Turns out simply wishing people good luck and asserting everything is going to be fine [1] is a poor substitute for extreme weather monitoring / defence / preparation / response [2].
"Over the last seven months, the president has both proposed and implemented numerous policies that surround hurricane preparedness, readiness, and response. Here are some of them:..."
Counterpoint: isn't this the PERFECT time? This is one time when we can discuss possible policies and it's not completely abstract. We can point to what a policy would have or would not have changed about what is currently going on.
For example it's much easier to convince people that it's OK to cut certain parts of the budget when no one has seen some of those programs used much in a couple of years. Events like this make it clear that preparations for extreme storms, even if they're not common, are still necessary.
Now of course most of what Trump has "done" is PROPOSALS to the budget, so he hasn't necessarily changed anything yet. But it still seems like a reasonable time to discuss these kind of issues.
And the government involvement in flood insurance, basically subsidizing people to live in areas that are a lot more dangerous than necessary.
Fortunately the Trump administration (in partial continuation of Obama policies) is attempting to reduce FEMA subsidy for people living in floodplains[1]. It's a messy process to end an unhealthy subsidy that many depend on but with this particular problem it may be worth buying people out--lives are at risk as well as just dollars.
That's good. That's one of those things (like the home interest tax deduction) that seems like a terrible idea we already have and is near political suicide to actually get rid of. At best people can just keep chipping away at it until it's affectively gone.
Let's quantify a once in a lifetime event just a little bit:
Let's say it's a 'hundred-year' event which means that it has a 1% probability of happening in a given year. And let's say that the event costs what Katrina did[1], i.e. ~$100 billion ($100,000,000,000).
That's an expected loss of $1 billion every year.
Once in a lifetime events like really bad hurricanes hitting a particular Gulf city aren't exactly 'unknown unknowns'. And furthermore, major damaging hurricanes in the US total (not just a single city) happen every 5-10 years maybe. It's absolutely worth putting a lot of resources into risk reduction (hazard assessment, long-term resilience efforts, disaster planning and strategizing). Ignoring this is shameful, especially considering that hurricanes are the costliest disasters the US faces, and efforts understanding and preparing for 1 once-in-a-lifetime event like Katrina will substantially apply to an independent once-in-a-lifetime event like Harvey.
And political will is the only way that things will get done in an appropriate fashion. It's not exclusively political/governmental (for example, reinsurance companies invest in research into this and their results plinko down to local insurance rates) but governments are in the best position to coordinate efforts, enforce regulation (zoning etc.), and have both bigger assets and bigger liabilities than everyone else.
>During the peak of the flooding on Saturday night, the National Weather Service in Houston issued an apocalyptically worded “Flash Flood Emergency for Life-Threatening Catastrophic Flooding.” That kind of warning wasn’t a thing before Harvey, which just adds emphasis to the unique risk this storm poses.
>The event is so rare, that even the NWS is unsure of what will happen next. In a chilling follow-up tweet on Sunday, the NWS said “this event is unprecedented & all impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced.”
Yes, but just because it happened for the first time now it won't happen anytime soon again? Maybe not next year, but really lifetime rare? I think it's better to prepare and it not happening than not prepare because it's just a once in a lifetime thing.
They even say it isnt sure what's going to happen next. So you can't say now that it is a once in a lifetime thing.
In someways isn't this the governments job? It's very easy for people to plan for things that happen every year or two, one of the things the government is capable of doing is looking further ahead than normal people will getting ready for THAT.
This hurricane yes.
The last comparable event was the destruction of Galveston in the early 1900ies, which led to the rise of Houston.
This is a hurricane with masses of hot mexican golf water, which decided to stop directly behind Houston to unload all the water there, the 3rd largest city in the US, which is huge and totally flat.
The rivers are showing record factors of flow, 10x more than the previous flow records. E.g 70.000 cfs in La Grange. The previous record was like 6.000 cfs.
You cannot deal with such numbers, but still the dams are holding.
I see. Thanks for providing some context and numbers. Seems to be much larger than I thought. But it could still be that the number of these kinds of hurricanes could go up, no?
It being a cat 4 hurricane was bad enough, but the flooding is largely being caused by the two high pressure systems on either side of Harvey [0][1]. Storms normally aren't held in place for a week straight.
So it may be more important to try to understand whether there'll be more storms + surrounding high pressure systems
