A couple of trucks made it through. I'm not in a truck.
The good news is that we should be on the “dry side” of Harvey before long. The bad news is it started raining while we were out. Hard. All over the city.
That’s not quite true; I can probably reach I-10, but with 340+ major highway closures (which doesn’t count other streets; assume thousands), I’m not going anywhere. I couldn’t even reach Greens Bayou on the morning scout. I’ll have what pictures I could get
, shortly. Times like this, I wish I had a drone….
Edit: forgot to mention
, Barker and Addicks floodgates are open, and Lake Conroe’s gates have been opened also.
We’re losing parts of the Flood Warning System. Not a lot, but I’ve never seen “OOS” tags before. Also, reaching their server seems to be a bit… spotty, and the local Greens Bayou gauge hasn’t reported a stream level in over 90 minutes (but still reports rain).
Raining
, thunder (which I haven’t heard in a while), and the power blinked. But we might be about to get some clear sky for a few hours.
Bigger picture:
But…
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Round 'herebouts, we measure rainfall in feet, boyah!
These gaps are saving our asses by giving some of the floodwaters time to run off.
I dug up my nearly 15-year old Sony 2 megapixel camera. Screw Microsucks and mePhone.
The unnamed bayou again. This is backing up from Greens Bayou
More below the fold.
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Apologies in advance for the terrible quality of these photos. They were taken on an iPhone 6, from inside my car, and often by my brother, on the move. It wasn’t safe to get out or even stop much of the time; there’s a surprising amount of people trying to get from point A to point B today. Or parked at C because that can’t get to A or B.
EDIT: Ok, I hate the iPhone and Microsoft. I’m rotating every photo BEFORE I upload it–which WordPress then compresses it to the small size you see in the post. Most are cropped too. That works fine. Despite that, when you click for the full-size version to be downloaded to your computer, it returns to the sideways format –which I already rotated, dammit! From some experimenting, it seems the real problem is not on my website; it’s that the photos are encoded on some level to tell YOUR system the proper, original orientation. And no, I don’t know how to fix that, or tell you to turn that feature off.
About two blocks from my house, a small tributary of Greens Bayou. I'ts about a foot from reaching the road, and I figure it will.
A little more on that picture. It’s the location of Gage 1610 from the Harris County Flood Control district. Below is the stream elevation data — this is now the third worst recorded level ever; exceeded only by the two tropical storms Allison (yes
, there was an earlier one in 1989, and it sucked too).
Four more days of this?
This is an unnamed bayou on Uvalde, just north of the fire station.
Uvalde at I-10, facing west
Unfortunately, I couldn’t safely get a good photo of all the trucks stuck on I-10; the feeder road is literally a parking lot. (What you see here is duplicated on the east side, though not on the eastbound feeder road.) They’re trapped by I-10 and Beltway 8 interchange being underwater on one side, and Greens Bayou covering I-10 on the other. The Home Depot is quite busy, although Ace Hardware was still closed. Academy at Market and I-10 was closed, which isn’t surprising as Greens Bayou is only a few feet from its backside.
All in all, not particularly spectacular, but the real reason is that I can’t GET anywhere the spectacular flooding is, well, the spectacular flooding. And I don’t want to waste the gas to try, given that we’ve got maybe five more days of this coming.
Metro stopped bus and train service, unsurprisingly. Harris County Toll Road Authority has waived all tolls until further notice. This would matter more if anyone could USE the toll roads.
List of roads with high water (get your scroll wheel ready):
