My Family and the Flood
texasmonthly.com
texasmonthly.com
Then, my friend messaged me one night and asked me to join him at the children's hospital to take a few photos as they were saying "goodbye." His 18 month old had been fighting cancer, and it was 1 in the morning and my melatonin-addled brain thought "oh, they must be taking him home."
It wasn't until I walked into the room with my DSLR that I realized what he meant. In fairness, he had prefaced the request with, "do you mind if I ruin your night?"
I am not even close to a professional photographer. But I tried to take as many pictures as respectfully as I could of the literal hardest moment any parents could ever hope not to have to go through. At a certain moment, it became time, and I found myself... stuck, in a sense. I was the only other one in the room aside from the parents, but I didn't feel like I could abandon them, and so I sat there as they disconnected the machines keeping their son alive. It was the most awful two minutes as the attending sat there with a stethoscope against this tiny chest.
I waited until an opportune moment, and then hugged them, quietly took my leave, went home, edited the photos as quickly as possible, uploaded and sent them, and then bawled for an hour or so.
Needless to say, this set back our efforts at even _trying_ for kids by about 2-3 years. Because I just was stuck by this all-encompassing thought: you can't lose what you don't have. You simply aren't open to that sort of vulnerability if you don't have children. It doesn't exist, until you form it into being. And that thought haunted me. Just like it haunts, well, every parent on some level.
And to clarify: this didn't even _happen to me_. It happened to _them_, and their son. But it was a defining moment for me that made it really tough to overcome.
Eventually, we did have two kids (after a miscarriage, of course, because isn't that how it goes), and they're sitting behind me watching a movie as I type this. But these sort of thoughts are always there in the background. And yeah, reading a story like this one about the flood just spears you in the soul.
I still felt like it was worse when, prior to this, I attended the funeral of a little girl from my kid's school. Tiny coffin, painted with horses. All the kids having their first experience with death. The impossibility of saying anything useful to the parents at the reception afterwards.
Its a mistake in general in life to get swayed and stunned by the negative aspects of it and be blocked to experience the positive aspects, even if some risk of harm is involved. Although some healing and reconciliation is required, no doubt there. You did allright based on your description. Trying to play the game of life as safe as possible ultimately means losing the game.
Life doesn't have to be always a positive experience, rather an intense one compared to keeping it always safe and ending up with meh story (and usually tons of regrets before dying). My philosophy only, but I really think it should be pretty much universal.
Also yes miscarriages are very common, we had one, and so did basically all couples in our circle in various phases. I take it as a defense mechanism of woman's body, figuring out it wouldn't work out later so aborting the mission (at least under normal circumstances). One was very brutal (in 37th week, basically a stillbirth and woman still had to go through whole birth process), a proper traumatic experience that leaves permanent scars on souls of parents. But still, after mourning one has to get up and keep moving even if feeling empty and powerless, thats life.
What I wrote is unfortunately true, and brutal. Don't think I didn't cry for those babies who never stood the chance, both ours and other's. But eventually you have to get up, the only other alternative to this is far worse. So I did, and so did my wife, and all the other parents affected. Life goes on and doesn't care about your personal woes.
We live in extremely safe times compared to how things looked even 150 years ago, 40-50% of kids didn't survive to age 5 and deaths during even normal pregnancies were very common. Go read a bit about that if you feel like I talk extreme or are an outlier.
This sentence in a HN article from a day ago caught my eye [1][2].
> Second, between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US maternal death rate fell by 94 percent, according to Sarygulov and Arslanagic-Wakefield. Early antibiotics in the 1930s, followed by the mass production of penicillin in the 1940s, “drove down incidences of sepsis, [which were] responsible for 40 percent of maternal deaths at the time, and made caesarean sections safer,” they write.
94 percent!
[1] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-caused-the-baby-boom-wh...
Once heard the observation that you're only as happy as your saddest child.
