BLADENBORO, N.C. — Ten days after Hurricane Florence came ashore, the storm caused fresh chaos Monday across the Carolinas, where rivers kept rising and thousands more people were told to be ready to evacuate.

Authorities urged up to 8,000 people in Georgetown County, on the South Carolina coast, to be prepared to flee from potential flood zones. A “record event” of up to 10 feet of flooding was expected to begin Tuesday near parts of the Pee Dee and Waccamaw rivers, county spokeswoman Jackie Broach-Akers said.

Residents along the Waccamaw braced for water predicted to peak Wednesday at 22 feet near Conway. That’s twice the normal flood stage and far higher than the previous record of 17.9 feet, according to charts published Monday by the National Weather Service.

Pastor Willie Lowrimore and several members of his church spent Saturday sandbagging and spreading plastic sheets around the sanctuary of The Fellowship With Jesus Ministries church on the banks of the Waccamaw in Yauhannah, South Carolina, about 20 miles south of Myrtle Beach.

The nearly black, reeking water seeped around and over the sandbags around 2 a.m. Monday. By noon, it was several inches deep.

With the church pews moved to a flatbed trailer on higher ground, Lowrimore sat in a rocking chair listening to the normally calm river rush by, ruining the church he built almost 20 years ago.

“I’m going to go one day at a time. Put it in the Lord’s hands. My hands aren’t big enough,” he said.

In North Carolina, the Cape Fear and Neuse rivers remained swollen and were not expected to return to normal levels until October, the charts show.

“Florence continues to bring misery to North Carolina,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Sunday evening in a statement.

Most of the Carolinas have seen the worst of the flooding, but people need to remain cautious, said Todd Hamill, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service’s Southeast River Forecast Center. With most rivers having crested, that water is moving toward the coast, he said.

Parts of Interstate 40 are expected to remain underwater for another week or more, and hundreds of smaller roads remain impassable. But there was some good news: Interstate 95 was reopened to all traffic Sunday night for the first time since the floods.

Floodwaters already receding on one stretch of Interstate 40 left thousands of rotting fish on the pavement for firefighters to clean up.

Crews conducted about 350 rescues over the weekend, and travel remains treacherous in the southeastern area of the state, the governor added. National Guard members would be shifting to more door-to-door and air-search checks on people in still-flooded areas.

The storm has claimed at least 43 lives since slamming into the coast Sept. 14.

On Monday, Republican education leaders in North Carolina announced planned legislation to assure teachers at still-shuttered schools that they will get paid without using vacation time. The proposal was part of broader disaster funding that the General Assembly will consider in an anticipated special session.

In Washington, lawmakers considered almost $1.7 billion in new money for disaster relief and recovery, even as they face a deadline this week to fund the government before the Oct. 1 start of the new budget year.

The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee said the money would be available as grants to states to help rebuild housing and public works, as well as assist businesses. GOP Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey called it “a first round” and said lawmakers are ready to act quickly if the federal disaster relief agency also needs more money.

The economic research firm Moody’s Analytics estimated that Florence has caused around $44 billion in damage and lost output, which would make it one of the 10 costliest U.S. hurricanes. The worst disaster, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, cost $192.2 billion in today’s dollars. Last year’s Hurricane Harvey cost $133.5 billion.

Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Yauhannah, South Carolina; Meg Kinnard in Galivants Ferry, South Carolina; Denise Lavoie in Richmond, Virginia; Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama and Michael Biesecker in Washington contributed to this report.

MORE

• Hurricane Florence strengthens as experts warn of ‘large-scale disaster’
• Carolinas brace for extremely dangerous Hurricane Florence
• Washington, DC, declares state of emergency head of Hurricane Florence
• ‘Big and vicious’: Hurricane Florence closes in on Carolinas
• Hurricane Florence could flood many waste sites, creating toxic brew
• Slaves’ descendants have long history of enduring hurricanes
• Hurricane Florence: 10 million in crosshairs of storm’s uncertain track
• EDITORIAL: Hurricane Florence and Trump’s tweets really have us worried
• Florence’s flooding claims 3.4 million poultry, 5,500 hogs
• Trump arrives in North Carolina to survey Florence damage
• New evacuations ordered because of Florence flooding
• Carolinas farms could take billions in losses from Hurricane Florence

Source: https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/hurricane-florence-carolinas-flood-zones-warning-rising-rivers/

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The disasters caused $306 billion in total damage in 2017, with 16 events that caused more than $1 billion in damage each. The bulk of the damage, at $265 billion, came from hurricanes.

