[HN Gopher] My Family and the Flood
___________________________________________________________________
My Family and the Flood
Author : herbertl
Score : 257 points
Date : 2025-07-15 22:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.texasmonthly.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.texasmonthly.com)
| a5seo wrote:
| Reading this account made me think of a paper I read in grad
| school about the Mann Gulch fire and how quickly one's ability to
| make sense of the situation unravels.
|
| https://www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Letture%20TDPC/K.%20Weick%2...
| markm248 wrote:
| This is the most gripping thing I've ever read
| jihadjihad wrote:
| It's a really tough read regardless, but if you've got young kids
| (or nieces/nephews), it's downright brutal.
| lpa22 wrote:
| This was possibly the saddest piece I've ever read based on how
| it was written
| Configure0251 wrote:
| Absolutely devastating.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of A Marker on the Side of The Boat by Boa Ninh
| from Night, Again.
|
| There's a bit of horrifying tension, and you hope everyone's ok.
| No matter how unlikely.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| I wonder how frequently that river (and the rest of the world)
| will experience once-in-a-hundred-year weather events from now
| on.
| sokoloff wrote:
| There are over 2000 watersheds in the US. It would be unusual
| if we didn't see around 20 100-year floods every year.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Extreme precipitation events are also getting more common.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| I would think they'd be correlated enough to mess up the
| numbers a little.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Right. It's the multiple-endpoints principle. The extreme
| events feel overly frequent because we cherry-pick and only
| notice them. We never notice the other 99/100 of places that
| don't have a hundred-year flood in a year.
| jkestner wrote:
| At a (central Texas) city council hearing today on granting
| someone a variance to build tennis courts on a meadow next to a
| creek, a longtime resident said, "I think I've lived through
| five 500-year floods here."
| nocoiner wrote:
| Where I live in Texas, we had three "500 year" events in
| three consecutive years, with the last one probably closer to
| a 1000 or 10000 year event - more rainfall in one spot than
| anywhere else ever measured.
|
| We'll see how long that record holds (I'll take the under on
| 1000 years).
| kbelder wrote:
| There's probably many other 1 in a 1,000 year events that
| haven't happened in many thousands. It's really hard to
| reason about infrequent events, especially post-hoc.
| Havoc wrote:
| I guess if you're building something in vulnerable spots
| tennis court is better than house
| jkestner wrote:
| Not for the neighbors. The courts are 10x the impermeable
| cover of the house they're also trying to build. There
| should be nothing on that land.
| Yeul wrote:
| If in the Netherlands a river floods millions are affected
| and there is trillions in damage. If in America a river
| floods a few hundred people die. That's why my country takes
| this stuff seriously.
| chiph wrote:
| The "Once in a hundred year" saying is misunderstood. It's
| actually 1% chance each year. So you roll your D100 every
| spring.
|
| Whether that's an acceptable risk is up to you. Having lived in
| central Texas, it's a region known for it's flash floods, and
| you should take the warnings seriously. If there's heavy
| rainfall - you should be asking where all that water will go.
|
| In this case, I hope that Texas looks into upgrading their
| alerting system so that people get word in time to leave the
| area. The news was saying the weather center added additional
| staff for the storm (five meteorologists) but if their
| forecasts can't get to where they're needed, that's not good
| enough.
| croes wrote:
| But you would question the dice if you roll your D100 ten
| times and it shows the same number on six throws
| dylan604 wrote:
| > In this case, I hope that Texas looks into upgrading their
| alerting system
|
| Since the July 4 flooding, I feel like the over correction of
| flood warnings via mobile phones is not a good thing. My
| phone has been going off with near daily flood warnings with
| 0% precipitation. I get how rain upstream can cause flooding
| where it's not raining downstream, but it hasn't even been
| raining upstream. I'm also well over 200 miles away from
| where the worst of the flooding happened. People that far
| away do not need these warnings. The notifications have
| listed counties not close, so it just comes across as "let's
| do something just to say we did something"
| wellpast wrote:
| Mobile notifications is a terrible solution to this
|
| Need ground alert sirens or something that would be taken
| seriously
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's a terrible solution if it is the _only_ solution. Up
| until this situation, the alerts I received on my phone
| have been pretty spot on, which has been impressive. Yes,
| local sirens are a good idea, but they come with caveats.
| I have local sirens in my area, but they are for tornado
| or other severe weather. If I hear those sirens, my
| action to take is totally different than for a flood.
