Hurricane Ivan, the storm that caused so much destruction last week, has risen from its ashes and is now a tropical storm off the coast of Galveston and Louisiana. It only has 50 mph winds but it promises to bring a lot of rain this way. In my 15 years living in Texas, I’ve never experienced a hurricane, but tropical storms can be pretty devastating, too.
Three years ago we had Allison. All Allison did was come ashore and then park herself in the perfect place to suck rain out of the gulf and drop it on Houston. We must have had 20 to 30″ of rain in some places. Downtown Houston has a triangle formed by I-10 going East-West, I-45 going southeast to Galveston and US 59 going southwest to Freeport. The part of Houston in that delta turned into a lake.
The water table in Houston is pretty much at ground level, which is why the concept of the basement doesn’t exist around here. The ground is constantly saturated and it doesn’t take much to saturate the earth. Many buildings in the downtown area flooded extensively. Underground parking garages turned into watery automobile graveyards. Edifices where the designers had cleverly hidden the power plant and other crucial equipment in the bottom levels lost power, including a major hospital in the medical center. In photographs of I-10 you can see some large rectangles–these are the tops of transport trailers, which is all you can see of them. Many people drowned in their vehicles on the interstate and on other surface roads, or were washed away in flash floods when they tried to get out of their vehicles.
The saddest story from Allison happened to a person I knew through our local writers guild. She had recently lost her job because the printing company she worked for was bought and closed down. She found a new job in a high rise building in downtown Houston and had only been there a week when Allison struck. Stranded in the building, everything would have been okay if everyone had just stayed put. However, a night watchman came along and advised her to go down and move her car up a few levels because the water was rising in the parking levels. She took the elevator down to the parking garage…and drowned when it passed through flooded levels. I can’t even begin to imagine what that was like
All this comes to mind when we hear about a tropical storm. We know what damage even a mild storm like this can do. We might have anywhere between 4 and 10″ of rain in the coming day or two. If that happens, parts of Houston will be underwater.
Shifting gears, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that my USA Today efforts paid off and The Road to the Dark Tower got a nice write-up on page 8D of today’s paper. You can read it online here. Should help raise awareness of the book in the community at large.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the community newspaper acted on my press release and printed large portions of it in the newspaper today.
Bev that story of the girl drowning is horrible.
I was wondering if the newly reformed Ivan was going to hit you. Hopefully it won’t hit at all. :::crosses fingers:::
Ivan seems to have fizzled out. We might get half an inch of rain…some places might get three or four, but all the storm warnings have been cancelled.