“2017 was a historic year for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters,” said Adam Smith, an economist for NOAA, on a call with reporters.

The record-breaking year raises concerns about the effects of future natural disasters, as scientists fear climate change could make extreme weather events more damaging.

Hurricane Harvey, which sparked extreme flooding in Houston and the surrounding area in August and September, caused $125 billion in damage, the year’s most expensive disaster. Hurricane Maria, which in September set off a fatal and ongoing humanitarian crisis in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico and elsewhere, caused $90 billion in damage. Hurricane Irma raked across the Caribbean and hit Florida in September, causing $50 billion in total damage, NOAA reports.

The storms also caused 251 combined deaths, the report found. According to Smith, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria now join 2005’s Katrina and 2012’s Sandy among the five most costly U.S. hurricanes in the agency’s disaster record.

Western wildfires cost an additional $18 billion and 54 lives, the report found. This, too, was an annual record. Other large costs came from tornadoes, droughts, flooding and other severe weather events.

The previous most expensive disaster year was 2005, when events such as Hurricane Katrina caused $215 billion in U.S. damage when adjusted for inflation. NOAA’s record of billion-dollar natural disasters goes back to 1980.

(NOAA)

According to NOAA, there have been 215 U.S. disasters costing $1 billion or more since 1980, for a total of more than $1.2 trillion in damage. The year 2017 tied 2011 for the largest total number of such events, at 16.

With numbers like the ones above, it’s no wonder the insurance industry also took a massive hit during 2017, thanks in large part to the trio of hurricanes that ravaged parts of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and parts of the South.

Insurers are set to pay out a record $135 billion stemming from natural disasters around the globe last year, according to data released this month from the world’s largest reinsurer.

Those huge payouts stem largely from last year’s deadly and devastating hurricanes, but those were far from the only disasters. Widespread flooding caused by monsoon rains in South Asia also contributed to the costs, as did a severe earthquake in Mexico, according to Munich Re, a German-based reinsurer.

Overall losses, which include uninsured losses, amounted to about $330 billion, the reinsurer said. That is second only to 2011, when a massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan fueled overall losses of more than $350 billion in today’s dollars.

The firm identified 710 natural catastrophes around the globe, significantly higher than the annual average of 605. But those in the United States were by far the most costly, accounting for roughly half of all insurance payouts.

Insurance officials also said they expect more such catastrophes ahead.

“Some of the catastrophic events, such as the series of three extremely damaging hurricanes, or the very severe flooding in South Asia after extraordinarily heavy monsoon rains, are giving us a foretaste of what is to come,” Torsten Jeworrek, a Munich Re board member, said in an announcement about the global losses. “Because even though individual events cannot be directly traced to climate change, our experts expect such extreme weather to occur more often in future.”

Indeed, the key question underlying the latest tally of disaster cost is to what extent climate change may be driving the United States and the rest of the world toward more numerous or more severe disasters.

NOAA experts demurred on this question on a media call, declining to apportion how much of the damage could be attributed to a changing climate as opposed to other factors. One key factor that is also known to be worsening damage is that there is more valuable infrastructure, such as homes and businesses, in harm’s way — along coastlines or in areas vulnerable to wildfire.

“For the purposes especially of this product, we do not try to parse those apart,” said Deke Arndt, chief of the monitoring section at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “We’re more interested in quantifying what’s going on. Both the economists and physical scientists will retrospectively look at that, but those sort of happen at the speed of science.”

But one expert, Harvard oceanographer and climate expert James McCarthy, highlighted the role of climate change in a statement in response to the NOAA findings.

“We can expect extreme weather events and economic losses and costs associated with them to continue increasing unless we make dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy authored a recent report with Robert Watson, the former chairman of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Liliana Hisas, the executive director of the Universal Ecological Fund (FEU-US), arguing that U.S. $ 1 billion disasters are increasing over time and suggesting economic costs from such events will only increase under climate change.

“As we both know hurricanes, wild-fires, floods and severe weather events occur naturally,” said Watson by email. “However, the data shows an overall increased frequency in these events, and an associated increase in intensity.  The precautionary principle would suggest that we should assume a significant contribution from human activities and prepare to adapt and mitigate.”

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/01/08/hurricanes-wildfires-made-2017-the-most-costly-u-s-disaster-year-on-record/

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Nate — the first hurricane to make landfall in Mississippi since Katrina in 2005 — quickly lost power, with its winds diminishing to a tropical depression as it pushed northward into Alabama and toward Georgia with heavy rain. It was a Category 1 hurricane when it pushed ashore outside Biloxi early Sunday, its second landfall after initially hitting southeastern Louisiana on Saturday evening.

