Yep. I live about a mile away from Buffalo Bayou and Studemont / I-10 [ [Link] ], but was miraculously - by an inch, maybe - spared from getting water in my house. Got out of the house yesterday (Tuesday) for the first time since Friday afternoon. Went scavenging for supplies to take to the evacuation shelters and helped out as best I could.

Edited by Ray in Houston (30 Aug 2017 5.57pm)

I'm sure all that TV coverage of people in Houston escaping the 10 feet of water in their houses is very inconvenient.

Also, the quote is "Houston we've had a problem." So annoying when people (everyone) get it wrong.

Well, our neighbours to the east - Beaumont an Port Arthur - got slammed and Harvey is going to drift inland and cause a s***-ton of flooding to any low-lying areas it comes across for a few more days yet.

A chemical plant blew up last night having lost power, back-up power and emergency refrigeration a couple of days ago. It's now burning who knows what* and sending toxic smoke into the local atmosphere.

* Texas' response to the explosion in the town of West a few years back was to remove the requirement that chemical facilities tell the locals - including first responders - what they're cooking. Arkema - the plant owner - is still keeping mum on what we're dealing with. Because...freedom?

Meanwhile, Irma is out there in the Atlantic and appears - albeit from long range - to have the Gulf Coast in her sights.

I know the world continues to turn/burn and s*** is happening elsewhere; we're still at war in Afghanistan and Iraq FFS! But this is a serious national story in the US at least, especially as it's climate change walking up a punching us in the face.

Edited by Ray in Houston (31 Aug 2017 4.42pm)

I doubt there will be a change of heart from those who deny climate change. However, this bears all the hallmarks of a storm that was far worse and for more badly behaved due to climate change. It sped up as it reached the coast (weird) and went from a Tropical Storm to a Cat 4 hurricane in 44 hours (crazy). Because warmer seas mean more moisture in the atmosphere, it had far more water to collect and dump on its way.

It's not like this storm doesn't happen without climate change; but climate change definitely made this storm far worse that it would have been otherwise. We're talking about a 1/2 degree increase in sea temperature made Harvey the biggest rain-maker ever to hit the US, instead of just a weekend of bad weather for southeast Texas. Sea level rises renders existing sea walls etc. as inadequate as the storm surge ahead of such storms are increased. There's a multitude of ways that climate change ramps up individual weather events, and things like Harvey are a manifestation of those things in perfect combination.