Hello! Long time no blogging. The doc was getting burned out from work and other things… then Hurricane Harvey hit Houston.
I survived with little damage to my house, so I’m pretty happy about that. Unfortunately, many of my friends and coworkers were not so lucky. They had damage ranging from a few inches of water in their garage, submerged cars and trucks, a few inches in their house, to having the entire first floor under water. Lots of hassles, from cleaning out a garage to gutting an entire floor of a house — and all the headaches of dealing with insurance companies, FEMA, and replacing lost property.
I’m really happy that no one I know was severely injured, although many had injuries after the flood during the clean up.
Anyhow, here are a few observations I made before, during and after the storm.
Before the storm
This one was going to be a doozy, judging by the non-stop news reports and satellite imagery. Better go to the store and stock up. Here’s what the local grocery store looked like… slim pickings. Fortunately, the liquor store was well stocked and so were the people coming out of there. Although drinking is probably not a great idea during an extreme weather event, but it might help to pass the time afterwards when you’re trapped in your neighborhood.
No place to go
Houston was not ordered to evacuate, which was probably the right thing to do. But once the rain comes, you’re not going anywhere. The streets were flooded. I saw the water in the street rise to a few feet from my door, then stop.
My house is about 22 feet above sea level, in a neighborhood with fairly decent drainage. However, the rain was coming down so hard and fast, and for hours and hours, it simply could not drain away fast enough. I’ve never seen rainfall that hard, last so long. The only breaks we got were between giant rain bands of the hurricane as they swept across Houston.
It rained like this for almost 7 hours straight, plus a lot of other not quite as long-lasting events as each rain band scathed across Houston. You can see the water creeping up the driveway if you look carefully. This video really doesn’t do it justice. It was the most intense and long-lasting rain I’ve ever seen. Now I know how Noah must have felt. 🙂
Another interesting observation was when looking at the radar it showed a rain band that didn’t seem that thick, maybe a few miles across. Although it quickly became apparent that these rain bands were shaped like giant arcs and that the rotation of the rain bands was tangential to any one spot, so you got rain bands dragged over you along the long axis, not directly across. So it rained and rained and rained and rained. Crazy.
If the flooding got bad, the only place to go was up. My house has a loft area, so I put all my important valuables (pictures, family treasures, important documents, etc) up in the loft, along with food that didn’t need refrigeration, sleeping bag, etc. I also put my chain saw, crow bar and axe up there. People have drowned during flooding by going into their attic without a means to breakthrough the roof. Sounds like a horrible way to die.
Water to drink
An important consideration in a pending natural disaster is your water supply. Often times, especially where flooding is concerned or power is lost, the water supply may eventually stop flowing, or water can become contaminated. You can live without food for weeks, but without water you’re in deep trouble within a few days.
So water containers and a means to purify water are essential. I took every large pot I had and filled it up with tap water. I also had a large blue 6 gallon water jug, so I filled that up. I also keep a bottle of plain liquid bleach in the laundry room, which can be used to purify water in a pinch. Fortunately, it never got that bad, but better prepared than thirsty.
No Power
Sometime in the middle of the night during the first wave of deluges there was a loud explosion in the neighborhood, then the lights went out. Apparently, one of those big transformers that sits on the ground had flooded and then shorted out in a big explosion. No power means no heat, but that’s not usually a problem in Houston. But what it does mean is no morning coffee. Ohh, the horror!
I had to improvise. That morning after the storm I pulled out my backpacking stove and heated up some water. I had my AeroPress Coffee Maker and my hand coffee grinder, so I used that to brew a decent cup. Thank heavens. You can do without the necessities provided you have the little luxuries.
Another issue with no power is no internet. Now there’s a scary thought. I might have normally bridged my laptop to the internet on my phone, however cell coverage had reverted to 3G instead of LTE, and multiple cell towers were down, so I had one bar of a very weak signal. Texting was about the best I could do with my phone for a few days.
I think my router and cable modem may have still been working, if only they had power. Since then, I have invested in a rechargeable lithium power pack that can run my wifi router, cable modem and laptop for hours on battery power. I also have some solar panels that I bought on sale a few years ago, and have not done anything with them. I need to set it up to charge my power supply. (Stay tuned for a future post about that!)
I was totally surprised when the power came back on the next day. People say a lot of bad things about Centerpoint, and they can be a pain in the ass to deal with, but they were definitely on the ball before, during and after this hurricane. (Centerpoint controls the transmission lines, but thanks to power deregulation I buy my 100% wind juice from Champion Energy).
Aftermath
For the next three days I was trapped in my neighborhood as the water slowly receded and the streets dried out. The doc has had big four-wheel drive SUVs and trucks all his life, but is currently the proud owner of a Ford Focus. A great vehicle, but not the best for flooded roads choked with debris.
Upon finally venturing out into the streets, it was a mess. Debris, trees, trash everywhere. Traffic lights not working. No cops in sight. It was a bit eerie. Many roads were still impassable due to water, and this is in an area of Houston that didn’t even get the worst of it.
Helter Shelter
Not long after the worst of the storm, the call went out by email and Facebook for doctors and nurses to staff the local shelters. Mind you, this was an informal notice, like much of the response to this hurricane it was people helping people. The local, state and federal authorities were COMPLETELY overwhelmed for the first week after the storm.
Volunteering in the shelter was an interesting experience. I had no idea what to expect, never having done that before. Basically, the shelter was full of a lot of people of limited means whose homes had been flooded and they had nowhere to go. These folks had injuries from fleeing their flooded houses in the middle of the night, being evacuated, preexisting medical needs that were not being met, and were under incredible stress.
