Slowly getting more and more optimistic

As the day is ending here on Harvey Monday, the water has inched closer to our door, but Harvey’s window of opportunity for invading our house is closing.

We are now officially outside of the “potential track of Harvey” as calculated and published by the National Hurricane Center, and more importantly, we are to the west of it. We needed Harvey to move east; he has obliged us. We are still projected to get up to fifteen more inches of rain. But as long as that fifteen inches comes at more or less the same steady pace it’s been coming at all day, I think enough of it will drain as we go so that the water might reach our porch, but probably wouldn’t get into the house.

One really serious thunderstorm could still get us; but the chance of that keeps shrinking steadily, bit by bit. At this point I think it is likely that we will make it all the way through with a dry house. And since we haven’t yet even lost power, I’d say that would make us one of the luckiest families in the Houston area. Not home free yet, but we can see the front porch light, as it were.

Now I have to start making up for lost time on work projects…

The trouble with being absent-minded

Thanks to Ken Buss for the following:

I like Siri

Here is the text message I meant to send earlier this morning:

“Based on the voluntary evacuation zones it looks like Ft Bend County officials expect the Brazos to flood a swath anywhere from seven to ten miles wide on its way through our county.”

Here is what Siri actually sent:

“Based on the voluntary evacuation zones it looks like Ft Bend County officials expect the Brazos to flood ex-wife anywhere from seven to ten miles wide on its way through our county.”

And you thought your ex-wife was plus-size…

Morning update (Harvey, Monday morning)

Water down a couple of inches in the street outside because we escaped last night with little rain. No immediate rain coming per the radar, but we are still projected to get up to fifteen more inches before this thing leaves, which will probably get water into the house. Brazos River coming up fast and rapidly shutting off exit routes for rain falling in our neighborhood. Essentially we are at the mercy of Harvey’s whims about where to drop his rain. So I would say the question is: do we feel lucky?

Praying for Jennifer Daniel Nease and family, Travis Rodgers and family, Stanley J. Leffew and Jessica Leffew and family, Brad and Becki Smith and family, the Lee family, the Schmalz family…all of whom are under mandatory evacuation notices (with the roads impassible already), and therefore all of whom are feeling much less lucky than we at the moment.

But lucky or not, we are all, still, blessed. (Romans 8:28)

Hurricane Harvey update: doesn’t look good for us.

So this evening, after another rainstorm had moved through, I looked out and saw this:

Well, at that point I figured it was time to assume we would need to keep water out of the house. I didn’t have very good waterproof tape — duct tape was the best I could do — but I had tarps and some sand. So: first the tarp, nailed in; then a couple of layers of cross-hatched duct tape; then paper-hanger clips nailed through the duct tape to assist the adhesive; then sand bags around the vulnerable corners; and then more sand or other weights to pin the tarps down on the ground and hopefully seal all the way so that water couldn’t get in either under the tarp or around the edges.

The big problem was our garage, because we didn’t have enough sand and tarp to seal all the way across three cars’ worth of doors. The best we could do was hope the rubber seal on the bottom would hold due to the weight of the door, and try to seal the corners off.

I hardly have a lot of faith in that; so we also did the interior garage door:

Of course if we have significant water in the garage for very long it’ll probably cause the drywall to collapse and then we are hosed anyway…

Just before 10:00 (there’s a 10:00 curfew in place now) I went for a walk halfway around the block.

Our neighbors are in even more trouble than we are:

I feel particularly bad for these folks, who have been trying to sell their home for several months and didn’t get it sold in time:

At any rate, I was feeling that we were about as well prepared as we could be…and then Helen showed me this map. It took me a minute to realize what it meant…but when the penny finally dropped, I realized we are pretty much hosed.

What that map says is that the Brazos River is going to go so much higher than it has ever gone in history, that it will actually flood most of Sugar Land, which until Harvey was unthinkable to anybody. We are not in an evacuation zone — but mandatory evacuations are affecting people less than a mile from us, and the people three streets away, on the other side of Oyster Creek, are in a voluntary zone. (Our address is 926 Goldfinch Avenue; type it in and you’ll see what I mean.) And as I told Helen, I figure the only reason we aren’t in an evacuation zone is that they’re waiting until tomorrow for us, so that they can first get out the people who are in more danger.