A wonderful novella in this context. Hard science fiction in one respect, with correct physics, but also literature in my opinion: https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Reading/Ch...
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
Our ancestors had families during wars and famines. In the case of my family, that wasn't that many generations ago.
https://www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Letture%20TDPC/K.%20Weick%2...
Shiroyama Elementary School
Nagai Takashi Memorial Museum Nagasaki
These felt much more personal than anything I saw in Hiroshima and there were zero (other) tourists to interrupt the experience (very much unlike the museum in Hiroshima).
Then I scrubbed around and realized, no, it was the same place, which left me stunned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kYjiTEDqtw
Make sure to watch the last 3-5 minutes or so for the cherry on top. Then I recommend skipping back to the beginning to really drive home how insane this was.
I will never again be cavalier about flash flood warnings.
We had about 10cm of rain fall on already saturated soils upstream of us, and as darkness fell that evening I could see the river rise… and rise… and rise - and in the nick of time came to the realisation that we had to evacuate, NOW. Our car had already washed away, so we ended up bushwhacking a few km out in the driving rain, two very pissed off cats stuffed into our go-bags. Turns out the car being gone was no great impediment as the road was gone, too, utterly washed out.
Came back to an almighty mess - flood was a 10,000 year one, the house was buried in gigantic flotsam, entire trees that had been uprooted, and tumbled down the river in an enormous jam, inches of mud coating every surface. The chimney had washed away.
The mill itself was fine. Three meter thick stone walls, for a reason, it turns out.
We still live here. The year after the flood we had a small earthquake, enough to send boulders crashing down into the valley - and the year after that a wildfire, which reduced much of the valley to a moonscape. That time, we fled with a toddler in tow, as well as the cats.
Perhaps one day this place will be the end of us - but the 99.9% of the time it isn’t trying to kill us, it couldn’t be better.
We now at least have huge water tanks and a deluge system for the fire risk, and a cabin 30 meters above the river for us to decamp to in the winter when the flood risk grows - and a new roof with a steel substructure to catch any errant bits of mountain that decide to visit.
It was incredible. Manhole covers popping off, mildly sloped roads were rivers with rapids and flat ones were lakes, growing as you watched.
Caught completely unprepared, it was chaos.
Living near a river or flood-plain is a hard no for me, even if I had 3m thick stone walls.
If you want to know, look into the last time it was flooded.
If it has never flooded in the scope of human history, it’s possible that the danger of flooding is indeed not significant.
If it has flooded, it will likely flood again.
If it is a flood plain, it will probably flood again many, many times. Weather changes associated with climate change may exacerbate this. It would not be particularly surprising to see the variance in significant precipitation events to double, triple , or more.
In any rate, climate change aside, it would not be particularly remarkable for a flood risk that aggregates to one in ten years to not flood for 50 years running, just as it would not be unexpected if some such areas flooded each year for 3 years straight. Both of those events would be consistent with patterns that would be expected to happen in the big picture.
I know nothing of your situation, but if I were living within less than 100 feet of the altitude of a nearby river or sea, I would consider moving. Life is short, and in my tiny life I have been humanly connected to floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes within my direct circle of friends and family enough to internalize that these risks are not theoretical.
When an existential risk can be categorically eliminated from your life, it is often worth doing.
But the one that kills the most people, and does the most damage, is good ol' H₂O; water. The giver of life. Even with hurricanes, most of the damage is done by the flooding. Up here, we had Sandy, which, I think was only a Cat 2 or 3, but did 70 Billion dollars' worth of damage, and killed a bunch of folks.
Hulu has a great documentary on the Tsunami from 2004, in the Indian Ocean. It was a true horror.
Insurance companies sure as hell know this. Try getting home insurance in an area that they deem "flood-prone" (you might be surprised, where they say so). I think that most big insurance companies have refused to insure homes, in many parts of Florida.
Yes, and instead of making the people who choose to live there bear the true cost of that choice, we instead create state-owned flood insurance plans that subsidize the risk for (typically wealthy) coastal homeowners.
