Hurricane Harvey

[joefromga]

Larry Caldwell
You know not of which you speak but allow me to enlighten you Aug 29 2005 Katrina struck my home town ground zero every thing gone and I mean every thing to make a long story short my family and i went to Houston the people did and gave every thing to help encouragement sympathy house hold items and most of all kindness I feel their pain recovery for some will take 3 to 10 years Larry your hurt full words do nothing but show a mean spirited person Larry you might want get on your knees and thank god it not your family suffering this hardship and maybe say a prayer for Houston and surrounding area.

Did you lose all your periods in the hurricane too?...

 

[Spanner]

It is gambling. Unless my math is wonky, 1/8 of 1% is 1 in 8000, far from infinitesimal,

ermm, isn't it: 1 in 800 ?

1/8 'of' 1 percent

(1/8) x (1/100) = 1/800

1/8=0.125.
1/100=0.01
0.125 x 0.01 = 0.00125 = 1/800

1/800 = 0.00125

1/8000 = 0.000125

 

[sseelhoff]

If I told you that there was a poison candy in a machine with eight thousand candies in it, would you put a candy from that machine in your mouth and swallow it? That one candy is a known risk, just like the unpredictability of the weather is a known risk. The fact that we can't control something has implications on risk mitigation, severe implications, but I don't understand how the difference between something being "knowingly undertaken" and something you cannot control matters. If you know you can't control the weather, you could choose to mitigate the associated risk by not moving into hurricane or tornado country. All we're really talking about here is risk and risk management, but then you've already concluded that I don't understand that.

Once again you are comparing a known (you know that poisoned candy is in the bowl) versus the unknown-the weather is not known. Secondly, with each successive candy that is eaten, the odds reduce. With each passing year, the odds of a flood of this proportion do not change. It's not an accurate comparison.

No one foresaw the building of the Berlin wall, or its subsequent tear down. Our ancestors never thought man would walk on the moon, or that there were such things as ice ages and glaciers. Just because something hasn't happened in the past is no indication that it will not happen in the future. With regard to the weather, and hurricanes in particular, climatologists have predicted that our current warmer conditions will lead to more frequent and violent storms. Harvey may be something of a freak, but not so much that it couldn't be imagined or anticipated.

So what? What did a Berlin Wall policy look like and who sold it?

I see from your sig that you live in the affected area, and I hope you're weathering this storm well. If you are, it is in no small part because you recognized the risks associated with hurricanes and took steps to mitigate them; you are to be congratulated! With regard to an individual's responsibility for loss, we are in complete agreement!

 

[TomSeller]

Just saw on FOX that there is price gouging going on by stores. Sounds like TX put laws into place a while back that will take care of the store owners before this is done. $20k to $250K fines for gouging in an emergency.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Are they subsidized? I know the feds control the market, just like they now do with student loans.

Yes, the feds pick up the tab for a large majority of flood insurance premiums. They were going to phase them out but then homeowners found out their flood insurance was going to cost more than their mortgage payment and pitched a fit. Congress decided to continue the subsidy.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Larry Caldwell
You know not of which you speak but allow me to enlighten you Aug 29 2005 Katrina struck my home town ground zero every thing gone and I mean every thing to make a long story short my family and i went to Houston the people did and gave every thing to help encouragement sympathy house hold items and most of all kindness I feel their pain recovery for some will take 3 to 10 years Larry your hurt full words do nothing but show a mean spirited person Larry you might want get on your knees and thank god it not your family suffering this hardship and maybe say a prayer for Houston and surrounding area.

If you spent less time praying to some fictional sky guy and more time dealing with the real world, life might be easier. While the rest of the country makes realistic preparations for disasters, southerners seem to think chanting mystical slogans is going to save them. Houston is the poster child for urban sprawl. It's over 600 square miles, much of it concrete, buildings or pavement. They have some bayous to dispose of flood water, and as a backup plan the freeways are supposed to turn into rivers, but that's the extent of their flood planning. That's why nobody wanted people evacuating Houston. Hundreds of thousands of people would have drowned when the freeways turned into rivers.

You are quite correct that Louisiana is even stupider than Texas. They didn't even have a statewide building code until after Katrina. However, engineers have been telling Houston to tighten up its flood control and flood codes for decades, and developers have blocked it because it would cost them money. Of course, people who build in flood plains don't care what happens to the property after they sell it, they just want the most money they can scam people out of. Just like Katrina and Sandy, the taxpayer will get stuck with the bill for Texan lack of responsibility.

I'm all for disaster relief loans, as long as people have to pay the money back. Maybe you forgot about the grifters in NOLA who scammed FEMA for over a million dollars apiece for nothing? It won't take a week for crooks to come crawling out of the pond slime. Disaster relief loans should be the same as student loans; not even bankruptcy can get you out from under them. You want to remodel your house on the federal dime? That's going to cost you two nickels.

 

[RedNeckGeek]

ermm, isn't it: 1 in 800 ?

1/8 'of' 1 percent

(1/8) x (1/100) = 1/800

1/8=0.125.
1/100=0.01
0.125 x 0.01 = 0.00125 = 1/800

1/800 = 0.00125

1/8000 = 0.000125

You are correct. I fat fingered my calculator.:ashamed:

But that just makes the odds ten times greater that the piece of candy is poison or a hurricane of Harvey's magnitude will occur in a given year. I wasn't comfortable at 1 in 8000, let alone at 1 in 800, especially when it comes to my life and livelihood.

 

[houstonscott]

Did you read the first link? "The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) owes $24.6 billion to the Treasury. Most of it covered claims from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and floods in 2016, the program’s third most severe loss-year on record with losses exceeding $4 billion, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which manages it." If payouts equaled premiums over time, the program would not owe the Treasury $24.6B. Steve

I think you'll find fema covered regardless of policy, and much of that was for more than home replacement. So no real numbers.

 

[txdon]

Houston is the poster child for urban sprawl. It's over 600 square miles, much of it concrete, buildings or pavement. They have some bayous to dispose of flood water, and as a backup plan the freeways are supposed to turn into rivers, but that's the extent of their flood planning. That's why nobody wanted people evacuating Houston. Hundreds of thousands of people would have drowned when the freeways turned into rivers.

That is not why they did not evacuate. The only "Freeway" in Houston that is low is the SW Freeway in the Montrose area. That's in the middle of Houston a stretch of about 3-4 miles of roadway.There are a few underpass that might also be lower than the roads but all the lower elevation parts would never hold hundreds of thousands of cars. The rest of the freeways are higher than the roads around them. However a lot of the neighborhood roads are designed to flood before the houses not the freeways.

For the last 30 years all new construction had to have a retention pond - did you forget about that?

The reason they did not evacuate is because the massive number of people would have created a gridlock on the roads like it did last time.

 

[smstonypoint]

I think you'll find fema covered regardless of policy, and much of that was for more than home replacement. So no real numbers.

The issue isn't FEMA expenditures, it's whether the NFIP premiums are subsidized. A debt of $24.6B even before Harvey indicates the NFIP premiums are being subsidized.


"Federal Emergency Management Agency data shows that from 1978 through 2015, 3.8 percent of flood insurance policyholders have filed repetitively for losses that account for a disproportionate 35.5 percent of flood loss claims and 30.5 percent of claim payments, .......... Most of these properties were grandfathered in before the NFIP issued its flood insurance rate maps. The NFIP is not permitted to refuse them insurance or charge them rates based on the actual risks they face."

Hurricane Harvey and the National Flood Insurance Fiasco - Hit & Run : Reason.com



Steve