Hey KTK peeps! It's me again, signing on from Austin where it is sunny and...oh wait it looks like it might rain again tonight after all. Was that thunder in the distance AGAIN? Maybe it was just an airliner.
If I seem a little gun shy about the weather it's probably because the weather here has been a little unusual lately. I'm sure you've seen all the news from Houston the last few days, where they have experienced some of the worst flooding on record and a number of people have died trapped in their cars. Well, those storms all hit us first and they hit damn hard. Our geography is different and so is our climate, so the water didn't stick around like it does in H-Town and we didn't have the warm Gulf air feeding extra moisture into the systems, but the Central Texas version of all this mess is it's own brand of disaster.
Please avoid that floating mat of fire ants as you jump the fold...
First, regarding Houston, the most important factor in how bad things are there is the fact that a) it is built on a swamp and b) the soil is compacted clay mud, locally referred to as "gumbo". It's the kind of soil that when you dig into it with a shovel or step on it with your shoe it sticks like thick-ass glue. If you let that gumbo dry on your shoe or shovel you will have to beat it against a wall or the sidewalk for like half an hour to get it off.
What that means in terms of flooding is the ground can absorb very little water before saturation is achieved. Since there are bayous (rivers, basically) running all through the city (because it's a swamp like in southern Louisiana), normal rains and even really heavy rains will runoff into these natural conduits, and while you will often see flooding it almost never reaches this level of intensity.
The last time Houston saw this was during Hurricane Tropical Storm Allison in June, 2001. I left Houston in September 2001 and remember how awful that was. People taking the elevator from the high floor of an office building downtown thinking it was safe to leave and the elevator took them to the basement; the Medical Center kept all their computers and systems controls in the basement; people drove into water that carried them away. It was terrible. What is happening right now is in some ways worse. Check out this drone footage of what folks are dealing with.
Here in Austin we have hills and the ground is permeable limestone, so it takes a lot for the kind of widespread flooding you see in Houston to take place. And while there are areas prone to that, mostly along the Colorado River floodplain. That's the TEXAS Colorado, known in ATX as "Town Lake" and snaking east through Bastrop and on toward the Gulf of Mexico. It is a major source of drinking and farmland irrigation water and since we have been in major drought status for several years, all this rain has been pretty welcome. In fact, Lake Travis, which is the main source of drinking water for Austin and the surrounding area,
rose 22 feet over the last week and 26 feet over the last month!
Not so welcome is the flooding of the creeks that happens with heavy rains, because while that permeable limestone is great for recharging the Edwards Aquifer and feeding into the many swimming holes in and around the city, too much too fast means flash floods. "Turn Around Don't Drown" is probably the most commonly heard phrase during heavy rains here and there is a reason for that: some people are idiots and try to drive through flowing water. It never fails, every time we get flash floods someone thinks the outcome will be somehow different for them. It isn't, and here's why. I took this the other day, as the system was making its way east to wallop the Bayou City.
But whatever we got here in Austin is nothing to the devastating impact of beautiful
Wimberley, TX, a gorgeous little town in the heart of the Hill Country between Austin and San Antonio, not far from San Marcos. With two confirmed dead and 13 still missing after the Blanco River swelled its banks and flash flooded, slamming into town with a 44 ft wall of water, people in that community will be forever affected. I knows some folks who live out there. They are all ok but are simply heartbroken and in shock at the level of destruction. Public radio informed listeners yesterday that tree ring counts from the vast number of live oaks, pecans and other old trees that used to line the streets and river bank in Wimberley reveal on average over 500 years of growth.
Not a single tree remains along that stretch of the Blanco. It is, in in modern terms, truly unprecedented.
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