| Naturally, if I were to come to an area where the sirens
| are meant for flooding, my reaction to them would be the
| wrong move. I would hope that a siren for flooding would
| just sound different than how the established tornado
| siren warning system sounds.
|
| This trained response to a siren/warning system is the
| reason they chose _not_ to use the tsunami warning system
| in Hawaii during the fire. When that siren goes off,
| people seek higher ground which would have driven them to
| the fire.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| I think once-in-one-hundred-year is a definition for weather
| events used in building standards (sorry to be vague and
| possibly misleading - if my resident architect/partner was
| here, I could be more specific). I've certainly heard of
| constructions like levies etc "build to withstand once-in-a-
| hundred-year storms". I wonder if these standards are being
| revised by appropriate international bodies?
| chiph wrote:
| I think it has become a "term of art" used by agencies like
| FEMA and insurance companies. And it makes for a good
| soundbite on the news.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Well, that was no fun to read. I wonder if my house would survive
| a flood as well as it would an earthquake.
| K0balt wrote:
| The only reliable way to survive a flood with strong currents
| is to not be in one.
|
| I will not live long term on land that has historically been
| subject to flooding, or where the site forms part of a
| constricted drainage.
|
| There are enough risks in life that cannot be realistically
| mitigated. No sense exposing your family to one day in and day
| out that is just a matter of choice. Unfortunately, humans are
| terrible about understanding probabilistic risks, and our
| short, brutal lives offer little opportunity to appreciate the
| nature of long-period risk.
|
| A "hundred year flood" means that there is a seventy percent
| chance that your house will be wiped away within your lifetime.
| It's like choosing to be habitually reckless with fire in your
| home. We aren't reckless with fire because the risk is very
| tangible and within our control. Long period risks are just as
| real and often just as much within our control, but we have to
| think in terms of math and not our "feeling" of security. Our
| instincts about safety and security are honed over millions of
| years to understand what is a safe Place to camp for the night.
| We are not intrinsically equipped to viscerally understand this
| kind of risk.
| jonah wrote:
| My parents property sits at the confluence of a creek and a
| river. They've built their house on a promontory that had
| signs of inhabitation by indigenous peoples. We had a
| "100-year flood" when I was growing up. It was quite
| impressive to wake up in the morning and see the water within
| six vertical feet of the house and 30 to 40 ft. of water the
| bottom field with entire trees floating Long.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| Reading this makes me so sad and reminded me of a book I read
| years ago: Hiroshima by John Hersey - about the first-person
| narrative account of survivors who witnessed the impact of atomic
| bomb dropped on Hiroshima that morning.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Like the little boy with his skin melted off walking down the
| road crying for his mother... horrendous stuff.
| Foreignborn wrote:
| These stories always have me instantly sobbing, life can be
| tragically unfair.
| qingcharles wrote:
| That book lives rent-free in my head since I read it about 10
| years ago. There's no way to forget some of the scenes in that.
| lokl wrote:
| If you have the opportunity to visit, I recommend Nagasaki over
| Hiroshima and especially these two places in Nagasaki:
|
| Shiroyama Elementary School
|
| Nagai Takashi Memorial Museum Nagasaki
|
| These felt much more personal than anything I saw in Hiroshima
| and there were zero (other) tourists to interrupt the
| experience (very much unlike the museum in Hiroshima).
| gkanai wrote:
| I cant imagine writing this having experienced the loss the
| author has.
| dylan604 wrote:
| And just 10 days after the event to be released, so written
| earlier. Not sure of the exact date it was written as the
| article has an August 2025 date in the byline. Hopefully it was
| helpful in their grief, which with how the last half was
| written seems to be at least part of the intent.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| With all the debris and the water force, would it have even
| helped if the concrete pillars were 10 ft higher?
| nocoiner wrote:
| Reasonable question. Yes, in that case, the house probably
| would have been fine. The lateral force on concrete pillars,
| even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily
| withstood.
| brazzy wrote:
| The very first thing in TFA is a photo of where one of the
| pillars was ripped from the foundation. If that happened
| because of the force of the water against the house on top of
| it, then it could also happen when a tree or other large
| piece of floating debris hits it.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > even from tremendous volumes of water, is fairly easily
| withstood.
|
| Physics is not on your side here. if it was just water, then
| perhaps, although I am sceptical given how much force is
| generated by 10foot of water moving at 18 mph, which is
| ~6metric tons of lateral force. (assuming 1m2 cross section.)