The storm surge from the Mississippi Sound littered Biloxi’s main beachfront highway with debris and flooded a casino’s lobby and parking structure overnight.

By dawn, however, Nate’s receding floodwaters didn’t reveal any signs of widespread damage in the city where Katrina had leveled thousands of beachfront homes and businesses.

A sailboat beached near Margaritaville and the Golden Nugget in Biloxi, Miss., on Sunday, after Hurricane Nate made landfall.  (Justin Sellers/The Clarion-Ledger via AP)

No storm-related deaths or injuries were immediately reported.

As Nate roared ashore, the hurricane-spawned storm surge in coastal areas, flooding the parking structure of the Golden Nugget casino in Biloxi and pushing water several blocks deep into the city.

“It kind of surprised us,” Mike Kovacevich, who lives two blocks north of U.S. 90, told Biloxi officials on their Facebook page. “We didn’t expect to be this deep. It come in pretty good — a lot of water.”

Biloxi public works employees clearing debris from U.S. 90 in Biloxi on Sunday.  (Justin Sellers/The Clarion-Ledger via AP)

Around 28,000 customers from multiple utility companies were without power in southern portions of the state, but officials from Mississippi Power, which covers all three counties on the state’s Gulf Coast, told Fox News they expect to fully restore power by Sunday night.

“Following Hurricane Nate, our dedicated team at Mississippi Power is actively assisting our customers and restoring service,” Mississippi Power CEO Anthony Wilson said. “The safety of our customers and employees is our top priority. We know how important electrical service is to restoring quality of life after a storm and we are working hard for our customers and their businesses.”

Combined, more than 100,000 residents in Mississippi and Alabama were without power Sunday morning, although some were starting to get electricity restored. About 6,800 customers lost power in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott said.

Mississippi’s Gulf Coast casinos got approval to reopen in midmorning after closing Saturday as the storm approached.

Pumpkins strewn around Highway 90 along the Gulf of Mexico in Pass Christian, Miss., in the aftermath of Hurricane Nate.  (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

In Alabama, the storm flooded homes and cars on the coast and inundated at least one major road in downtown Mobile.

At sunrise in Pensacola Beach, Florida, a small front-end loader scraped sand off a parking lot and returned it to the nearby beach. Sand also was blown onto the decks of beachside bars and restaurants.

In Alabama, Dauphin Island Mayor Jeff Collier said he woke up around 3 a.m. Sunday to discover knee-deep water in his yard. Although some homes and cars on the island had flooded, Collier said he hadn’t heard of anyone needing rescue.

“We didn’t think it would be quite that bad,” he said. “It kind of snuck up on us in the wee hours of the morning.”

Before Nate sped past Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula late Friday and entered the Gulf of Mexico, it drenched Central America with rains that left at least 22 people dead. Still, Nate didn’t approach the intensity of Harvey, Irma and Maria — powerful storms that left behind massive destruction during 2017’s exceptionally busy hurricane season.

“We are thankful because this looked like it was going to be a freight train barreling through the city,” said Vincent Creel, a spokesman for the city of Biloxi.

Fox News’ Travis Fedschun and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/08/hurricane-nate-unleashes-flooding-power-outages-on-gulf-coast.html

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Then Las Vegas, the nation’s playground, witnessed the worst mass shooting in U.S. history — the latest in this peerless series of catastrophes. Some were natural, some man-made. Together, they’ve shadowed a usually optimistic nation with a cloud of sorrow and anxiety.

You didn’t have to be in Vegas, Seattle, Houston, Key West or San Juan, or have relatives in Mexico, or live in the Inter-mountain West with a respiratory condition, to be worried. A nation that had thought itself numbed to tragedy is realizing that no matter how bad things are, they apparently can always get worse.

“Why?’’ asked country music star Blake Shelton in a tweet after the shooting. That was one question, shared many times by many others. There was another: “What’s next?’’

A summer that seemed destined to be remembered for its magnificent solar eclipse had lurched suddenly toward the eve of destruction. And autumn hasn’t been much better.

