🎊🎈 Moving back into my house train! [Levels 0-7+] 👀🌀

Well, you have to remember that this was a freak occurrence of events. It was just a category 2 hurricane, which we usually just laugh at when they go by. Seriously, you might get some shingle damage or some downed trees, but we're talking a couple of grand in damages, max, and you fix up a couple little things and move on.

But the problem with Harvey was that it landed right when there was a 3,000-mile-long stationary front parked right over Southeast Texas. Now, my Dad has been a pilot for over 50 years and said he's never seen a stationary front that big in his life. They're usually a couple of hundred miles across, and big storms like hurricanes just sort of slide around them. But this front stretched almost the length of the US, and so it just parked the hurricane right over Houston and the surrounding area. That dumped about 50-100 times the water you would usually get, even with a much stronger hurricane, because it just kept pulling it from the warm ocean and dumping it on the land.

It was NINE TRILLION gallons of water in the Houston area. It was so much water that it actually compressed the Earth's crust two centimeters in this area (no, I'm not joking). And, despite that, my neighborhood might not have flooded at all, or at least very little (replace some floors, and open up walls low down to ensure everything is dried out...nothing that would keep you from living in the house) if it weren't for the Army Corp of Engineers and the Harris County Flood Control district deciding that the reservoirs were dangerously full and deciding to release water from them at 200% of the maximum rate that had ever been done in the past.

Essentially, my neighborhood was sacrificed to ensure that there wasn't a catastrophic failure of the reservoirs (and a subsequent 20-ft tidal wave washing across Houston and killing thousands). The worst part is that engineers came to the county well over a decade ago and told them that they needed a third reservoir in the case of a catastrophic event because there was too much construction west and north of Houston, and those areas hadn't designed their own retention...and all of that water would just head to the reservoirs design for Houston. They said that it was too expensive. [Yeah, how expensive was this crap? I'm betting at least 10-20 times more costly.]

So, for this to happen again, we'd have to have an event that statistically is a one-in-a-million-year event (maybe even rarer) combined with mismanaged infrastructure (I'm betting that third reservoir gets built now). Our house is 40 years old and hasn't ever flooded from a hurricane in the past. Heck, it's hardly had any shingle damage, and it's been through a couple of category-4 storms.

Technically, we aren't even required to have flood insurance because we're not in the 100-year flood plain. Now, we have it anyway, because we're those people (and this past year, we were really thankful that we're wired up that way). But that's why it's understandable that so many of our neighbors didn't have it. But, even with insurance, we're still out thousands of dollars from our own pockets...it didn't cover all of the loss. But, it was a lot better than having nothing and did cover most of our expenses for the rebuild.

Anyway, there you have it. We don't intend to move...we really like where we live, and what happened here shouldn't ever happen again. I grew up in Indiana, and they have tornadoes...California has earthquakes...Washington state could experience a significant volcanic eruption basically any time...Florida gets hurricanes, all of the Northeast gets blizzards and ice storms...almost no matter where you go, there's some kind of potential for natural disasters. Our risk here really isn't any worse than any place else we would consider living, and is actually less than most.

Wow, that was a lot longer response than I expected to give. LOL I hope that helps explain things...I promise that we're not crazy, stupid, or even ignorant about this. I mean, we're probably crazy, but it's for completely different reasons. Ha ha ha ha ha

Yeah, that's still pretty bad. We're probably one of the first three houses to be fully habitable. There are probably 30-40 houses with people living in them, but it's basically advanced camping...mostly older people with grown kids, so they're just sleeping upstairs and avoiding paying for a rent house or apartment, and they just eat out for every meal since they don't have a functional house.

So, it'll be a little bit of a ghost town when we move back in, but both of our neighbors on either side of us are about 1-2 months behind us, so we'll at least have them back pretty soon as well.

Thanks!

And yeah, Choooooooo-chooooooooo!

(I tried to put in a few weirdo/interesting things that I picked up on Indiegala that I haven't seen given often...hopefully you'll find some stuff in there that you like. 😎)