|
| Thats before any flotsam gets attached increasing the surface
| area.
|
| Sure you could build something to withstand that, but could
| you afford to build it?
| acuozzo wrote:
| > but could you afford to build it?
|
| And, if not, could you really afford to live there?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| It would have helped if the columns were correctly tied down -
| those rebar stumps tell a story, which is that they did the
| foundation pour, left stubs, and then poured columns atop them
| with a cold joint. Fine if you're doing a carport in a desert.
| Criminally negligent in a river floodway.
|
| For that kind of structure, you _must_ tie the rebar in - best
| is to have the entire length of the rebar for the column splay
| at the base and be threaded through and tied into the rebar for
| the footing, pour the footing, and then pour the columns as
| soon as the footing is cured enough to support the mass, but
| before it's totally hard. That way the footing and the columns
| form a continuous structure, without any point where they can
| just lift or shear off.
|
| I speak from experience, having built exactly this type of
| structure myself, and seeing it resist an enormous flood and a
| barrage of high-speed trees, unscathed. Absolute mess inside
| the timber structure atop, but anyone trapped within would have
| survived.
|
| Unfortunately what they had there was a disaster waiting to
| happen.
| jonah wrote:
| Honestly, that protruding rebar reminds me of the common
| practice in some Central American countries of pouring the
| columns and crossties for the first story and leaving rebar
| stubbed out the top for a future second level which may or
| may not ever get built.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Oh, that's a common thing all over the world - it's
| generally because property taxes aren't payable on
| incomplete structures. Seen it everywhere from Bulgaria to
| Cambodia to Egypt.
| wahern wrote:
| That's a myth, albeit one commonly held everywhere, even
| by locals.
|
| You don't find it odd that so many poor- and middle-
| income countries with wildly different legal histories
| and taxing structures have the same glaring property tax
| loophole? Despite often wildly different origin stories
| for how the loophole came about?
|
| Yes, some jurisdictions tax incomplete structures
| differently, but that only begs the question of whether a
| habitable structure lived in would be considered
| incomplete merely because some rebar is sticking out.
|
| The real answer mostly relates to patterns of savings and
| real estate finance. In places where people invest their
| savings into their home directly, without a mortgage or
| similar as is common in more developed countries with
| robust retail financing options and comparatively liquid
| real estate markets, they often plan to build
| incrementally over time. Today you have enough money to
| build a 1-story out-of-pocket; in a few years you hope to
| have enough saved to expand to a 1-1/2 story or 2-story.
| This is much more feasible with concrete construction as
| it's relatively cheap (if not free or even cheaper than
| finishing) to just leave rebar exposed. Of course, as you
| pointed out earlier this doesn't make for great
| engineering. So you're more likely to see this in areas
| with loose building codes or lax enforcement.
|
| In really poor areas you'll often find partial structures
| that aren't even habitable. That makes no sense in the
| tax loophole theory, but perfectly fits the theory that
| these structures are methods of investing savings. What's
| sad is that it's not uncommon for these to sit unfinished
| (to the point of habitability) for many years, or never
| finished at all; hard-working people's savings
| effectively lost.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Terrible story. I've lived near a river, and never will again.
| And the worst I had was just 4 feet of water in the basement.
| rf15 wrote:
| I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades -
| largely because this area is full of rivers so any flooding is
| just spread thin. I feel this is mostly a drainage problem of
| areas where all water is channeled into a narrow area by the
| surrounding geography? "Narrow" being a relative term here of
| course, considering geological scale.
| K0balt wrote:
| Being fine for decades is not a useful metric, unfortunately.
|
| If you want to know, look into the last time it was flooded.
|
| If it has never flooded in the scope of human history, it's
| possible that the danger of flooding is indeed not
| significant.
|
| If it has flooded, it will likely flood again.
|
| If it is a flood plain, it will probably flood again many,
| many times. Weather changes associated with climate change
| may exacerbate this. It would not be particularly surprising
| to see the variance in significant precipitation events to
| double, triple , or more.
|
| In any rate, climate change aside, it would not be
| particularly remarkable for a flood risk that aggregates to
| one in ten years to not flood for 50 years running, just as
| it would not be unexpected if some such areas flooded each
| year for 3 years straight. Both of those events would be
| consistent with patterns that would be expected to happen in
| the big picture.
