All the residents of this flooded assisted living facility were rescued, but the photo emphasizes to me how many people lost their family photo albums and irreplaceable memorabilia in this catastrophe.
Perhaps this will serve as a reminder to readers to make digital copies of such items and distribute them to other family members.
Image cropped for size from the original.
Addendum: Followup photo the next day at a new location. The cat was also rescued.
a couple of before and afters of harvey visiting houston:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000005394951/before-and-after-harvey.html Houston, Before and After Harvey
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/tropical-storm-harvey-houston-flooding-disaster Before and After Images Reveal Houston's Disastrous Flooding From Harvey's Rainfall
I-)
The NYT one is very nicely done. Tx.
DeleteOne of the most upsetting of scenarios set in the most banal of settings.
ReplyDeleteIf you live in a flood plain, and your house is destroyed, I think, by law, every structure should be built on stilts/concrete posts. Common sense people. They retrofit buildings for earthquakes in San Fran...why the heck wouldn't you do the same sort of forward thinking for flood zones?
ReplyDeleteI don't have statistics, but it's been my observation that the majority of the homes built in my part of central Houston (near Brays Bayou) in the last several years have been elevated. This does not seem to be the case in the surrounding suburbs, however. Houston proper is famous for its lack of zoning laws, so that makes enforcing building codes a bit more difficult. I imagine (and sincerely hope) that the city is more proactive in the future. It's true that we're prone to flooding and have had some significant but very localized flood events in recent history, but Harvey dropped biblical amounts of rainfall over a huge region larger than many US states. Better planning would have spared a lot of the troubles we're currently facing, but many areas would still have been inundated even with reasonable flood protection.
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