by "Wagon Guy drives a Boostang" (gimmeboost)
Published 08/28/2017 at 00:16
by "Wagon Guy drives a Boostang" (gimmeboost)
Published 08/28/2017 at 00:16
No Tags
STARS: 1
Corvette for your time...
Ok, I am perturbed. I was going to say angry, or maybe frustrated, but that’s not quite right.
Anyway.
As mentioned before, my ex-wife lives in Houston while I’m in Austin. So with Hurricane Harvey beating up on the Houston area, I’m naturally concerned for my kids well-being. Older daughter was supposed to move into her college apartment last Friday, and when I didn’t hear anything otherwise I figured that they had managed it.
We’ve had a family text message chain going since Friday, verifying that everyone here under the storm have been safe, and we were getting individual responses from the kids. All seemed normal in that regard for the past two days. Then today I find out that they hadn’t actually moved my middle daughter to her 5 th floor apartment in Austin, but she is still in Houston! “Something came up.”
I’ll tell you what came up! Flood water, that’s what! WTF do you mean you’re still in Houston?! When are you coming this way? “Monday morning.”
So in addition to everything else they’re going to be fighting heavy outbound traffic from Houston with everyone trying to evacuate from the floods. At 4pm today I was encouraging them to leave immediately. They could all stay at my house until morning, since I wouldn’t be there anyway, but no. They’re not leaving until morning.
I totally don’t understand. It’s not like a tornado that you don’t know is coming. This was a giant hurricane, we knew about it for a week, but they’re still sitting in its path. Stupid.
< update >
I heard from my older daughter this morning about 6:30. “The roads are so flooded that emergency services just came by in a boat. Not going to Austin today. Can’t leave the house. Should have left Friday”
crap crap crapity crap
"PatBateman" (PatBateman)
08/28/2017 at 00:27, STARS: 1
20% of Fort Bend country just got out under evacuation orders. That’s an extra, oh, 80,000 people potentially on the road tomorrow.
"Svend" (svend)
08/28/2017 at 00:38, STARS: 3
You can’t cure stupid mate.
Any rational logic would suggest getting out as soon as possible with minimal traffic, ie the path of least resistance to where you need to go.
Unfortunately you can only hope they make it safely.
"bob and john" (bobandjohn)
08/28/2017 at 00:39, STARS: 2
Jesus fuck your ex wife is denser then a bag of bricks
"Wagon Guy drives a Boostang" (gimmeboost)
08/28/2017 at 00:47, STARS: 2
If they had gotten out on Friday and had problems then, I’m in a position at my job where I could actually send them help if they got in trouble. But now? No way in hell, everyone is scrambling to rescue people in even worse situations and they’d have to take a number. (I work for the state police.)
"Wagon Guy drives a Boostang" (gimmeboost)
08/28/2017 at 00:48, STARS: 1
I used to think she was an intelligent person. Then she turned 32 and lost her damn mind... Guess when we got divorced...
"Wagon Guy drives a Boostang" (gimmeboost)
08/28/2017 at 00:49, STARS: 1
yep.
My sister was texting me all kinds of stuff in frustration, but really, I can’t do anything about the ex being dumb.
"Svend" (svend)
08/28/2017 at 01:59, STARS: 1
True and as an ex, anything you say or do would be classed as confrontational.
All you can do is be ready to pick up the pieces for your daughter mate.
"themanwithsauce - has as many vehicles as job titles" (themanwithsauce)
08/28/2017 at 02:07, STARS: 1
Well one would hope when she was 31.5 but I don’t think that’s when it actually happened....
I feel you there, man. Same thing with my ex. At first she was smart but then it seemed like she had to re-learn so many life lessons every day. At the end of our relationship she decided to tell me she was going on a mostly carb diet to lose weight because “Carbs are good for you! atkins is bad!” and that she didn’t tip servers anymore and only tipped when we split the bill together to not look cheap. But she had a good reason for not tipping - to show the restaurant industry that the tip system is wrong!!!!