|
| I know nothing of your situation, but if I were living within
| less than 100 feet of the altitude of a nearby river or sea,
| I would consider moving. Life is short, and in my tiny life I
| have been humanly connected to floods, tsunamis, and
| hurricanes within my direct circle of friends and family
| enough to internalize that these risks are not theoretical.
|
| When an existential risk can be categorically eliminated from
| your life, it is often worth doing.
| peterbecich wrote:
| A.f.a.i.k. this tragedy was preventable because the flood
| risk was already known:
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/09/us/camp-
| mysti... Apparently this was disregarded.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades
|
| For the non-expert reader, I must point out that there are
| many factors that contribute to how "safe" rivers are.
|
| Large parts of texas are flat, or have flat lands further up
| the water shed. This means that wide areas of rain, even
| though modest all get funneled into small areas. This is a
| common cause flash flooding.
|
| More over the river basins are wide and flat too, which means
| that there isnt much to slow the water down _and_ no shelter
| for when it comes.
|
| In the same way that some costal areas have tame tides, and
| other have 7 meter swells, or where I grew up, tides that
| come in as fast as you can run.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| One of the things about natural disasters, is that everyone
| focuses on the big, kinetic ones, like fires, volcanoes,
| tornados, earthquakes, etc.
|
| But the one that _kills_ the most people, and does the most
| damage, is good ol ' H2O; water. The giver of life. Even with
| hurricanes, most of the damage is done by the flooding. Up
| here, we had Sandy, which, I think was only a Cat 2 or 3, but
| did 70 Billion dollars' worth of damage, and killed a bunch
| of folks.
|
| Hulu has a great documentary on the Tsunami from 2004, in the
| Indian Ocean. It was a true horror.
|
| Insurance companies sure as hell know this. Try getting home
| insurance in an area that they deem "flood-prone" (you might
| be surprised, where they say so). I think that most big
| insurance companies have refused to insure homes, in many
| parts of Florida.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > I think that most big insurance companies have refused to
| insure homes, in many parts of Florida.
|
| Yes, and instead of making the people who choose to live
| there bear the true cost of that choice, we instead create
| state-owned flood insurance plans that subsidize the risk
| for (typically wealthy) coastal homeowners.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I live in an old watermill. We've had a "run for your life"
| flood. Fortunately, I was well aware of the risks when we moved
| here, and always keep an eye on the weather in winter.
|
| We had about 10cm of rain fall on already saturated soils
| upstream of us, and as darkness fell that evening I could see
| the river rise... and rise... and rise - and in the nick of
| time came to the realisation that we had to _evacuate, NOW_.
| Our car had already washed away, so we ended up bushwhacking a
| few km out in the driving rain, two very pissed off cats
| stuffed into our go-bags. Turns out the car being gone was no
| great impediment as the road was gone, too, utterly washed out.
|
| Came back to an almighty mess - flood was a 10,000 year one,
| the house was buried in gigantic flotsam, entire trees that had
| been uprooted, and tumbled down the river in an enormous jam,
| inches of mud coating every surface. The _chimney_ had washed
| away.
|
| The mill itself was fine. Three meter thick stone walls, for a
| reason, it turns out.
|
| We still live here. The year after the flood we had a small
| earthquake, enough to send boulders crashing down into the
| valley - and the year after that a wildfire, which reduced much
| of the valley to a moonscape. That time, we fled with a toddler
| in tow, as well as the cats.
|
| Perhaps one day this place will be the end of us - but the
| 99.9% of the time it isn't trying to kill us, it couldn't be
| better.
|
| We now at least have huge water tanks and a deluge system for
| the fire risk, and a cabin 30 meters above the river for us to
| decamp to in the winter when the flood risk grows - and a new
| roof with a steel substructure to catch any errant bits of
| mountain that decide to visit.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I live in Auckland, New Zealand and had never been in a flood
| until 2023. We got something like 280mm in a 24 hours, on the
| back of a wet month. At its peak we we getting 50mm an hour.
|
| It was incredible. Manhole covers popping off, mildly sloped
| roads were rivers with rapids and flat ones were lakes,
| growing as you watched.
|
| Caught completely unprepared, it was chaos.
|
| Living near a river or flood-plain is a hard no for me, even
| if I had 3m thick stone walls.