  So much has gone wrong so fast it’s fair to review the overlapping calamities:

• In the span of two weeks, two major hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, hit the continental U.S., the first time two category 4 storms have ever done so in a single season. Then a third storm, Maria, clobbered the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, producing a level of misery that still may not have crested.
• Mexico was shaken by two earthquakes 12 days apart that killed hundreds of people. The second occurred on the anniversary of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that killed thousands. That quake had been commemorated, and a national earthquake drill held, just two hours before the ground again began to shake on Sept. 19.
• Wildfires, spurred by some of the driest, hottest late summer weather on record,  consumed an area in the West 50% larger than the state of New Jersey. As air quality plummeted across Washington State, the governor declared a state of emergency and told everyone in some areas to stay indoors.
• The leaders of the U.S. and North Korea traded insults and threats. President Trump ridiculed his own secretary of state’s efforts to negotiate with the Kim Jong Un regime to peacefully resolve the nuclear faceoff. Trump tweeted that Rex Tillerson “is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…’’

The natural disasters produced images that unsettled even those nowhere near them.  Consider just the wildfires.

In normally wet Seattle, which on Aug. 8 recorded its record 52nd straight day without rain, ash from Central Washington fires fell like snow and covered the city with a dense smoke cloud. In Montana, wildfires closed the western part of Glacier National Park’s famous Going-to-the-Sun Road …. while the eastern portion was closed by ice and snow. In Oregon, a photo showed golfers in the foreground playing through as a huge forest fire roared in the background.

“Yes,’’ the Dallas Morning News editorialized last month, “it does feel like Mother Nature is just done with us.’’

The crises brought out the best in some people. Texas saw an American Dunkirk, with more than 15,000 rescued from high waters by a motley array of craft. And Mexicans spontaneously formed bucket brigades to remove rubble and search for survivors in the ruins of hundreds of collapsed schools and other buildings.

More: September was a hellish month for hurricanes. What will October bring?

More: The land of the stars & stripes has become a country of stress & strife.

More: Las Vegas shooting now tops list of worst mass shootings in U.S. history

More: Here are the worst hurricanes and floods in U.S. history

But for all too many, it was all too much.

Tamara Harpster, 54, of Lakeside, Calif., wrote on Facebook that when she learned of the shooting “I felt numb.’’ After the last month, “it seems like ‘Oh well, just another day in a sucky world now.’ … I feel such a loss of control and a realization that there is nothing an individual can do to stop these horrible things from happening.’’

And yet, she wrote, “I want somehow to fix things and make them stop.’’

Daniel Gardner, who teaches communications at Mississippi State, says that while most people in the rural South shake their heads over the troubles and move on, the millennials he teaches are different: With instantaneous communication via social media, they are “easily shaken emotionally, and prone to be more naive and gullible. … So the confluence of bad events makes them feel more vulnerable.’’

The question was why it seemed to be going there.

There was an obvious answer — coincidence — and on one level, it was all explicable.

Storms? That’s why they call this hurricane season. And until 2017 it had been 12 years since any hurricane of such intensity made continental U.S. landfall.

Quakes? Mexico sits on unstable tectonic plates.

Fires? Forests have been burning in North America since before any civilization.

Korea? The Korean War never officially ended when hostilities ceased in 1953. Sabers have been rattling ever since.

As for Las Vegas, America since Columbine has repeatedly demonstrated what happens when a wealthy, historically violent nation with many angry, mentally disturbed residents has loose gun laws.

Some blamed global warming for the storms and the fires; some blamed Trump for Korea and the halting Puerto Rico relief effort.

Others saw a higher authority in control.

‘What else is needed to get our attention?’’ asked Michael L. Brown, the conservative host of the nationally syndicated radio show, The Line of Fire.

 “We need to get on our faces before the Lord, acknowledging our own sins and shortcomings, not pointing the finger at others but rather at ourselves. And whatever our views on climate control and gun control and immigration reform and President Trump, we need to implore the only one who can heal our land.’’

In a video he posted online, actor Kirk Cameron (Growing Pains) called the hurricanes “a spectacular display of God’s immense power” and said, “weather is sent to cause us to respond to God in humility, awe and repentance.”

Was Judgement Day at hand? Several who studied the question had set the date at Sept. 23. But as the day passed and the tribulations continued, some didn’t need obscure scriptural passages or complicated astrological projections to feel the end was near.

That’s one theology. Another is held by the Rev. Ryan Moore of First Presbyterian Church in Tulsa. He told the Tulsa World that he doesn’t spend much time trying to predict when The End is coming, because a daily faith matters more.

“But with all that’s going on in the world,’’ he admits, “you can’t help but be a little bit apocalyptic.”

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/03/storms-quakes-fires-korea-and-now-vegas-shooting-whats-next/725889001/

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The high end of the range, released Thursday by Moody’s Analytics, represents almost an entire year’s economic output for Puerto Rico.

The estimate underscores “why officials are now suggesting that its economy may be set back decades,” Adam Kamins, a senior economist at the firm, wrote in an analysis.

