Harvey Heads Into Louisiana While Assault on Texas Gulf Coast Continues

TOWSON, Maryland, Tuesday, August 29, 2017 - In New Orleans yesterday, the citizens began lining up for government-issued sand bags.  The outside bands of now-tropical storm Harvey were overhead with showers.  Nobody here needs to be reminded about what could be next.  Harvey, for now, is still west of New Orleans, but forecasters say it will make land fall today.  

All Along the Texas Gulf Coast, flat bottomed boats are in high demand.  Even in the middle of the night, small boats are moving up and down what used to be streets on dry land.  The flat bottoms allow the vessels to move in shallow water.  Whenever a citizen is spotted, they are asked if they want to stay or go.  If their answer is "go" - as it most often is - they are invited aboard and taken to the nearest  drop off center.

There were reports of tornados all along the Gulf Coast.  But by far the biggest danger was the rising waters.  If the forecast of 50 inches of rain proves true, it is hard to imagine what the Gulf Coast will look like or how long it would take before the flood waters recede.  Where will the flood waters go?  A huge reservoir, which up to now has kept its millions of gallons of water out of the rising flood, is reported to be only inches from the top of its capacity.  No one thinks it will hold the rising waters, and when the water comes out of the reservoir and into its spillway, a bad situation will get worse, a lot worse.

Of course, the Gulf is a resilient body of water.  People remember the BP disaster of early in the Obama years.  An oil well in very deep water blew off its drilling head and began spilling tens of thousands of raw crude oil into the Gulf.  It took weeks to cap the well.  There were predictions of tens of thousands of square miles of Gulf Water being a marine grave yard, and none of it came true.  Within a month it was hard to find any oil in the Gulf of Mexico, even at ground zero.  Apparently, large bodies of salt water have built-in ways of dealing with such pollutants.  Obama sent Justice Department Lawyers to the scene, looking to indict BP
 folk for their "crimes."  Turned out the Obama EPA had just awarded BP several medals for environmental responsibility.

Sadly for Obama, no crimes were broken.  No indictments were returned.  

The National Weather Service said this about today's weather on the Gulf Coast, " Tropical Storm Harvey is forecast to move slowly north-northeast across the
 lower Sabine River Valley into central Louisiana through 
the period."

Officials said the official death toll for the storm was just six, but fears are rising that the toll will rise rapidly as areas now cut off from the outside world are accessed.