| cjcenizal wrote:
| Having children makes me feel vulnerable. They're like extensions
| of myself -- if they feel pain, I feel it too. To imagine one of
| them dying... this story broke my heart.
| disillusioned wrote:
| My wife had been pushing me to try for kids for, well, a couple
| of years, and I was finally getting there. I always knew I
| wanted kids, or figured I did, but then reality comes: can we
| afford it, shouldn't we enjoy what we have a little bit longer,
| are we sure we want to do this, etc.
|
| Then, my friend messaged me one night and asked me to join him
| at the children's hospital to take a few photos as they were
| saying "goodbye." His 18 month old had been fighting cancer,
| and it was 1 in the morning and my melatonin-addled brain
| thought "oh, they must be taking him home."
|
| It wasn't until I walked into the room with my DSLR that I
| realized what he meant. In fairness, he had prefaced the
| request with, "do you mind if I ruin your night?"
|
| I am not even close to a professional photographer. But I tried
| to take as many pictures as respectfully as I could of the
| literal hardest moment any parents could ever hope not to have
| to go through. At a certain moment, it became time, and I found
| myself... stuck, in a sense. I was the only other one in the
| room aside from the parents, but I didn't feel like I could
| abandon them, and so I sat there as they disconnected the
| machines keeping their son alive. It was the most awful two
| minutes as the attending sat there with a stethoscope against
| this tiny chest.
|
| I waited until an opportune moment, and then hugged them,
| quietly took my leave, went home, edited the photos as quickly
| as possible, uploaded and sent them, and then bawled for an
| hour or so.
|
| Needless to say, this set back our efforts at even _trying_ for
| kids by about 2-3 years. Because I just was stuck by this all-
| encompassing thought: you can't lose what you don't have. You
| simply aren't open to that sort of vulnerability if you don't
| have children. It doesn't exist, until you form it into being.
| And that thought haunted me. Just like it haunts, well, every
| parent on some level.
|
| And to clarify: this didn't even _happen to me_. It happened to
| _them_, and their son. But it was a defining moment for me that
| made it really tough to overcome.
|
| Eventually, we did have two kids (after a miscarriage, of
| course, because isn't that how it goes), and they're sitting
| behind me watching a movie as I type this. But these sort of
| thoughts are always there in the background. And yeah, reading
| a story like this one about the flood just spears you in the
| soul.
| GarnetFloride wrote:
| Being there is a powerful and supportive thing. Yes, it is
| incredibly hard to deal with the loss of a child, we lost
| one, too. Having someone there is a help and a support, we
| didn't really get from others.
| disillusioned wrote:
| I'm truly sorry for your loss.
| sgt wrote:
| Miscarriages are more common than people think!
| jajko wrote:
| Sorry to hear that, no parent is unmoved deeply with such
| stories which just shouldn't be happening, but life is...
| life.
|
| Its a mistake in general in life to get swayed and stunned by
| the negative aspects of it and be blocked to experience the
| positive aspects, even if some risk of harm is involved.
| Although some healing and reconciliation is required, no
| doubt there. You did allright based on your description.
| Trying to play the game of life as safe as possible
| ultimately means losing the game.
|
| Life doesn't have to be always a positive experience, rather
| an intense one compared to keeping it always safe and ending
| up with meh story (and usually tons of regrets before dying).
| My philosophy only, but I really think it should be pretty
| much universal.
|
| Also yes miscarriages are very common, we had one, and so did
| basically all couples in our circle in various phases. I take
| it as a defense mechanism of woman's body, figuring out it
| wouldn't work out later so aborting the mission (at least
| under normal circumstances). One was very brutal (in 37th
| week, basically a stillbirth and woman still had to go
| through whole birth process), a proper traumatic experience
| that leaves permanent scars on souls of parents. But still,
| after mourning one has to get up and keep moving even if
| feeling empty and powerless, thats life.
| binary132 wrote:
| "Well sometimes your kids just die, that's life" isn't
| really the most uplifting response to that.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| That's one of those things that's just hard to be
| uplifting about.
| jajko wrote:
| You want to hear empty phrases like typical 'thoughts and
| prayers' that help absolutely nothing and are overused to
| the point of losing any value, just so that writer feels
| for 5s better about themselves? Internet is chock full of
| those from all those me-participating-too people.
|
| What I wrote is unfortunately true, and brutal. Don't
| think I didn't cry for those babies who never stood the
| chance, both ours and other's. But eventually you have to
| get up, the only other alternative to this is far worse.
