Saturday Open Thread

Posted on August 26, 2017 by rikyrah

Be safe, SG2 and Texas citizens.

Harvey slows over Texas as a Category 1 hurricane, bringing 1-3 feet of rain and potential for ‘catastrophic’ flooding

Nine hours after making landfall as a Category 4 storm, Harvey stalled over the Lone Star state, drawing energy from the Gulf of Mexico. At 7 a.m. local time the center of the hurricane was 20 miles west-southwest of the city of Victoria, with top sustained winds of 80 miles per hour. It is expected to weaken during the day to tropical storm status. Damage assessments are still in the early stages as dawn comes to the central Texas coast. The city of Rockport has suffered extensive damage. Harvey is the strongest storm to hit the U.S. in more than a decade, and forecasters warn that its most lethal effects are yet to come.

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26 Responses to Saturday Open Thread

  1. Liza says:
    August 26, 2017 at 10:07 pm

    Harvey delivers heavy damage as it batters Texas coast
    By Kevin Sullivan, Tim Craig and Joel Achenbach August 26 at 10:06 PM

    VICTORIA, Tex. — Harvey pummeled Texas on Saturday, destroying buildings and causing widespread power outages as residents evacuated towns and prepared for historic flooding that could keep them from their homes for days.

    After the storm pounded the Texas coast, it crept inland and then stopped moving, as if mired in mud, and its torrential rains are not expected to abate for many days. Rising rivers have started to trigger evacuations across a broad section of the state, and computer models are forecasting record flooding.
    …
    In the coming days, forecasters expect the storm to meander south and east, and possibly slip back out over the warm gulf waters, allowing it to restrengthen to some extent. All the while, it will dump what could be historic quantities of rain — 15 to 30 inches in many areas, with as much as 40 inches in isolated areas, according to the National Weather Service.
    …
    Among the cities at risk of major flooding is Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest, with a population in excess of 2 million. Saturday evening, the city was buffeted by mammoth rains and nonstop lightning. The National Weather Service was keeping much of the area under tornado watch into the evening.
    …
    To the west, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg urged residents to continue to stay off the roads as Harvey neared the city and brought wind gusts of op to 60 mph and heavy rain. The city is under a flash flood watch and tropical storm warning.
    …
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/hurricane-harvey-hits-texas-bringing-high-winds-storm-surge/2017/08/26/64fa6982-8a28-11e7-a50f-e0d4e6ec070a_story.html?utm_term=.0111981d3d7c

    Reply
  2. Liza says:
    August 26, 2017 at 9:37 pm

    Good Lord. They’ve already got 293 photos on weather.com.

    Harvey Leaves Widespread Devastation (PHOTOS)
    Aug 26 2017 01:15 PM EDT
    weather.com

    https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/tropical-storm-hurricane-harvey-images

    Reply
  3. Liza says:
    August 26, 2017 at 9:33 pm

    A little moment of relief here, really cute. Picture at link…

    Dog Spotted Carrying An Entire Bag of Dog Food After Harvey
    By James Crugnale
    Aug 26 2017 04:00 PM EDT
    weather.com

    A Texas woman’s photo of a dog appearing to carry an entire bag of dog food — in the hours after Harvey barrelled through the state, leaving behind a trail of devastation — has gone viral, illustrating the impact that severe storms can play on pets as well.

    Local resident Tiele Dockens told weather.com that she was surveilling the damage from Harvey around Sinton, which is located just outside of Corpus Christi, when she spotted Otis, a golden retriever mix, carrying the large bag.

    “We are a population of about 6,000,” Dockens explained to weather.com. “We were out today clearing tree limbs from streets. Families are already starting to clean up. Our town is still out of water and power. I was driving around checking on family and friends’ properties that decided to evacuate. Otis was strolling the streets after the owner let him out.”
    …
    Dockens confirmed the dog was safe.

    https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/dog-spotted-carrying-dog-food-bag-photo-harvey

    Reply
  4. Liza says:
    August 26, 2017 at 9:27 pm

    SG2 tweeted something 42 minutes ago so she’s doing okay.

    Reply
    • Liza says:
      August 26, 2017 at 9:58 pm

      It was a retweet, not about her.

