small, step in the right direction without pushing a large tax increase on residents.
The bond will increase the tax bill for homeowners by 2 cents to 3 cents per $100 of assessed home value, according to county budget analysts.
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Wasted money indeed.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Voters approved a $2.5 billion flood infrastructure bond a year to the day after Hurricane Harvey swamped 204,000 Harris County homes and apartments and killed more than 50 county residents.
An estimated 150,000 of Harris County's 2.3 million registered voters cast ballots, according to preliminary numbers.
204,000 flooded residences, but only 150,000 voted. That is an amazingly low voter turnout. Your house gets flooded but that still is not enough to motivate you to vote to prevent future flooding.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-weather/hurricaneharvey/article/
Harris-County-voters-pass-2-5-billion-flood-bond-13182842.phpQuote:
Estimates to completely protect the county from 100-year storms range from $25 to $30 billion. Court members agreed the $2.5 billion figure would be a significant, albeit small, step in the right direction without pushing a large tax increase on residents.
The bond will increase the tax bill for homeowners by 2 cents to 3 cents per $100 of assessed home value, according to county budget analysts.
The Internet and it's ability to show us so much and hide so little, can make it very hard to feel good about humanity. My standards have dropped so far I don't have them any more.
I have not read this yet but thought you might be interested - you may know most of it already, but jic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/hurricane-harvey-
is-houstons-unending-nightmare/568579/
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Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday gave the green light to 16 new flood control projects, three days after voters overwhelmingly approved a $2.5 billion bond aimed at boosting the region’s protections against future floods.
The projects include de-silting the Addicks and Barker reservoir watersheds, drainage improvements in the San Jacinto River, Cypress Creek, Luce Bayou and Cedar Bayou watersheds, a stormwater detention basin project along Greens Bayou and conveyance improvements on Willow Creek.
“It’s a matter of starting with the low-hanging fruit, the ones that are ready to go, and move forward,” County Judge Ed Emmett said.
The bond includes more than 230 projects across the county’s 23 watersheds.
“We’ve got to meter the amount of work we produce with the amount of staff we have internally. It’s going to take us a bit of time to ramp up and produce commensurate with the public’s expectations,” said Russ Poppe, the Harris County Flood Control executive director.
More at www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/With-flood
-bond-passed-Harris-County-OKs-16-13189258.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Years of government buyouts have chipped away at the frequently flooded Arbor Oaks neighborhood, returning the subdivision at the confluence of Vogel Creek and White Oak Bayou in northwest Houston to nature one house at a time.
Dozens agreed to sell after Tropical Storm Allison in April 2001, or the next flood in October 2002, or another the year after that. By the time Hurricane Harvey arrived, there were just 13 homes left on the “wet” side of the subdivision, west of the creek.
Now, a year after Harvey, one more resident is ready to pack it in.
“Whatever they give me, I’m out of here,” Helen Rodriguez said. “We have good memories from this house, but there has to come a time when you have to give it up. I don’t want to go through it again. I keep losing pictures, I keep losing stuff the kids did when they were in grade school. It’s too much.”
Harris County Flood Control District’s buyout manager James Wade sent letters to all 3,300 homeowners in more than 70 targeted areas after Harvey and again last February, and almost 1,000 homeowners raised their hands to ask for help getting out of the flood plain. About 100 homes have been razed since the storm, Wade said, and hundreds more slated to be bought with Harvey aid are in the process of being appraised or purchased.
The buyouts — 207 parcels on both sides of Vogel Creek, at a cost of $36 million in federal and county funds — often were contentious. Owners said the county was undervaluing their homes, while officials argued they were offering more than any private citizen would.
Wade said the flood control district appraises each home at its pre-flood value and covers moving expenses, as well as up to $31,000 toward the cost of buying a comparable house outside the flood plain.
More at www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Oft-floode
d-neighborhood-slowly-disappears-13239735.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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100-Year Rain Events to Strike Texas More Frequently
Decades of additional weather data have led federal officials to reconsider rainfall totals in Texas that define 100-year weather events and caution that extreme rainstorms will strike the state more frequently.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday released a study finding that in the Houston area, for instance, 100-year estimates increased from 13 inches (33 centimeters) to 18 inches (46 centimeters) for a 24-hour period. Rainfall previously classified as 100-year events are now more frequent 25-year events.
A 100-year storm is one that has a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year.