| So I did, and so did my wife, and all the other parents
| affected. Life goes on and doesn't care about your
| personal woes.
|
| We live in extremely safe times compared to how things
| looked even 150 years ago, 40-50% of kids didn't survive
| to age 5 and deaths during even normal pregnancies were
| very common. Go read a bit about that if you feel like I
| talk extreme or are an outlier.
| foobarian wrote:
| > We live in extremely safe times compared to
|
| This sentence in a HN article from a day ago caught my
| eye [1][2].
|
| > Second, between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US
| maternal death rate fell by 94 percent, according to
| Sarygulov and Arslanagic-Wakefield. Early antibiotics in
| the 1930s, followed by the mass production of penicillin
| in the 1940s, "drove down incidences of sepsis, [which
| were] responsible for 40 percent of maternal deaths at
| the time, and made caesarean sections safer," they write.
|
| 94 percent!
|
| [1] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-caused-the-baby-
| boom-wh...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572527
| lordnacho wrote:
| There were three deaths in my family over a 10 month period.
| Both my parents and my cousin.
|
| I still felt like it was worse when, prior to this, I
| attended the funeral of a little girl from my kid's school.
| Tiny coffin, painted with horses. All the kids having their
| first experience with death. The impossibility of saying
| anything useful to the parents at the reception afterwards.
| gora_mohanty wrote:
| The story was powerfully honest, but I think it also concludes
| that love is as powerful as death. Death will come for all of
| us, and instead of trying to fight against it, it might make
| sense to try and understand what it is, and what it also
| brings. If we fear death so much, it is often because that fear
| has stopped us from truly living while we are still alive.
|
| A wonderful novella in this context. Hard science fiction in
| one respect, with correct physics, but also literature in my
| opinion: https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/Reading/Ch...
| isolli wrote:
| It's also harder to protect them as well as yourself, adding to
| that sense of vulnerability.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Having children makes me feel vulnerable. They're like
| extensions of myself -- if they feel pain, I feel it too._
|
| Once heard the observation that _you 're only as happy as your
| saddest child_.
| bwb wrote:
| I can't remember where, but somewhere I heard that before kids
| you live with your heart inside you, and after you have kids
| you live without heart out in the world.
| alecco wrote:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...
|
| Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings
| total obliteration.
|
| Our ancestors had families during wars and famines. In the case
| of my family, that wasn't that many generations ago.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Theres videos from different people as the flooding started live.
| It's WILD to watch what happens in a short span of time. We're
| talking under 30 minutes I think before it starts overtaking a
| bridge. The water will sweep you up and drag you around too, the
| random debris is what's fatal.
| anonymars wrote:
| I watched the first couple minutes of this video (certainly
| wasn't going to watch 40 minutes) then skipped ahead in chunks,
| thinking it was clips from different locations.
|
| Then I scrubbed around and realized, no, it was the same place,
| which left me stunned.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kYjiTEDqtw
|
| Make sure to watch the last 3-5 minutes or so for the cherry on
| top. Then I recommend skipping back to the beginning to really
| drive home how insane this was.
|
| I will never again be cavalier about flash flood warnings.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| That's the video! I didn't have the link, so thank you for
| that.
| komali2 wrote:
| > Alissa would tell me, five days later, that Rosemary wanted to
| play "I spy" while they waited in the tree.
|
| I can't imagine a more grim version of this game as the
| floodwaters of the Guadalupe recede below you.
| Theodores wrote:
| What astounds me is how quickly America moves on from
| environmental catastrophes. As an example, a huge part of Florida
| was pretty much devastated earlier this year but now you would
| never know. The electricity and other services were back up in
| days and all evidence of destroyed buildings gone as if the trash
| was just collected.
|
| If a similar extreme weather event hit the UK, that would be all
| you would hear about for months and there would be no instant
| clear up. The populace would be deeply traumatised and would not
| move on from the tragedy. America is different, resilient and it
| is rare for articles like this one to make the light of day.
| morsch wrote:
| I'm not sure that a country being "resilient" in that manner is
| a good thing. It's callous towards the individuals involved,
| who may not be as quick to move on, emotionally or otherwise.
| And moving on quickly doesn't exactly encourage learning from
| tragedy, which really is its only upside.
