Two words for those who're flinging shade at Houston municipal officials: Hurricane Rita

[AtheistCrusader]

71. True, for the long game, it's critical to keep the climate perspective.

And you make a good point about the jet streams, although it's nearly impossible or might actually be impossible to prove direct correlation to this event.

I guess my main point is, these storms happen even absent any human spawned climate alterations, and with that in mind, the ground level development is fully irresponsible, and entirely profit-motivated with little to no meaningful regulatory oversight. Or worse, fox guarding the henhouse stuff where the regulatory building codes and city planning is infested with developers/allies. It's possible to build the city to shrug this kind of storm off, but they seem to have taken the opposite tack, and build the second most vulnerable infra/city behind New Orleans itself.

This was preventable. Completely so.

There's some heroic rescue efforts underway, and some impressive sudden shelter options, but there should have been formal mass-scale shelter options in place. Worst case mitigation is shelter-in-place in communal shelters, evacuating residential areas but not leaving the city. They really didn't have much of a plan for that. Investment isn't there.


Now I'm starting to look around and worry. What other under-investment disaster planning is on the brink? Mt. Rainier? Hawaii coastline tsunami prep? What is the next disaster where we're going to say NEXT TIME we do it right, after failing to address an obvious vulnerability?