Tropical storm Harvey moved on from Houston, finally – to dump rain on the city of Beaumont, and on to the states of Louisiana and Tennessee. (Rescuers in Houston still tried to reach homes block by block place today, fearing that people have been left behind in homes). An estimated 100,000 homes have been flooded. For people that can get to their homes, the immense clean-up effort has started. Lots of incredible pictures, of Texas’s Flood of a Century – no, Flood of a Thousand Years, say some – have been posted by the Weather Channel, here.
The storm still made a lot of trouble in the city of Beaumont to the east today, knocking out its water supply system, with no repairs possible before the waters recede, and basically flooding the entire city (pop. 118,000).
Once a semblance of normality has returned to Texas, and especially the city of Houston, some very hard questions will have to be answered. How to pay for all the repairs and reconstruction? Should new zoning laws be passed? What can be done infrastructure-wise?