For the non-expert reader, I must point out that there are many factors that contribute to how "safe" rivers are.
Large parts of texas are flat, or have flat lands further up the water shed. This means that wide areas of rain, even though modest all get funneled into small areas. This is a common cause flash flooding.
More over the river basins are wide and flat too, which means that there isnt much to slow the water down and no shelter for when it comes.
In the same way that some costal areas have tame tides, and other have 7 meter swells, or where I grew up, tides that come in as fast as you can run.
Whether that's an acceptable risk is up to you. Having lived in central Texas, it's a region known for it's flash floods, and you should take the warnings seriously. If there's heavy rainfall - you should be asking where all that water will go.
In this case, I hope that Texas looks into upgrading their alerting system so that people get word in time to leave the area. The news was saying the weather center added additional staff for the storm (five meteorologists) but if their forecasts can't get to where they're needed, that's not good enough.
Since the July 4 flooding, I feel like the over correction of flood warnings via mobile phones is not a good thing. My phone has been going off with near daily flood warnings with 0% precipitation. I get how rain upstream can cause flooding where it’s not raining downstream, but it hasn’t even been raining upstream. I’m also well over 200 miles away from where the worst of the flooding happened. People that far away do not need these warnings. The notifications have listed counties not close, so it just comes across as “let’s do something just to say we did something”
Need ground alert sirens or something that would be taken seriously
This trained response to a siren/warning system is the reason they chose not to use the tsunami warning system in Hawaii during the fire. When that siren goes off, people seek higher ground which would have driven them to the fire.
We’ll see how long that record holds (I’ll take the under on 1000 years).
It’s a stark reminder that robust early warning isn’t just technology, it’s life or death and the costs of underfunding those systems aren’t hypothetical.
There’s a bit of horrifying tension, and you hope everyone’s ok. No matter how unlikely.
For that kind of structure, you must tie the rebar in - best is to have the entire length of the rebar for the column splay at the base and be threaded through and tied into the rebar for the footing, pour the footing, and then pour the columns as soon as the footing is cured enough to support the mass, but before it’s totally hard. That way the footing and the columns form a continuous structure, without any point where they can just lift or shear off.
I speak from experience, having built exactly this type of structure myself, and seeing it resist an enormous flood and a barrage of high-speed trees, unscathed. Absolute mess inside the timber structure atop, but anyone trapped within would have survived.
Unfortunately what they had there was a disaster waiting to happen.
You don't find it odd that so many poor- and middle-income countries with wildly different legal histories and taxing structures have the same glaring property tax loophole? Despite often wildly different origin stories for how the loophole came about?
Yes, some jurisdictions tax incomplete structures differently, but that only begs the question of whether a habitable structure lived in would be considered incomplete merely because some rebar is sticking out.
The real answer mostly relates to patterns of savings and real estate finance. In places where people invest their savings into their home directly, without a mortgage or similar as is common in more developed countries with robust retail financing options and comparatively liquid real estate markets, they often plan to build incrementally over time. Today you have enough money to build a 1-story out-of-pocket; in a few years you hope to have enough saved to expand to a 1-1/2 story or 2-story. This is much more feasible with concrete construction as it's relatively cheap (if not free or even cheaper than finishing) to just leave rebar exposed. Of course, as you pointed out earlier this doesn't make for great engineering. So you're more likely to see this in areas with loose building codes or lax enforcement.
In really poor areas you'll often find partial structures that aren't even habitable. That makes no sense in the tax loophole theory, but perfectly fits the theory that these structures are methods of investing savings. What's sad is that it's not uncommon for these to sit unfinished (to the point of habitability) for many years, or never finished at all; hard-working people's savings effectively lost.
Physics is not on your side here. if it was just water, then perhaps, although I am sceptical given how much force is generated by 10foot of water moving at 18 mph, which is ~6metric tons of lateral force. (assuming 1m2 cross section.)
