Looking through news photos of the situation and spotted some ISU hospitality.
Hurricane Harvey
- Thread starter SayMyName
- Start date
Cyclonepride
Thought Police
I agree with all that, but I also wonder if a computer software/simulation program couldn't be used to determine where the trouble spots would be in any given city. I'm sure it would have to be fairly complex, as it would have to factor in each city's waste water capacity/speed of draining, along with surrounding streams and rivers (and factor in storm surge), but I bet they could come up with something where you upload your elevations, set rates and volumes of rain, and see what happens.
Computers are logical. People are not...and they are even less so when endangered or panicked.
That'd all work great until the water grabbed a car or something and drug it to a place where it blocked drainage. Then your model is busted, as the water can't escape how it normally would.
Or the infrastructure wasn't all the same age and some wears out and bottlenecks areas. Cities don't keep up with storm sewers very well is my experience.
Cyclonepride
Thought Police
And my point was - no matter how much information people get, they still do not make logical decisions like computers. Feed ten thousand computers the same information and they will (or should) reach the same conclusions. Feed ten thousand people the same information in an emergency situation and you still have a basic clusterf*ck.
I mean - I sorta do that for a living. Not exactly parallel, but close.
One thing is, the accuracy of such predictions is often only reliable up to what you can test, or what has been observed previously. This type of event - a years worth of rain in 3 days for an area the size of New Jersey - computers aren't going to help a ton. I mean, 30% of the land in Harris County is under water!
I know here in Iowa, the Flood Center at the UofI (which the legislature tried to defund last year) has very detailed maps of Cedar Rapids that shows exactly what land is covered at a specific river depth. ProPublica did a similar study in Houston last year (LINK) predicting much of what happened.
The secondary problem is, if you try to evacuate in a very precise manner, that you need everyone to cooperate, and coordinating that type of response - in Texas especially, is not going to be efficient or timely.
28 great pictures from The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-leaves-houston-under-water/538215/
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-leaves-houston-under-water/538215/
I am interested to see these types of models mature over time and incorporate different scenarios (temporary flood protection being set up as able). Last year in Cedar Rapids the models showed water going places it never ended up going. Partially due to temporary flood protection (which requires a solid day or two to set up). That being set it seemed like it showed places flooding that didn't even though they did not have protection.
It is always better to be over prepared but this lead to large areas sandbagging that didn't have a drop of water come near them.
The story thats blowing up twitter this morning has to do with a mom who was with her 3 year old daughter and drowned. The girl clung to her mom's floating body until she was rescued. Really had to collect myself and get my **** together at work after reading that. My son is 3 btw, so that hits close to home.
A gofund me page is up for that girl. Sorry i dont have a link handy.
A gofund me page is up for that girl. Sorry i dont have a link handy.
These stories crush me and is hard to ***** about anything in life. The people that are pointing fingers need to take a step back and realize this is time to come together to help each other.
Problems now spreading past south TX. As some main refineries went offline, DFW is now running out of gasoline. I was still able to fill up diesel in Arlington, but there was no gasoline. My wife called to tell me that there is no diesel either on the west side of Ft. Worth.
While I was filling diesel, somebody pulled up and asked if I thought their gasoline car would run on diesel. I strongly advised against trying it...
CycloneErik
Well-Known Member
And my point was - no matter how much information people get, they still do not make logical decisions like computers. Feed ten thousand computers the same information and they will (or should) reach the same conclusions. Feed ten thousand people the same information in an emergency situation and you still have a basic clusterf*ck.
Pride is only talking about feeding that info to leaders for decision-making in case it might help.
I can't imagine it is due to the hurricane as it is a not a high demand product and thus not refined very often but the main airport in Wichita ran out of AvGas yesterday (100LL). Still haven't heard the reason why though so who knows....could have been equipment related too.
Should have told them it would, but they'd need a funnel to get it in their tank...
While I still think the modelings are of limited use due to the sheer volume of variables, I will concede that point.
All I could think of was the crazy mega-winter-storm crazes we get up here, and how po'd people would get when they were not 100% accurate...
