Re: I would take a hurricane over the oil disaster
Posted by
POCTX on 6/29/2010, 8:25 pm
The problem w/these really "wet" storms, as Alex seems to be, and it isn't unique to S TX/ N MX but it is pronounced, is not always the destruction at landfall but the flooding inland afterward. Given our topography, low and flat, then hills or mountains, is a recipe for disaster and it is nothing new. I think it was 80s' Allen that caused record flooding in the Hill Country hundreds of miles away from landfall. This is standard for "wet" 'canes that have legs. And coastal flood warnings have been up from the Upper TX Coast to the N GOMEX.
Comparing disasters is tricky. TS Allison killed 41 from TX to PA and is the only TS with a retired name (and was worse for many in parts of the Houston metro area than Ike.) Another Carla (1961) with landfall up the coast, a worst-case scenario strike on Houston would be an environmental disaster with a large death toll that the nation would feel for some time. Carla was so large it caused hurricane conditions in every coastal cty in TX, but made landfall at Port O'Connor, 1 MPH short of Cat 5. Surge went 20 mi inland in some places. Everyone on the TX coast at that time thinks it "hit" them, to hell w/the definition of "landfall." If it happened now, w/ all the petrochem on/near the coast, the levees that surround, say, Alcoa in Port Lavaca, across the hwy from the levee-free Formosa, would be topped between the surge and the waves. Same goes for other petro states - you can't separate loss of life from environmental disaster if we're talking catastrophic 'cane, in the short term or the long term. |
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