The damage estimate from Moody’s is the highest yet. A more conservative estimate earlier this week from the disaster research group Enki Research put the total at $30 billion.

Damage to Puerto Rico has been catastrophic. People are scrambling for food, water, fuel and cash. Almost the entire island is without power, and outages are expected to last for months in some areas.

The Moody’s estimate says as much as $40 billion could be lost in economic output because of impassable roads and lost power. Property damage could total $55 billion.

For comparison: Moody’s estimates that Hurricanes Irma and Harvey combined caused more than $150 billion in damage after those storms hit major U.S. cities in Texas, Florida and Georgia.

“Given that Harvey and Irma disrupted far larger and more vibrant economies than that of Puerto Rico, this reflects the stunning amount of damage that Maria has wrought,” Kamins said.

Puerto Rico’s economy was already struggling. The island has been in recession for 11 years and has lost 10% of its population in that time. In May, it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Kamins said fallout from Hurricane Maria could make it all worse. Puerto Ricans are American citizens and can freely move to the mainland.

“The end result could be a permanent increase in the rate of population decline, with many of those who remain too poor to move elsewhere,” he said. “Puerto Rico’s already murky future is now even more in doubt.”

The catastrophe modeling firm RMS released a damage estimate Thursday for the entire Caribbean that was also more conservative than Moody’s. It said damage to the region could be $30 billion to $60 billion.

Maria devastated several islands in the region, including Dominica and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/28/news/economy/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-damage-estimate/index.html

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The post What Hurricane Harvey left behind first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

RVs are lying on their sides, windows blown out. Debris is everywhere. Any trailer that wasn’t moved before the storm was destroyed, says Buddy Seeds, an owner there.

Riding a golf cart through the park, he shows a newly built rental cabin that’s been lifted off its foundation and flung at least 300 yards away.

“That one floated all the way to the dunes,” he says, pointing at the unit. The deck is all that remains. Mangled metal and snapped wood are strewn across the park, which is busy again, but with people hauling away ruined homes, or checking what can be saved. One man hangs sopping wet clothes on a line next to his damaged home. He hopes they are salvageable.

Seeds and other owners say the storm’s massive power caught them by surprise. About 4 feet of storm surge flooded the area from the nearby bay, flinging every trailer onto its side.

“The wind is what started the ball rolling … and then the water finished them off,” Seeds says.

A week after Hurricane Harvey slammed into the coast near Corpus Christi, Texas, and then dumped foot after foot of rain on Houston and its neighbors, we crisscrossed the 200 miles between the two cities to witness what the storm had left behind.

For some communities, it was the wind that did the damage. For others, it was the flooding from the massive rains. And for some, who had seemed to dodge both those bullets, it was a surprise late attack from rivers overflowing with the floodwaters heading south from Houston trying to find their way to the Gulf of Mexico.

No matter how the destruction rode in, how different the damage was, the devastation was deep and severe.

Walls ripped off
Three and a half miles down Highway 361 from the RV park, utility trucks line the road alongside businesses that have been leveled. Power lines and traffic signs dangle from broken poles. Boats have been thrown into the street like toys after a toddler’s tantrum.

A local liquor store’s four walls are gone. But some shelves are still standing, holding row after row of bottles of Patron and Crown Royal near six racks full of wine. It smells like a rotting winery on one side and like a bar at closing time on the other. Glass and liquor cover the floor.

Next door, in front of Moby Dick’s, one of Port Aransas’ most beloved restaurants, owner Ed Ziegler stands at a pile of muddy debris. It used to be the front of his restaurant.

The sign is torn in half. The shark that hung outside the front door was flung toward the back of the restaurant. Mud is everywhere.

Inside, a back door was rammed by a boat that was swept in. Chairs are knocked over, covered in debris, but some silverware still remains perfectly wrapped in a white napkin atop a table.

Ziegler, 62, estimates he may have lost $2 million in Harvey’s wake.

“But at least I’m alive,” he says.

Ziegler counts himself lucky. His family left ahead of the storm, but he found himself sheltering at home. The storm sounded like a jetliner crashing outside, he recalls.

It sent sea water gushing in. He sat on a chair on top of his dining room table as his refrigerator bobbed around the living room.

“I was making water marks along my wall as the water rose up and I figured I was just going to have to write goodbye to my wife and kids at the top mark,” Ziegler says.

When he finally dared to leave, he says he passed a turtle in his living room and a tuna on the street outside.

A scent of destruction, and generosity
Arriving in Rockport, the smell of chopped wood permeates the air. Mangled trees are all around and those that are still standing look dead, with all their leaves ripped off.