Fucking sacks of hammers, I tell ya!
"Jayhawk Jake" (jayhawkjake)
08/28/2017 at 08:25, STARS: 0
As a native Houstonian, I don’t think it’s fair to say ‘you knew it was coming you should have left’
Houston gets hit by storms all the time, and the vast majority of them don’t cause damage like this. If you evacuated every time there was a storm coming you’d never be home. Plus if the whole city evacuated all you’d have is massive gridlock clogging every road out of town. That’s what happened during Hurricaine Rita years ago.
Not to mention no one knew Harvey would be this bad. As the NWS reported this event is ‘unprecedented’. It’s being categorized as an 800 year flooding event. In the 25 years my parents have lived in their current house in Houston the flood waters have never been this high before.
Most of the time you’re safest sheltering in place and there really was no reason to think this storm would be any different than the many storms before it. It’s very easy for someone looking from the outside with hindsight to say they should have left, but it’s not necessarily accurate or fair.
"Wagon Guy drives a Boostang" (gimmeboost)
08/28/2017 at 09:40, STARS: 0
It’s not hindsight. I was IN the state emergency operations center on Friday when the storm hit Category 4. Saturday I asked the youngest to come to Austin. I saw it stall and start to meander on Saturday night. I asked them to come to Austin on Sunday. I was watching parts of the storm that the news was missing, everything going on over the gulf. and we knew where that water was going. My older daughter admitted to me this morning, “Should have left on Friday”.
I don’t mention it here much. I work for the Texas State Police...
"Jordan and the Slowrunner, Boomer Intensifies" (jordanwphillips)
08/28/2017 at 09:41, STARS: 0
She’s not wrong that the tip system is wrong, but she is wrong for punishing the employee, not the employer.
"Cash Rewards" (cashrewards)
08/28/2017 at 09:45, STARS: 1
Don’t know how Katrina changed mindsets in the gulf coast area, but I lived in New Orleans just prior to that storm. I remember evacuating for a hurricane that was “definitely” hitting the city (it didn’t), only to be told to evacuate again a couple weeks later. We stayed, storm missed again. I was living in Indiana for Katrina and had a friend evacuate. I remember asking him “you really evacuating?”, and him saying no, just an excuse to come visit. Lived with me for months.
Tldr: realistically understanding risk is something people are bad at, especially when there’s so much uncertainty in these forecasts you feel like they cry ‘wolf’ so often.
"Wagon Guy drives a Boostang" (gimmeboost)
08/28/2017 at 09:47, STARS: 1
Oh I get that. Especially when everyone is telling you to “shelter in place”. It’s just too bad they never listen to me...
"themanwithsauce - has as many vehicles as job titles" (themanwithsauce)
08/28/2017 at 09:56, STARS: 1
Right. Also she was wrong for acting like it’s taking some dramatic moral high ground to save 2 or 3$.
"DipodomysDeserti" (dipodomysdeserti)
08/28/2017 at 10:33, STARS: 0
Isn’t this the seventh major flood southeast Texas had had in the last two years? Wasn’t there just a 10,000 year rain event a few years ago followed by several 100 year rain events? And all those were without hurricanes hitting. Seems like you should be expecting flooding like this considering the recent weather history.
"Jayhawk Jake" (jayhawkjake)
08/28/2017 at 14:41, STARS: 0
That’s like saying we should expect softball sized hail every time it thunderstorms because we’ve gotten a little dime sized hail in the past.
7 major floods in the last two years and none were this magnitude. In the last 20 years there have been at least a handful of hurricanes without flooding of this magnitude. There was no reason for average citizens to expect this to be worse , so why would they have acted any different than in the past?
Again, while one example doesn’t represent the entire city, my parent’s saw the water levels significantly higher from Harvey than they have ever seen in TWENTY FIVE YEARS . That’s unprecedented, and I maintain it’s unfair to expect people to expect something this unprecedented.