We should get ten to fifteen more inches of rain in the next two days. Unless at least some of the water drains out of our neighborhood, that easily puts water above our living-room floor level — and I suspect that at least one of the four entrances our home has, will see my little tarp barricade fail. But our water is already not draining out of the neighborhood, and the Brazos rise hasn’t gotten here yet.

(sigh) So I guess tomorrow we’ll start moving stuff upstairs. We don’t have flood insurance because…well, because anything less than Harvey wouldn’t have threatened our house. I suspect there are lots of others like us.

(grinning) Oh, well, I didn’t want to retire at 70 anyway.

You guys can pray for us…only, there are so many people in Houston who need prayer so much more badly than we do. We have a lot of friends who are in the mandatory evacuation zones. Even if we do get tens of thousands of uninsured damage to our house, we aren’t going to die or anything, and we should salvage most of our possessions except maybe (sigh) the new furniture we got two months ago that Helen so loves. So I guess am saying I know a lot of people who need prayer more than we do. But if you think of us, fire a quick one off all the same.

Heroes

Dusk falls over the riverside

Where is Thomas Kincaide when you need him?

Do these Weather Channel people not know anything about weather?

The Weather Channel doofuses have already annoyed me once, but apparently once is not enough to satisfy them…

WEATHER CHANNEL CHICK: Mike, before we talk about Buffalo Bayou, I want to ask — have we ever had a situation like this before, where a hurricane made landfall, then went back out into the ocean and made a second landfall as a tropical storm?

THE PERIL: Ivan!

WEATHER CHANNEL DUDE: Well, nothing really comes to mind…

THE PERIL: IVAN!!

WEATHER CHANNEL DUDE: …I mean, we’ve seen lots of things over the years, and maybe a tropical storm that came ashore and then went back out, but a hurricane, no, I don’t…

THE PERIL: IIIIII-VVVAAANNN — 2004 — for heaven’s sake you guys work for the Weather Channel and you were coming to a hurricane in Houston, did you not do any research AT ALLL???!!!…hmmm, maybe I should go take a nap.

Sometimes even when life is bad…

…life is good.

Current status

We woke up this morning to this:

Now this in itself wouldn’t be bad — it was worse than that in the Memorial Day flood — except for one major issue — the water was just sitting there. In the Memorial Day flood, we had a raging river. Now? Just sitting there.

“Uh-oh,” I thought, “that acts like there’s nowhere for the water to go.” So I grabbed and umbrella and beach sandals and sloshed my way around the block and down to the nearest point where I could get a view of the lake levels…and sure enough, we’re backed up this far from the lakes.

Now that is bad, because what that REALLY means is that we’re seeing the backup from Oyster Creek.

We could no longer get out with the Chevy Cruze or the little Lexus, but I could still get out with the Lexus SUV. So I made our last supply run, and now we’re booked in for the duration. I have tarps and finishing nails and waterproof tape and big backs of fertilizer so I can put up a nice waterproof barrier at the front door; it now begins to look as though we will have to actually do that. For even if we don’t get any more rain, if Oyster Creek rises three or four more feet we’ll have water in the house. And looking out the window as I type, the water in the street has risen at least an inch in the last half-hour, though I think that is our local runoff since we just had a mini-squall blow through.

As you can imagine, I am not feeling any more kindly towards the Sugar Land local officials in charge of lake levels than I was since I wrote this. While I was out I checked to satisfy my malevolent curiosity, and the water in the local bayou into which the local lakes could be released by opening the sluices (a) is flowing briskly, meaning the Brazos level has not yet gotten high enough to back it up and also means that water is still Gulf-bound, and (b) is a good ten feet lower than the level of the Sugar Lakes. It continues to look to me as though the local officials could have pre-emptively lowered the Sugar Lakes levels by at least a couple of feet before all this started, in which case there wouldn’t be any water in my street yet. So, you know, thanks fellas!

(Still hoping I’m wrong and that for some reason there was no way to open the sluices and lower the lake levels…in which case it would be necessary to blame the engineers and developers who put those lakes into flood-prone Fort Bend County and didn’t bother to provide any means of draining them in an emergency. And switching from blame mode to solution mode: surely if local governments are going to be so regulation-happy as to require hairdressers to be registered with the government, couldn’t they at least require that any future such developments would include appropriate flood-control measures? Hmmm, somehow that still seems to have a whiff of blame-y libertarian hostility to local government to it…)