| gkanai wrote:
| Japan is similar in terms of moving on from environmental
| catastrophes. Due to it's geographic location, the number and
| severity of earthquakes and tsunamis not to mention the regular
| stuff like wildfires, flooding etc. there's just a lot of
| devastation and loss. Japan does memorialize the larger events
| of course and there's public memorials at annual schedules,
| etc.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Add Japan's volcanoes:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#Lis.
| ..
|
| At least 3 of those are active calderas, with histories of
| producing VEI 7 eruptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natu
| ral_disasters_in_Japan#VEI...
|
| A select quote:
|
| > Aira caldera is surrounded by the major city of Kagoshima
| which has a population of more than 900,000. Residents do not
| mind small eruptions because they have measures in place for
| protection. For example, school students are required to wear
| hard helmets for protection against falling debris.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| Resilience and foolishness are very close together. I can't
| imagine living in a place where you have to rebuild every X
| years when you can just move somewhere else. The people are
| just used to it.
|
| This will get worse and at some point you have to ask if the
| areas are actually habitable or if it's just a colossal waste
| of resources to live there.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...
|
| As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes
| (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority
| of which are in Texas and Florida.[4][5] The cost of the
| insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the
| end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since,
| primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy,
| accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[4][6] In
| October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt,
| making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes
| $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Directly from their website: https://www.fema.gov/flood-
| insurance. This encourages everyone to build in places that
| shouldn't be built in the first place.
|
| "Floods can happen anywhere -- just one inch of floodwater can
| cause up to thousands of dollars' worth of damage. Most
| homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Flood
| insurance is a separate policy that can cover buildings, the
| contents in a building, or both, so it is important to protect
| your most important assets -- your home, your business, your
| possessions.
|
| The NFIP provides flood insurance to property owners, renters
| and businesses, and having this coverage helps them recover
| faster when floodwaters recede. The NFIP works with communities
| required to adopt and enforce floodplain management regulations
| that help mitigate flooding effects.
|
| Flood insurance is available to anyone living in one of the
| 22,600 participating NFIP communities. Homes and businesses in
| high-risk flood areas with mortgages from government-backed
| lenders are required to have flood insurance."
| MichaelRo wrote:
| Quite a few people live near riverbeds, if not all of them. I
| mean like, it was one of the basic requirements of a settlement
| to have some flowing water source nearby.
|
| And while not directly on the river bed, I've seen my share of
| swollen rivers in all places I lived. My grandparents had a house
| at the edge of the village, the river was some 200 meters from it
| and much lower but a few times with heavy raining, the garden was
| flooded and water nearly got to the house. I recall watching in
| awe from uphill the raging torrent and wondering how the funk
| could it have gotten so big from the original peaceful river.
|
| Right now, I live downstream of a 100 meters tall water dam
| holding 200 hectares (500 acres) of lake. If that dam breaks,
| it's lights out for many. You forget about it but shit happens:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
| actionfromafar wrote:
| And sometimes shit is made to happen:
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/russia-shells-flooded-ukr...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Watch any movie with the settlers moving out west, and you'll
| see them all right next to a river. It all makes sense as
| nobody likes carrying water far
| NoProfession wrote:
| The mix of terrifying immediacy and raw loss is haunting,
| especially when you hear about people literally being swept away
| from shelters they trusted.
|
| It's a stark reminder that robust early warning isn't just
| technology, it's life or death and the costs of underfunding
| those systems aren't hypothetical.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| One of the consequenes of our population growth, combined with
| our willingness to allow NIMBYs to dictate our housing policy, is
| that more and more new houses are built in areas that regularly
| experience major natural disasters. And if that isn't enough of a
| tragedy, these plots of land are treated as valuable when they
| really aren't, leading to people sinking big chunks of their net
| worth into what is objectively a liability.
| nop_slide wrote:
| This was a vacation house. It had nothing to do with
| building/density/urbanism/policy. Its purpose was to be by the
| water.
|
| I am a fellow urbanist and while I see where you're coming from
| this doesn't apply at all to this situation. There's a quote in
| the article talking about how the grandparents chose this house
| specifically for the summer memories.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, there are two conflicting things here.
|
| The land is valuable as entertainment space. Such as temporary
| camping, hiking, fishing, and other outdoor activities. It is
| quite beautiful land.
|
| Conversely there are also plots of land that are not valuable
| along the water where there is little natural beauty which
| leads to lower land prices, hence people setting up things like
| mobile homes and RVs as places to live that are less expensive
| options.
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