‘FLOODING ALL OVER THIS CITY’
Hurricane Harvey hits Houston
More than 3,000 national and state guard troops are being deployed to assist with relief and recovery efforts as the United States’ fourth-largest city and surrounding areas try to cope with Hurricane Harvey, which since has transformed into a storm of historic proportions.
Gov. Greg Abbott said in a news conference Sunday that the perpetual rain and dire flash flooding has produced the strongest storm the state has seen in at least 50 years. He could not confirm death totals nor the number of evacuations, but the National Weather Service reported five deaths. The service issued a statement that the storm was “catastrophic” and “beyond anything experienced.”
By Sunday afternoon, the National Weather Service was predicting that parts of Texas could receive nearly 50 inches of rain, the largest recorded total in the state’s history. Communities in southeastern Texas, already experiencing water so high that it engulfed vehicles up to their car handles, were continually being beaten down by heavy sideways rain.
The flood warnings also came with urgent pleas for residents to be cautious, stay indoors and not attempt to travel flooded roadways. Police and rescue workers implored residents who see flood waters rising near their homes to make their way to the highest point possible — even if it is a roof — while awaiting rescue. On Saturday night, a woman was found dead by her vehicle, believed to have been trapped during a flood.
More than 66,000 homes were without electricity. The U.S. Coast Guard dispatched five helicopters and Houston is expecting about 40 additional boats to find those in need of help, Mayor Sylvester Turner said in a news conference. He defended the decision not to issue evacuation orders, noting that it would have been a “nightmare” to empty out the population of his city and the county all at once.
“You literally cannot put 6.5 million people on the road,” Turner said.
“This disaster is going to be a landmark event,” said Brock Long, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, speaking to CNN’s State of the Union.
Words cannot describe the catastrophic situation unfolding in Houston and southeast Texas. As daylight dawned Sunday morning, the scope of the devastation began to come into clearer focus, and it will probably take months, if not years, to fully recover from damage of this magnitude.
The total rainfall from the storm is likely to tally up to a widespread 15 to 30 inches (38 to 76 cm), with a few localized spots picking up to 50 inches or more. Many textbooks have the 60-inch mark as a once-in-a-millionyear recurrence interval, meaning that if any spots saw that amount, they would essentially be dealing with a one-in-a-million-year event.
Regardless of whether we reach that 60-inch benchmark, “it’s fair to say it will produce more rain than we have ever seen before in the U.S. from a tropical system, and over the fourth-largest city in the country,” said Eric Fisher, chief meteorologist at WBZ-TV in Boston. “Looking at those two factors, it will likely be an unprecedented flooding disaster affecting a massive number of people. It’s hard, if not impossible, to compare this to any other storm. It may stand alone when all is said and done in terms of rainfall.”
Putting this into perspective is challenging; after all, the sheer volume of water is incredibly tough to visualize. Fortunately, we crunched the numbers — here’s how they stack up.
So far, just the rain that has already fallen across the greater Houston area and Southeast Texas tallies to nine trillion gallons (34 trillion litres). That’s only what has already come down, and keep in mind that 5 trillion to 10 trillion additional gallons could fall before things wrap up mid-week.
The 9 trillion gallons of water dispensed so far is enough to fill the entire Great Salt Lake in Salt Lake City — twice! It would take nine days straight for the Mississippi River to drain into Houston and equal the amount of water already there.
This amount of water could fill 2.3 per cent of the volume of the mountain range containing Mount Everest in Nepal and is enough to occupy 14.2 million Empire State Buildings, from basement to penthouse. Similarly, about the same number of Olympic swimming pools could be doused.
But here’s the kicker: Just how unprecedented is this? Well, remember the flooding that New Orleans experienced with Katrina? Most places saw about 10 to 20 feet of water thanks to levee failure, inundating about 80 per cent of the city. Now, if we took the amount of rainfall that Texas has seen and spread it over the city limits of New Orleans, it would tower to 128 feet in height — roughly reaching as high as a 12-storey office building.
This is entirely uncharted territory. For years, many had watched movies like The Day After Tomorrow, and thought, “Someday ...”
Unfortunately, that day is today. Welcome to the future of weather.