Parts of the town are flattened, with damage severe in its Heritage District.

But help is here, too. The HEB supermarket parking lot looks like a military command center, with trucks from nearly every branch of service present. Across the street, a ladder is being used to fly a large American flag over the local fire department. A food truck offers a cooked meal to residents with no gas or power.

Bad as Rockport looks, a neighbor warns worse is to come down the road.

Signs at the entrance to Holiday Beach warn looters to stay out and declare “Holiday Beach Strong.”

Strength is certainly needed here, where residents consider themselves lucky if their building is still standing. Row after row of homes are broken. Roofs and second floors have just been peeled off, crumbled kitchens have fallen into canals.

Peggy Bourg bought her home four years ago. It was everything she ever wanted; she could even fish from her back porch. Now, she stands on the second floor, completely exposed to the sun. The roofs and most of the walls have been blown away. A red vacuum cleaner stands upright in her spare bedroom against a wall that’s no longer there.

A large green truck is in her backyard. She believes it was pushed by the storm across an entire street. Appliances are there, too, coming from who knows where. And entire pieces of Bourg’s own furniture have disappeared.

Bourg, a former resident of Louisiana, knows what a hurricane can do and she fled town before Harvey barreled through. She prayed and prayed her home would be spared, even as she watched neighbors post photos on Facebook declaring their entire houses were gone.

And then someone sent her a picture of what remained of her home, and she had to get back to see for herself.

“It was a dreary day. It was still raining, it was muddy … and you’re numb when you go through something like this,” Bourg says.

She had forgotten to take her mother’s ring when she evacuated, leaving it on the kitchen windowsill, and it was one of the first things she looked for when she returned. Despite nearly everything being scattered, destroyed or thrown into the canal, her husband found it when he was picking through debris upstairs.

“[It was] very emotional. I don’t think I can cry anymore,” Bourg says, still choking back tears. “I’ve gone through a lot of emotions — a lot of anger, sadness, you know, even envy: Why didn’t my house make it?”

Some concern and bitterness also creeps in, with the aid and attention other areas are getting.

“This area has been hit very hard. You know I feel for the people around us, the Houston area, the Rockport area,” she says. “We’re across the causeway from Rockport. It’s almost like, do they know we’re here?” Have they seen all of this destruction?”

Where wind gave way to water
Two miles north on Highway 35, a barbed wire fence has almost become a memorial to the storm. It has caught debris from miles away. Along with mangled metal, pieces of doors and furniture, smaller items hang from the fence: someone’s beige winter hat with ear flaps and a tassel on top. And then a bright red child’s life jacket comes into view, snagged on top of the wire.

A dead cow lies in the road, water and mud covering it.

Farther down Highway 35, near Tivoli, the pure wind damage begins to give way to the flooding, with water lapping over the pavement, and sheriff’s deputies closing a road.

By Victoria, the water flows through fences and more roads are closed. A long line of cars is funneled toward Main Street, where the power is still out.

But with Victoria in the rearview mirror, it soon becomes clear the flooding there was haphazard and sporadic. At Van Vleck, a town closer to Houston than Corpus Christi, the rivers had taken over entire neighborhoods, rising 3 or 4 feet from the ground, residents said.

At one flooded home, a father and son were too emotional to talk, wanting just to keep going, ripping out drywall, pulling out their refrigerator, even as the water kept flowing through.

Outside, it sounded like a babbling brook, but it was overflow from a nearby bayou spilling into homes and over sidewalks. Fast-moving water, more than a week after the storm first hit.

Sudden, belated flooding
A couple of dozen miles north in Wharton, residents first thought they were going to escape unscathed. Trouble for them didn’t begin until Wednesday. The rain, the wind from Harvey, that wasn’t the problem. It never directly hit them. But all the downpours from up north, and especially Houston, were overflowing rivers, including the one in their town. And now it was destroying their homes.

The rivers haven’t been this bad since 1913, Howard Singleton says. Singleton and his 18-year-old son Shane have been out helping their neighbors.

“For the past three days most people have been trapped in their homes because you can’t drive around town because so many roads are flooded,” he says.

They helped the parents of a fellow church member — the husband on oxygen, with limited battery backup if the power went out — to get out before the roads closed completely.

Shane Singleton took a small fishing boat with no motor over to a friend’s house and ended up rescuing several families. Howard Singleton proudly shows off pictures of his son, who used a rope to help get neighbors from their homes to his boat. Then, wearing waders, he physically dragged them through the water to safety.

While many people have lost their homes to this disaster, the younger Singleton says he is thankful so far he has not heard of any loss of life.