      Reply
    • Liza says:
      August 26, 2017 at 10:21 pm

      The local newspaper in SG2’s area has no post-landfall updates right now. And I can’t find anything else which might be an indication that they aren’t getting hit too hard at this time. In her area, they were mostly just expecting a lot of rain (10-15 inches), according to the local newspaper.

      Reply
  5. Ametia says:
    August 26, 2017 at 6:44 pm
    Reply
    • Liza says:
      August 26, 2017 at 9:22 pm

      “The baby-faced Borden, who was charged with malicious wounding, has a history of hate.”

      The charge should be attempted murder, IMO. But I’m glad they caught this young sociopath before he actually did kill someone.

      Reply
  8. yahtzeebutterfly says:
    August 26, 2017 at 12:44 pm

    “Local Officials Want to Remove Confederate Monuments—but States Won’t Let Them Laws preventing the removal of statues raise questions not only about historical legacy but also about local control and public safety.”
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/when-local-officials-want-to-tear-down-confederate-monuments-but-cant/537351/
    Excerpt:

    Leaders in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, had long looked askance at the Confederate monument in Linn Park, a granite obelisk soaring more than 50 feet in the air near downtown. In a city with a bloody civil-rights history and a nearly 75 percent African American population, the memorial seemed like a provocation even before violent protests broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia, where leaders want to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee.

    “With the condonement by the president of the activities that took place, or the moral equivalency of hate speech, we felt that things were beginning to get out of hand and that we needed to speak up and speak out against all the hate groups,” Mayor William Bell told me Friday. “We felt that the best thing for us to do was to end this controversy by covering up our monument so it would not be used as a focal point for any hate speech.”

    Why didn’t they just have city workers haul the statue out, the way mayors in Baltimore and New Orleans did? The statue stands in a public municipal park, and the mayor and the city council agreed that the statue was both improper and a threat to public safety. But in May, the Alabama Legislature passed a law that bars the “relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, or other disturbance of any architecturally significant building, memorial building, memorial street, or monument located on public property which has been in place for 40 or more years.” That meant Bell couldn’t have it removed, and when the mayor decided to erect a barrier around the monument, blocking it from public view, the state attorney general promptly sued him and the city for violating the law.

    Across the South, citizens are rising up and demanding that their towns and cities remove Confederate monuments. And in many of those cities, local officials are reckoning with the fact that they don’t actually have the power to do that. Alabama’s is the newest, but several states also have laws on the books that are designed to prevent the removal of Civil War memorials. In North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi, statues are protected by laws that preempt local governments from removing them. And the standoff in Charlottesville was catalyzed by a Virginia state law that prevented local authorities from removing the Lee statue, as they’d desired. (On Tuesday, workers draped a large black tarp over the statue.) </blockquote.

    Reply
  9. yahtzeebutterfly says:
    August 26, 2017 at 12:38 pm

    “ANALYSIS: Trump made controversial moves as nation focused on hurricane”
    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/analysis-trump-made-controversial-moves-nation-focused-hurricane/story?id=49436333
    Excerpt:

    First, at 6 p.m. ET, came the announcement that President Trump had sent a much-anticipated memo to the Pentagon codifying his seemingly impromptu Twitter announcement last month to ban transgender people from the armed services.

    Exactly two hours later came the second story. The White House sent a press release announcing Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio, the highly controversial former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who is reviled and admired for his harsh treatment of undocumented immigrants. The press release and a subsequent tweet by the president lauding Arpaio for “admirable service” made no mention of the fact that the pardon was for the sheriff’s conviction on criminal contempt for violating a federal court order that he stop detaining people solely for immigration offenses.

    The pardon, Trump’s first as president, appears to distinguish him from other recent presidents who waited to issue their most controversial pardons or commutations until the end of their terms.

    The news on Friday night didn’t stop there. Just minutes after word came of the Arpaio pardon, the conservative news site The Federalist posted what it called a “resignation letter” from Sebastian Gorka, a special assistant to Trump who had drawn scrutiny for his alleged ties to a far-right Hungarian nationalist group and questions over his national security expertise.

    Reply
  10. rikyrah says:
    August 26, 2017 at 11:21 am

    Good Morning, Everyone 😐😐😐

    Reply
  12. Ametia says:
    August 26, 2017 at 10:13 am

    BWA HA HA HA

    Reply
  15. SouthernGirl2 says:
    August 26, 2017 at 10:08 am

    We’re still at my daughter’s but gonna leave in a little while.

    Reply

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