The NOAA findings released Thursday can have wide-ranging implications. NOAA rainfall values guide state and federal regulations that then dictate how infrastructure design and development is done. They also determine flood risks and are used in the development of floodplains.
More at www.usnews.com/news/best-states/texas/articles/2018-09-27/study-100-ye
ar-rain-events-to-strike-texas-more-frequently
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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After three years of study, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Friday that the so-called "Ike Dike" -- the 70-mile-long coastal barrier that could cost as much as $32 billion -- is the preferred choice for protecting the Texas coastline from future storm surges.
www.swg.usace.army.mil/Business-With-Us/Planning-Environmental-Branch/
Documents-for-Public-Review/
The Army Corps and the Texas General Land Office will hold a series of public meetings to review the plans for the coastal spine, beginning Nov. 27 in Port Lavaca. The final feasibility report and environmental impact study is expected in 2021. Once a final report is issued, it would be sent to Congress to consider funding the project.
www.houstonchronicle.com/local/article/Army-Corps-of-Engineers-release
s-coastal-spine-13339550.php
The price is estimated at $23,106,582,000 to $31,825,875,000 from Table 6-2 "Cost".
Congress won’t vote on this until 2021, and the engineering will take 2 to 5 years, followed by construction for 10 to 15 years, from Figure ES-6 in the Executive Summary of the report.
Hurricane storm surge protection is coming 15 to 23 years from now. Mark your calendar. I am not excited by the slowness of this life-or-death project.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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More than a year after Hurricane Harvey, developers continue to build in parts of Houston that flood, and it’s not expected to stop anytime soon. After all, one-third of the city is covered by flood plains. On the newest episode of Looped In, the Chronicle’s Mike Morris explains a reporting project that revealed how 1 in 5 homes permitted in Houston in the year after the hurricane are in a floodplain.
Listen at www.HoustonChronicle.com/Looped-In .
www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/looped-in/article/Listen
-Developing-in-Houston-s-flood-plains-13372167.php
Homeowners in the southern part of Timbergrove -- many of whom flooded during Hurricane Harvey -- noticed earlier this year that a nearby tract of land in the 100-year flood plain was being readied for a luxury townhome development.
Outraged that new homes were going to be added there, the residents went to public officials seeking help. Ultimately, they learned that the developer can build on the site, as long as he satisfies new city and county regulations.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Harris County ramps up floodplain buyouts
Updated: Nov. 25, 2018 4:21 p.m.
A Houston Chronicle investigation found that seven Houston homes in the floodplain racked up $9 million in federal insurance payouts, even though the combined value of the properties was less than $500,000.
“There’s not a mechanism to prevent paying those damages through the Flood Insurance Program,” Wade said. Home buyouts erase “those repeat homes that should have never been built.”
The year that has elapsed since Harvey swamped 11 percent of the county’s housing stock has been too long a wait for some buyout-eligible homeowners. In the spring, the Chronicle found that private buyers already had purchased 5,500 homes that flooded.
Wade said in this latest round of FEMA buyouts, about half of applicants have either dropped out of the program or sold to private developers. When firms flip homes to new buyers — who may be unaware of a property’s flood risk — Flood Control District Executive Director Russ Poppe said they hamper the district’s goal to protect Harris County from future storms.
“We have investors come in, and then an unsuspecting renter moves in, and the structures are stuck in the vicious cycle of flooding again,” Poppe said.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/With-bond-
funds-secured-Harris-County-ramps-up-13420009.php
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There is a disconnect between the urgency residents feel about flood mitigation projects after Hurricane Harvey and the laggard pace of the region’s recovery from the storm.
Though work has continued on some flood mitigation projects underway for years before Harvey hit, no major projects have come close to starting construction in the 18 months since the massive storm made landfall.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Possible-d
elay-on-Project-Brays-bridges-irks-13644179.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Reports: land development rules still fall short after Hurricane Harvey
Development regulations to limit flooding in the Houston region have improved but continue to fall short, with insufficient storm water detention requirements that can put homes at risk and a patchwork of rules that could better be aligned across jurisdictions, according to two research reports released Monday.