“With any natural disaster there’s going to be anger and sadness, but at the same time there’s happiness that people were left with their lives,” Shane Singleton says. “They may have lost everything but they still have their family.”

But still, one week after the storm, the danger isn’t over.

“It’s a little concerning to see it getting closer and closer to your house and not knowing when it’s going to stop,” Howard Singleton says.

His words were prescient. Within a short time, several feet of water began to flood the town, sending police and National Guard units into action to block off roads that were no longer safe.

Trying to save soaked treasures
The big fields of the southern suburbs give way to the bright lights of Houston on I-10. The highway is finally clear of water, and people are streaming in.

Early Saturday morning, residents of the northeast Houston community of Lakewood are out in full force. They are wearing gloves and masks and pushing wheelbarrows, which are filled to the brim, mostly with drywall from their homes.

The rank smell of mold and mildew fills the air. Front yard after front yard is full of belongings brought out from flooded homes. Some people try to air out what they can to save it. But most of it is being thrown into dumpsters

This part of town was deluged with so much water that the waterline in Waylon Doucett’s home was above his head. He’s 6 feet 5 inches tall.

Jose Rodriguez and Veronica Mendoza have already pulled up their carpet, and then the hardwood floor they didn’t know was there. They’ve taken out the furniture that was soaked. There’s so much more they haven’t gotten to yet and they don’t know what the future holds for them, they didn’t have flood insurance.

They struggle the most with what to tell their daughters, age 3 and 11, who keep asking when they can come home.

They stand in their daughter’s room with purple walls, half of it now torn away.

Rodriguez says he showed his 3-year-old daughter some pictures of the home.

“She asked, ‘Why did you tear my purple wall down dad?'” he recalls.

On the other side of the bayou, Felicia Darden has no idea what’s safe to save. What about those mattresses? They are standing up in the garage and driveway. They’re soaked.

She is hoping if all else is lost she can save a few prized possessions — her 8-year-old daughter Eden’s birth book, and photos of her growing up. She’s got them laying across her grassy yard under the Houston sun.

“Those are things you can’t replace,” she says.

He told her, “I gotta clean.”

Just the thought of them not surviving brings tears streaming down her face. She just wants her daughter to be OK. Darden has learned her school will open on Thursday, though she doesn’t know how she’ll shuttle her back and forth.

But she prays it will bring a bit of normalcy.

Darden talks about how Eden appears resilient, but she wonders what her daughter is internalizing. She wonders what the future will hold for them. She wonders how long all this will take to get better.

And that of course is the great unknown.

There were genuine outpourings of kindness and generosity visible along the road, and so much pride and resilience was expressed that towns and Texas will get through this.

Back in Port Aransas, Ed Ziegler watches volunteers wash mud off chairs and says, “Now that I’ve seen the actions of people, my hope is restored. As well as my faith in the human race.”

Howard Singleton’s view was that “Sometimes crisis shows a town or a person’s true character, and it’s brought out the best of the people in Wharton.”

Full coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey

But for all that powerful positivity, it’s hard not to think of the fear of people like Felicia Darden.

She and so many others don’t have the answers yet — not for tomorrow, or a week from now or the many months ahead when they will struggle with the aftermath of Harvey.

CNN’s Michael Pisano contributed to this story.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/04/us/hurricane-harvey-from-corpus-christi-to-houston/index.html

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Hurricane Harvey, which has been downgraded to a tropical storm, has flooded Houston and its surrounding areas, disaster relief efforts are currently focused on getting area residents to safety. Local first responders have been overwhelmed by cries for help, with thousands of calls for rescue. The storm’s death toll has reached 38 people, and it will almost certainly climb.

At the same time, the storm has wreaked havoc on the city’s buildings and infrastructure, destroying homes and businesses and even causing a chemical plant explosion. In a region with such a heavy chemical and petrochemical footprint, many residents worry that the safeguards at other facilities will fail as well.

Analysts agree on one point: it will cost an enormous amount of money to repair and rebuild from Harvey.

“Let me put some stuff in perspective,” said David Shapiro, president of DMS Disaster Consultants. “New Orleans got hit, and prior to the storm the population was about 450,000. Houston gets hit, and its population is eight or nine times what New Orleans was.”

Damage estimates are currently all over the map. An early assessment from the risk modeling firm RMS suggests losses of potentially $70 to $90 billion, while some members of Congress have suggested that Texas will need $150 billion or more in aid. Shapiro himself believes the numbers will get even larger.

