Much better!

 

The Sandpiper Wetlands this morning.

Less water.

 

This evening.

 

Even better!  When you stand right over it and look down, the grass is still wet, and the pumps are still running, but we're getting better fast.

 

 

 

Last night

  

The park in front of us was still grass.

 

Now today, it's a lake again.

 

Well, at least wetlands.

 

No rain.  Rising water.  The entire neighborhood outside our gates is flooded worse than we are.  Go figure.  The combined output of our pumps in the park is 1,900 gallons of water per minute being pumped into the nearby ditch.  We're just breaking even.

 

 

 

Uh oh

  

We're done with the hurricane.  We're mostly done with the rain.  Almost all the water was drained out of the park.  But now it's rising again.  There is not enough rain going on to feed the amount of water coming back in.  It's not an immediate problem for Judy and me, but grade matters.  Here on the south side of the park we're a few inches higher.  It's a different story for our friends on the north side of the park (about a block away).  If it wasn't enough for them to get the attached carport blown off the top of their house, now they're being threatened by rising water from the bottom!

 

 

 

There is a lake/reservoir just down the road from us and an intricate web of canals all over the valley to provide water where it is needed for crops, and to drain the water away from where it's not supposed to be.  Up until today, it was looking like the county had this whole drainage thing under control this year.  Darn.

 

 

 

Honest, we didn’t really mean to ride out a hurricane

  

Not even just a Category 1 hurricane.

 

We saw a system developing in the gulf.  A storm.  It was just a tropical storm wandering around out there.  No big deal.  All of a sudden, Saturday morning, just as the storm is about to make landfall.  Boom!  It’s a hurricane!  And it was still a hurricane when it crossed over us!  There were no hurricane warnings; no evacuation orders.  We have the motorhome.  It would have been easy enough to evacuate with a little more warning, and if we’d have wanted to.  We need more than one day of warning though.  The only thing we can do from here in a day is drive north, still in the path of the oncoming storm.

 

The rain has stopped.  The electricity stayed on, mostly, but it seems to be solid again now.  The television is back on.  The water is back on properly.  The internet is iffy.  Judy has been doing a lot of yard work getting everything picked up.  Oops, it’s raining again.

 

A walk around the park yesterday:

 

There is exterior fencing down on every exposure.

 

 

Lots of siding and skirting blown off.

 

 

The flooding wasn’t nearly as bad as it has been in the past.  It’s mostly just wet and receding, so the drainage improvements inside and outside the park are working.

 

There used to be a large attached carport here that ran the length of the trailer.

 

Now it’s here two houses away.  And another section of fence gone.

 

The winter population has moved on, but there are still a few people here in their RVs for the summer.  That must have been a rougher ride than we had Saturday night.  RVs are not strapped down to the ground like we are.

 

 

There used to be an attached car port here too, in front of the screen room, but it’s gone.  It didn’t crash into anyone else’s house, it just hasn’t been seen since.  Maybe it’s still going.

 

The great news is that we’re talking about property damage; no injuries or loss of life that we’re aware of.  Having a hurricane was not what we expected to do, but it’s another adventure to add to the life-list.  I’m thinking that not a lot of people get to stand outside in the middle of the night, during a pandemic, in the eye of a hurricane, naked!  Well, not that many people outside of our park anyway.  :)

 

 

 

It’s beginning

  

It’s beginning to look a lot like Thankschristmas at our house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’re having one friend over for an outdoor dinner on the deck tomorrow.  Judy, the cranberry lady, has been making homemade cranberries for two days and delivering servings to people all over the park as a way to share without all being in the same place at the same time.  The pie and ice cream; just at our house.

 

 

 

Sunday morning

  

Holy crap!  That was a fricking hurricane!  Wind howling, house shaking, stuff banging off the roof and walls.

 

When it got quiet at 11pm, we went outside into the eye of a hurricane.  This is how the weather radar looked at the time.  That nice round eye in the middle, that was right over us.

 

Shingles from our house in our neighbor's yard.  The windshield from our neighbor's golf cart in her neighbor's yard.  Electricity flashing off and on. 

