I think we can all remember what this was like

NOAA satellite photos show flooded neighborhoods in Houston and Galveston.  I remember clicking through file folders of these some 12 years ago trying to find the one that might show if my place was ok.  It was the first time a lot of us who had evacuated started to really process the scope of what had happened; block after block, neighborhood after neighborhood just totally underwater. It was devastating.

At least now there's this easy to use map interface.  The kids today don't know how lucky they are.

Floating balls of fire ants are having a moment

Good for them. It's about time.  I still can't believe we didn't think about this during the whole Zephyrs renaming episode.  Baby Cakes is still good in that it's funny that their bad idea to change the name failed on them like that. But if we had remembered this was available, things might have been different. 

Always check first

I read this story and thought, well now everybody is going to get a Whataburger a tattoo.  But something told me that might already be a thing.

HUD, which still exists for now, says it will help

Ordinarily this would be a rote declaration from the HUD secretary in this situation, but nowadays you really can't count on anything so it's worth noting.

12:25 p.m.: HUD confirms it will help with Harvey aid

Homeowners and low-income renters forced from homes by the pounding storms or flooding will have assistance available via the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

"Today, our thoughts and prayers are with those who are beginning the process of recovering from Hurricane Harvey," said HUD Secretary Ben Carson, in a release. "As FEMA begins to assess the damage and respond to the immediate needs of residents, HUD will be there to offer assistance and support the longer-term housing recovery efforts."

HUD is where the CDBG money is... for now. 

The most high profile post-K HUD project, Road Home, ended up costing about $13 billion and dispersed grants to 130,000 homeowners. It did this at a maddeningly slow pace and via an absurd and torturous process mostly to satisfy and idiotic political prejudice against helping people who might not "deserve" help.  I'm sure Ben Carson will get all that straightened out, though.

Why didn't they evacuate?

As always, there are many many reasons not to evacuate.  It's never a clear cut decision for an individual. Where will you go? How will you get there? Can you afford to go? Are you healthy enough to go? Can you afford to stay there? How sure are you of being able or allowed to come back? Also, what if evacuating literally kills you?

Houston area officials who urged people to stay home before the storm may have been remembering that the city government was strongly criticized after the disastrous evacuation before Hurricane Rita in 2005.

In the hours before Rita struck the Houston area in September 2005, government officials issued an evacuation order, and some 2.5 million people hit the road at the same time, according to the Houston Chronicle.

More than 100 people died in the mass exit from the city — almost as many as were killed by the hurricane itself.

Dozens were injured or died of heat stroke waiting in traffic for nearly a full day. Fights broke out on clogged highways. A charter bus carrying people from a nursing home exploded on the side of Interstate 45, killing 24 people inside

Therefore evacuation shouldn't be a clear cut decision for public officials to make. There's no such thing as a "mandatory evacuation." Or, at least, we shouldn't be thinking in those terms.  Give people the best information and advice. And, by all means, do whatever  is possible to help them go if that's the best thing.  But it's not possible or helpful to make them go.  It's also not helpful to blame them if they choose not to.

A big bathtub

$40 billion or thereabouts. At least, that was the estimate before the actual impact was known. Right now Houston is flooding. So that can't be good.

Very concerning that less than 1/6 of homes in Harris County have NFIP insurance. Sadly, a big portion of losses won't be insured. #Harvey pic.twitter.com/TTiSBOSb7C

— Steve Bowen (@SteveBowenWx) August 27, 2017

As we know all too well in New Orleans, when there's a lot of flood damage and insufficient flood insurance, the difference is mostly made up through HUD's Community Development Block Grants program. Louisiana's infamously administrated Road Home program was funded by CDBG, for example.

Presently, HUD is guided by the gifted hands of Ben Carson and, I guess, his wife.

At the Metropolitan Club, George W. Bush’s second secretary, Alphonso Jackson, warned Carson against cutting further into HUD’s manpower. (Many regional offices have shuttered in recent years.) Carla Hills, who ran the department under President Ford, put in a plug for the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, noting that Ford had created it in 1974 precisely in order to give local governments more leeway over how to spend federal assistance.

The tone was collegial, built on the hopeful assumption that Carson wanted to do right by the department. “We were trying to be supportive,” Henry Cisneros, from the Clinton administration, told me. But it was hard for the ex-secretaries to get a read on Carson’s plans, not least because the whisper-voiced retired pediatric neurosurgeon was being overshadowed by an eighth person at the table: his wife, Candy. An energetic former real-estate agent who is an accomplished violinist and has co-authored four books with her husband, she had been spending far more time inside the department’s headquarters at L’Enfant Plaza than anyone could recall a secretary’s spouse doing in the past, only one of many oddities that HUD employees were encountering in the Trump era. She’d even taken the mic before Carson made his introductory speech to the department. “We’re really excited about working with — ” She broke off, as if detecting the puzzlement of the audience. “Well, he’s really.”

The story of the Trump administration has been dominated by the Russia investigations, the Obamacare-repeal morass, and cataclysmic internecine warfare. But there is a whole other side to Trump’s takeover of Washington: What happens to the government itself, and all it is tasked with doing, when it is placed under the command of the Chaos President? HUD has emerged as the perfect distillation of the right’s antipathy to governing. If the great radical-conservative dream was, in Grover Norquist’s famous words, to “drown government in a bathtub,” then this was what the final gasps of one department might look like.

Maybe Houston is the bathtub.  

This event is unprecedented & all impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced. Follow orders from officials to ensure safety. #Harvey pic.twitter.com/IjpWLey1h8

— NWS (@NWS) August 27, 2017

And Trump's budget proposes we drown the CDBG program.

40-50 inches of rain

Houston is the fourth largest city in the country. Gonna need a big big, well coordinated search and rescue plan. I'm sure the current federal administration is on top of it...

Better and not-so-better

BP lawsuits to be heard in New Orleans

A federal judge in New Orleans has been picked to preside over more than 300 lawsuits filed against BP PLC and other companies in the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill.

Previously, BP's lawyers had asked to have these proceedings take place in Houston where, as Oyster explained at length here, the court may have been a bit more sympathetic toward BP.


Update: Note this, however: Carl Barbier, Judge Who Owned Bonds In Gulf Oil Spill Companies, Will Handle Most Spill Lawsuits

Meanwhile,

Questions remain about Gulf Victims Fund

1) BP is going to make about $5 billion in claims against its own "victims' relief fund". Apparently, BP is its own victim here and needs to pay itself reparations or something.

2)

President Obama appointed prominent attorney Ken Feinberg to oversee the fund.

Feinberg says he will only coordinate the claims for individuals and businesses.

Local governments must still appeal directly to BP for their losses.

"If BP and the White House are saying that while the government claims will come out of the fund, but Feinberg won't handle those claims, you're going to be having more than one hand actually dealing with the fund and will you get inconsistent results, we don't know," said New Orleans attorney Walter Leger.

3) Leger and others are now begging to have more of this stuff go through Feinberg. Which, if you've been reading Dambala at all, you kind of have to sigh at a little.