The first report, focused on detention and drainage, calls for an increase in city and county minimum detention requirements. It also recommends a closer look at runoff in undeveloped watersheds and creation of specific criteria for building there.
www.houstonconsortium.com/graphics/190410_Detention_and_Drainage_Regul
ation.pdf
The second report looks more broadly at varied development regulations, advocating better communication of flood risks to residents, increased use of green infrastructure and continued consideration of what to do with flood-prone homes.
www.houstonconsortium.com/graphics/190410_Development_Regulations.pdf
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Looks like we found our spot to put the overflow of illegals.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:A: There is no overflow of illegals.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Looks like we found our spot to put the overflow of illegals.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
B: You're stupid a f, and that's not gonna change.
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:Quote:A: There is no overflow of illegals.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Looks like we found our spot to put the overflow of illegals.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
B: You're stupid a f, and that's not gonna change.
Not yet.
We've got to fill L.A. first.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Houston remains extremely vulnerable to major storms two years after Hurricane Harvey’s unprecedented rains swamped the Houston area, forcing leaders to consider how flood protection projects can be sped up.
Ninety-five percent of the county’s flood control infrastructure damaged by Harvey has yet to be repaired, a testament to the scope of the monster storm and the laggard pace at which the federal government disburses funds. Though the county flood control district has begun projects supported by a $2.5 billion flood infrastructure bond passed by voters last August, no major improvements have been completed.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/As-hurrica
ne-season-begins-95-percent-of-Harvey-13910194.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Texas governor signs $1.7 billion in state aid for Harvey into law, June 13, 2019
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Abbott-sig
ns-1-7-billion-in-state-aid-for-13990319.php
Tens of millions of dollars in state aid could flow to Houston and other communities flooded by Hurricane Harvey within weeks after Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday signed a $1.7 billion bill marking Texas’ largest response yet to that catastrophic storm.
The bulk of that money, and billions more in federal funding remains months, in some cases years, from ever reaching local authorities, however.
Senate Bill 7, a flood-control package authored by state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, was the marquee bill among a stack of disaster legislation Abbott signed Thursday at Gallery Furniture, the huge north Houston showroom where owner Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale housed flood victims during Harvey.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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After supporting flood bond, Houston-area developers want to delay new building rules -- July 8, 2019
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/After-supp
orting-flood-bond-Houston-area-14074362.php
Houston-area developers, engineers and real estate professionals were among the most vocal supporters of last summer’s $2.5 billion Harris County flood bond, the largest storm infrastructure investment in county history.
They contributed to a political action committee established by bond backers and helped shepherd the initiative to passage on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Harvey, the devastating 2017 storm that flooded more than 204,000 homes and apartments in Harris County.
For the past several months, however, many of those players quietly have lobbied Houston and Harris County officials to delay implementation of new building rules developers say will increase housing costs but county engineers insist are needed to protect neighborhoods from future storms.
The changes under consideration would expand the area subject to flood-related building restrictions by roughly 65 percent in areas of the county outside the city of Houston, and would require developers to devote a larger share of their properties to holding back stormwater, among other changes.
Pressure from the development community already has delayed a Commissioners Court vote on the regulations by five weeks, though builders’ pleas for even more time have not prevented the Harris County Flood Control District from asking the court to approve the new rules on Tuesday.
This round of changes is following the same pattern as the last one: The county mandated higher building elevations in floodplains roughly three months after Harvey, with immediate effect; the city acted five months later and gave builders — who strenuously opposed the changes — a five-month grace period.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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With urgent need to begin post-Harvey flood projects, Harris County seizes properties
Nov. 22, 2019
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/With-urgen
t-need-to-begin-post-Harvey-flood-14874279.php
More than two years after Hurricane Harvey dumped 4½ feet of water in his home in the Castlewood neighborhood of Aldine, Trinidad Hernandez is eager to see his new kitchen finished. Two workmen installed cabinets and granite countertops last month, part of a design by Hernandez’s brother.
But Hernandez acknowledges the remodel, which includes upgrades to the living room and bathrooms, may be pointless. Using eminent domain, Harris County is seeking to seize his and four other Castlewood properties, raze the buildings on them and convert their part of the neighborhood into a detention basin. Hernandez is fighting his case in court.
“We haven’t had a kitchen in two years, and we’re barely finishing it,” Hernandez said. “We’re going to maybe get to enjoy it for three months. That’s the stuff that makes you sick.”
The dispute offers a preview of difficult decisions ahead for the Harris County Flood Control District as it seeks to purchase thousands of homes in the flood plain, some of whose owners are reluctant to sever long-standing community ties and abandon residences that may have been in their families for generations. District officials argue such repeat-flood neighborhoods burden the government’s flood insurance program and are dangerous for first responders.