The recovery from Katrina cost about $160 billion, but he expects the repair from Harvey to run a $200 billion tab. That would be the largest disaster ever to the hit the U.S., he said.

Property Damage

Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States with more than 7 million individual properties that have a collected $1.5 trillion in value. That estimate only includes the city proper, not factoring in all of the communities up and down the Texas coast that have also been submerged by Harvey.

As Brookings Institute Fellow Andre Perry writes, “Brick by brick, local folk will rebuild. As residents toil drying out, salvaging mementos and determining if they’re covered by insurance, they must prepare for the manmade storms that could follow.”

That process of digging out and rebuilding will take a long time and it will cost billions of dollars.

Much of this will come from water and wind damage. Flooding can cause irreparable harm to buildings and infrastructure. It can erode foundations, even to the point of degrading and destroying roads outright. Water damage ruins building materials like wood and drywall, and salt water in particular can destroy infrastructure such as machinery, electrics and boilers.

Few homeowners have insurance to cover these losses. Estimates suggest that approximately 80% of homeowners in the affected areas lack flood insurance, which does not typically come with homeowner’s or renter’s coverage. As a result, many residents will have to rely on federal aid or their own resources to rebuild and future flood victims may lack even that, as the Trump administration has openly discussed canceling the federal program through which most homeowners purchase flood protection.

Then there will be the losses beyond real estate. Some estimates suggest more than half a million vehicles alone will have to be scrapped, along with innumerable high-value items such as electronics, jewelry, clothing and more. Those losses still have yet to be calculated.

For many families, as was the case in post-Katrina New Orleans, replacing it all will simply not be an option.

Infrastructure and Buyouts

It also will not be enough to simply rebuild Houston. The city must be made safer with infrastructure not only repaired but also upgraded to help prevent future disasters. That, too, will cost an enormous amount of money.

It will, however, be one of the first post-recovery issues for Houston to consider.

“You have infrastructure,” said Shapiro. “You have schools damaged, public facilities, electric distribution and roads that are damaged. You have a whole slew of problems. But they have to fix the drainage system or else.”

“They said it was a 1,000 year event,” he added. “But I’ve seen more [of those] events happen multiple times than any of the statistics would allow you to believe. It happens, so they’re going to have to fix it.”

Houston already sits in a flood-prone area, with geography that has always created problems for the city. Building drainage and water-management systems that prevent this kind of disaster from happening again will be a major concern for the city and, as America learned while rebuilding New Orleans’s levees, that can cost billions of dollars. The expense doesn’t make it any less necessary, however.

And many parts of the city simply may not be saved.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy the states of New York and New Jersey earmarked $700 million for buying properties in high-risk zones, choosing to take over the land rather than spend enormous amounts of money making the area safe. Texas may have to face the same choice as it weighs its infrastructure needs.

Lost taxes

Houston will have to do all of this while earning far less money.

In a state without income tax, this city relies on two main sources of revenue: sales and property taxes. Harvey will cripple both.

As the storm drives out residents, making thousands of Texans refugees in their own land, it will grind economic activity to a halt across large sections of the city. Not all of Houston will or has shut down, but enough will do so to cause a very serious interruption in the city’s sales tax revenue.

At the same time the damage from Harvey will erase a large section of Houston’s property tax base.

It is frankly impossible to know right now just how much property damage Houston will suffer. Estimates vary widely, but right now they’re little more than best guesses. What forecasters can know is that the value of local properties will plummet to a significant but unknown degree. Homes and buildings will be damaged, some beyond repair, and some amount of physical real estate will suffer permanent damage from the flood waters and erosion. The value of hundreds of thousands of cars will vanish into junkyards, either permanently or until the owners file insurance claims.

All of this will gut Houston’s property tax base. The question is for how long and how much.

Some property owners will repair the damage, either through insurance claims or self-financing, returning the land to its full value. Others won’t, leaving reduced or blighted properties sitting on the tax rolls. It will take weeks, if not months, to estimate the full impact this will have on the city’s tax rolls.

In the meantime, however, the recovery will have to begin. It will be expensive but, as Perry pointed out, not wasted.

“When the floodwater is in front of you,” he wrote, “it’s hard to look ahead, but the framing of recovery dictates its pursuits… No one should shy away from pursuing opportunities to improve upon the city’s strengths, but everyone must envision job prospects, training and capacity building for the people who need it most.”

Houston has a long road to recovery ahead, but after the waters recede there may be room to shoulder the burden with optimism and build a better city for everyone.

Source: https://www.thestreet.com/story/14291348/1/hurricane-harvey-s-total-damage-will-be-shockingly-expensive-to-repair.html

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