For two weeks a large team of all volunteer doctors and nurses staffed a small make-shift medical clinic around the clock. People who were good at planning took on that role, others who were good at leading did that. It was an amazing team effort, that was repeated all over Houston.
Medical supplies were donated by the Red Cross, and by doctor’s offices in the community. Fortunately, a few pharmacies were still operating. The shelter provided volunteers to drive people on errands, including to the pharmacy. We gave away a lot of meds, and wrote a lot of prescriptions for people who had left their house in a hurry in the middle of the night as the water flowed into their houses and they fled without their critical medications.
We saw everything from extreme anxiety to uncontrolled high blood pressure and diabetes, to lung disease. We sent a few people by ambulance to the local hospital or to the federal mobile DMAT hospital, but most folks we managed to treat in the shelter. It was an amazing effort all around.
Rebuilding
Friend’s of mine had the first floor of their house destroyed by flooding, like many other folks where I work. They lived in an older neighborhood in the South Houston area. An area where houses sit on large lots of land, surrounded by woods. Unfortunately, for them, there are lots of streams and rivers in this area too. All of which flooded.
Like many places in Houston, areas that had never flooded before in recorded history were underwater. So many people did not have flood insurance, because they were not required to have it.
A large volunteer crew of coworkers, friends and family got to work. We gutted the first floor of their house, and piled it up on the street for the city to eventually take away (many weeks later). Anything that touches flood water has to be disposed of… furniture, floors, walls, insulation, etc. All I can say is, what an unfortunate and incredible mess.
Some drone footage I took of a friend’s neighborhood after the flood. Houses were gutted and debris piled on the street. This area was under about 7 feet of water, enough to submerge the first floor of all the homes here.
Surveying the Damage
The destruction wrought by Harvey was immense. The third largest US city was brought to a stand still. Since the storm, the damage has been estimated at $130 – 190 billion dollars, making Harvey the most costly disaster in US history.
Beyond the monetary costs, the death toll has been estimated at 88 persons, although the official toll has yet to be released, and counts of this kind are notoriously difficult to assess and usually end up much lower than the true figure.
What role did climate change play?
In a nutshell, warming climate resulted in unusually warm ocean water in the Gulf of Mexico, which led to increased energy input into the storm, and more moisture pulled from the sea. Eventually, this excess moisture in the atmosphere was dumped on the land when Harvey made landfall and the storm lost energy. Harvey stalled out over Houston for several days, which also worsened the impact. This behavior may also be due to climate change, but that relationship has not yet been robustly established.
Here are some charts from Cedar Bayou in Baytown, which received the some of the largest rainfall totals, 51.88 inches of rain. A station near where the Doc lives got 44 inches. These charts are from the Harris County Flood Control District.
Several groups of climate scientists have attempted to determine what specific role human-caused climate change played in making Harvey worse. In recent years climate scientists have begun investigating how to attribute the impact of a global problem on regional or local events. This is a budding area of climate science that is rapidly growing and improving.
Mark Risser and Michael Wehner at Lawrence Livermore National Lab estimate the contribution of climate change to increasing rainfall during Harvey at, “at least 18.8% (best estimate 37.7%).” This group used extreme value statistical analysis to determine their estimates, which uses past historical data referenced against an extreme event. These researchers also determined that ALL of the additional effect was due to human-caused increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, and colleagues from various academic organizations used somewhat more conservative methods and came up with a value of about 15%, with a range of contribution of 8 – 19%. They categorized the worst hit area of the storm with respect to precipitation (Baytown, Tx) as a 9,000 year event, with a 1,000 year event for the storm as a whole. This is in comparison to a historically “normal” atmosphere from before 1950.
Interestingly, both of these analyses show a contribution greater than would be expected merely by increasing water temperatures and resulting moisture uptake from the ocean. The “expected” relationship is dictated by the Clausius-Clapeyron Equation, which says that for every 1 degree Centigrade of increased temperature, the air will hold 6 – 8% more moisture.
The second paper suggested that this deviation from Clausius-Clapeyron was probably driven by stronger winds aloft and updrafts which help keep the water suspended in the atmosphere, until it is released when the atmosphere cools over land. And… that this will likely be a feature of extreme rain events going forward, which I believe is born out by all of the extreme events we’ve been seeing in the recent past.
So when you think about the impact of climate change on human suffering from an event like this, how does it relate? I am willing to bet that it’s not a one to one relationship. In other words, you probably don’t simply get 1 more death for every extra inch of rain. More than likely it’s an exponential relationship when thinking about these extreme events. The first excess inch of rain gets you 1 extra death, then the next inch gets you 10, then the next inch gets you 100, and so on. And for every excess death, 1,000 people are displaced. Something like that. This would be an interesting analysis, and I think it’s not impossible to do. The implications are dire for the impacts of climate change.
How can you protect yourself?
The Climate Advisor’s has several posts written about climate change and flooding. Check them out here…
Climate Change and Deadly Floods: What you need to know – gory details about the relationship between climate change and flooding
How to prepare for flooding caused by climate change – learn about the risk factors and health impacts, and how to respond to flooding
How to prepare for and survive a flood – just the important stuff
With the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall events in the US and around the world, you better be ready. Especially if you live near any body of water. Even a tiny creek in your neighborhood can become a raging river when you get 50+ inches of rain at one time like Houston did. Old flood maps are becoming more obsolete every year. So don’t be complacent.
Bonus!
Check out this excellent podcast discussion on ClimateOne about adapting cities to climate change, with the Mayors of Houston, Charleston and Miami…