In the past four years, the county has purchased 467 flood plain homes through voluntary buyout programs. The $2.5 billion flood bond approved by voters in 2018 includes funds for about 3,600. In rare cases, the county seeks court approval to seize property via eminent domain.
. . . He understands why the flood control district needs to demolish the neighborhood, but he said that the buyout offered by the county is too low to cover the price of a new building and that renting would cut into his business. He hopes to strike a better deal with the help of a lawyer.
. . . About 180,000 homes and other structures sit inside the current, inaccurate 100-year flood plain — a figure that will likely surge when new flood plain maps are drawn that reflect higher rainfall totals from the Tax Day, Memorial Day and Harvey floods.
Buyouts are reserved for areas where no mitigation would be practical, said Poppe, the flood control district head. The county offers to purchase homes at market rate and provides funds for closing costs and relocation. Involuntary buyouts are a last resort, he said, taken only after years of negotiations have failed.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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$1.4 billion gap in flood bond program, raising prospect of project delays
March 9, 2021
Harris County on Tuesday revealed a $1.4 billion shortfall in funding for flood control projects under the bond program voters approved in 2018, a massive miscalculation that threatens to cause construction delays and cost taxpayers more than expected.
Budget Officer David Berry told Commissioners Court that projected funding from state and federal partners, which was supposed to supplement the $2.5 billion investment by county taxpayers, has not materialized. As a result, the county has committed to doing more work than it currently can afford to do.
“The hope after Hurricane Harvey that federal and state partners would really be focused on Harris County, where we saw the worst damage, has not altogether turned out to be true,” Berry said.
Berry said the county believes it can secure an additional $100 to $500 million from the state and federal governments, but that still leaves “a substantial gap.”
The court on Tuesday unanimously approved a motion directing the Harris County Flood Control District to develop a plan to secure more funds by June 30. Berry offered several potential solutions, including using some toll road funds or raising the flood control district property tax rate.
Harris County voters overwhelmingly approved the $2.5 million bond program in August 2018. Then-County Judge Ed Emmett and flood control district leaders said by making a down payment on better flood protection, voters could expect state and federal partners to invest an additional $2 billion or so in the plan. So far, that has turned out to be only partially accurate.
Poppe did not say how many potential projects may be need to be scaled down. Most projects already are underway. The flood control district plans to give a comprehensive update on the bond program to Commissioners Court at its March 30 meeting.
Since before the flood control bond passed in 2018, Commissioners Court members generally have agreed that future bonds would be necessary, since the flood control district pegs the full cost of protecting the county against 100-year storms at more than $30 billion.
Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said voters likely would reject future proposals if they feel they were tricked into supporting the first one.
Precinct 3’s Tom Ramsey agreed, arguing the county must complete all 181 projects and keep its word to voters.
County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who took office five months after the bond passed, said the local government once again is scrambling to fix a dilemma that should have been anticipated.
She compared the flood bond to her predecessor’s plan to renovate the Astrodome, which she views as an unambitious, underfunded solution to a grand problem. And she implored Berry and Poppe to get to work quickly on a better plan.
“I’m glad that Dave, you’re thinking about this strategically,” Hidalgo said. “But this is not just a budget issue. This is a strategic thinking issue. And Russ, your strategic thinking needs to be up real quick.”
More at https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/environment/articl
e/Harris-County-reveals-1-4-billion-gap-in-flood-16012642.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Houston needs $30 billion for flood control, but has less than $3 billion. Could Texas afford to pay? YES! How?
The GNP of Texas is $1,900 billion per year. Bigger than Canada and South Korea.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/texas-enters-2021-as-worlds-9
th-largest-economy-by-gdp-301216400.html
And the economy is growing at a nice pace:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=BaQx
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=BPv0
With an annual GNP of $1,900 billion for Texas and a cost of $30 billion for flood control, it should be easy to pay, especially because Houston will only need about $3 billion per year spread out over 10 years of work. But it isn't easy.
The problem with Houston paying for its flood control with all of Texas' money is that Texas won't pay. Texans NOT in flood-prone areas of the state won't transfer money to solve Houston's flooding. Houston could move parts of itself to a less flood-prone area, which would be like Bangladesh, where most elevations are less than 10 metres (33 ft) above sea level, moving north into India, or else Houston will flood. But moving Houston is even more expensive than improving flood control where Houston already is located.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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