Thats before any flotsam gets attached increasing the surface area.
Sure you could build something to withstand that, but could you afford to build it?
And, if not, could you really afford to live there?
If a similar extreme weather event hit the UK, that would be all you would hear about for months and there would be no instant clear up. The populace would be deeply traumatised and would not move on from the tragedy. America is different, resilient and it is rare for articles like this one to make the light of day.
"Floods can happen anywhere — just one inch of floodwater can cause up to thousands of dollars' worth of damage. Most homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Flood insurance is a separate policy that can cover buildings, the contents in a building, or both, so it is important to protect your most important assets — your home, your business, your possessions.
The NFIP provides flood insurance to property owners, renters and businesses, and having this coverage helps them recover faster when floodwaters recede. The NFIP works with communities required to adopt and enforce floodplain management regulations that help mitigate flooding effects.
Flood insurance is available to anyone living in one of the 22,600 participating NFIP communities. Homes and businesses in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from government-backed lenders are required to have flood insurance."
I live in a "zone X" neighborhood. Interestingly, it appears that significant areas around me are all "zone X" but personal experience and common sense show vastly different flood risks. Meaning there are lots built on the edges of "100 year" flood areas in "zone X" and properties 50-100 feet higher in elevation in the same neighborhood. Surely the risk would actually be quite different? I guess the models aren't particularly fine-grained.
You can play around with the calculator at: https://www.floodsmart.gov/policy-quote/
There are a bunch of available spreadsheets with costs by state/county that show some stats on those costs but I don't have the link handy.
This will get worse and at some point you have to ask if the areas are actually habitable or if it's just a colossal waste of resources to live there.
As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[4][5] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[4][6] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#Lis...
At least 3 of those are active calderas, with histories of producing VEI 7 eruptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_disasters_in_Japan#VEI...
A select quote:
> Aira caldera is surrounded by the major city of Kagoshima which has a population of more than 900,000. Residents do not mind small eruptions because they have measures in place for protection. For example, school students are required to wear hard helmets for protection against falling debris.
I can't imagine a more grim version of this game as the floodwaters of the Guadalupe recede below you.
And while not directly on the river bed, I've seen my share of swollen rivers in all places I lived. My grandparents had a house at the edge of the village, the river was some 200 meters from it and much lower but a few times with heavy raining, the garden was flooded and water nearly got to the house. I recall watching in awe from uphill the raging torrent and wondering how the funk could it have gotten so big from the original peaceful river.
Right now, I live downstream of a 100 meters tall water dam holding 200 hectares (500 acres) of lake. If that dam breaks, it's lights out for many. You forget about it but shit happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
I will not live long term on land that has historically been subject to flooding, or where the site forms part of a constricted drainage.
There are enough risks in life that cannot be realistically mitigated. No sense exposing your family to one day in and day out that is just a matter of choice. Unfortunately, humans are terrible about understanding probabilistic risks, and our short, brutal lives offer little opportunity to appreciate the nature of long-period risk.
A “hundred year flood” means that there is a seventy percent chance that your house will be wiped away within your lifetime. It’s like choosing to be habitually reckless with fire in your home. We aren’t reckless with fire because the risk is very tangible and within our control. Long period risks are just as real and often just as much within our control, but we have to think in terms of math and not our “feeling” of security. Our instincts about safety and security are honed over millions of years to understand what is a safe Place to camp for the night. We are not intrinsically equipped to viscerally understand this kind of risk.
I am a fellow urbanist and while I see where you’re coming from this doesn’t apply at all to this situation. There’s a quote in the article talking about how the grandparents chose this house specifically for the summer memories.
The land is valuable as entertainment space. Such as temporary camping, hiking, fishing, and other outdoor activities. It is quite beautiful land.
Conversely there are also plots of land that are not valuable along the water where there is little natural beauty which leads to lower land prices, hence people setting up things like mobile homes and RVs as places to live that are less expensive options.