 

This morning.  Damage.  Our house mostly intact but with some shingles gone.  Parts blown off our shed.  Leaves, branches, and trees blown down.  Pieces of fence gone.  Skirting gone.  More than one attached carport blown away.  More than one house damaged by flying carports.  Sheds relocated.  Water pressure gone.  No television.  Internet gone (but we have a backup for when we travel).

 

A downgrade to a tropical storm in Mexico; in the neighborhood of Monterrey.  The eye is dissipating, but see those red bands off to the right?  Those are rain bands that continue to pound where we live.

 

Severe flooding in town.  The rain will likely last all day and maybe all night.  The park in front of our house is turning into a lake again.  I can hear frogs.

 

 

 

Hurricane Hanna

  

Wow.  That blew up fast from a tropical storm to a hurricane.  It has been out in the Gulf of Mexico over water that is 86 degrees.  Storms feed off the heat of a warm ocean.  It looked mighty well-defined this morning.

 

We're well off the coast; sixty miles inland.  We're at the blue pin in the map above if you can find it.  (Actually, we're right where the blue pin is even if you can't find it.)  We'll get tropical storm force wind and rain, but the storm surge won't get us.  Five or ten inches of rain forecast.  Maybe fifteen.  We'll expect some flooding.  No worries though, we've got our pant legs pulled up.  We'll be fine.

 

It's already very stormy at the coast.  Here are some local television reports.

 

The pier at Port Aransas.

 

Bob Hall Pier South of Port A.  It's coming apart a little.

 

Somewhere near Port A.

 

The Gulf water has already eaten up the beach at Port Aransas.  Now it's starting on the dunes.

 

Mustang Island has a really good dune field though, so it will probably be fine.

 

It'll be interesting to see how our park holds water this year.  Previously, the water level continued to rise even after it stopped raining.  That suggests a drainage problem not just inside our park, but from outside the park as well if water keeps draining back in.  Since the last round of floods, there has been a public works project called the Raymondville Drain.  It's supposed to drain the excess water from our area all the way to the Gulf of Mexico at Port Mansfield.  The new drainage project is far from done, but maybe the ditches they have been able to dig so far will make a difference.

 

No sign of Lake Sandpipers yet.  It's still a green-grass park.

 

Late-day update.  The hurricane has come ashore.

 

The wind and rain are here.  No flooding yet.

 

 

They've had 100mph gusts at the coast.  Rain at a rate of 4 inches per hour.  The wind is shaking our house now.  The power and television are blinking on and off.  It will be dark here soon.  The eye of the hurricane should pass right over us at about 11pm our time.

 

 

 

There’s a storm a comin

  

 

It’s out in the gulf.  Tropical storm Hanna.

 

 

It is projected to make landfall about Corpus Christi then bend south as it proceeds west.  That would take it right over us too.  Maybe 5 inches of rain over the weekend.  Maybe 10.  And tropical force winds.  We’re battening down the deck furniture.

 

 

 

A long-billed thrasher

  

 

 

 

Not to be confused with the curve-billed thrasher.

 

 

 

 

FW: Physics Talk 5:30 Aspen Time Tonight

  

So far, to me, these physics talks seem to be directed more to other physicists than to the general public, unless of course, the general public understands a lot more physics than I do.  They’re pretty hard for me to follow.

 

This one about black holes looks like it’s got some potential for a general audience though.  Black holes.  You can’t see anything inside a black hole, so how technical could it be?

 

2020 Heinz R. Pagels Physics Talks   Please join us LIVE ONLINE TONIGHT   5:30 Aspen time (11:30 UTC) followed by an interactive Q&A           Jane Dai   University of Hong Kong       Giant Black Holes Devouring Stars: Extreme Cosmic Events Illuminating   Black Hole Spacetimes       In the center of every big galaxy, there is an enormous black hole with billions of stars orbiting around it. Astrophysicists want to study how these black holes grow together with galaxies throughout cosmic history and how they affect the surrounding spacetime. However, this is a hard task, since these black holes are usually dark and faraway.    Recently, a lot of progress has been made in studying how such massive black holes can tear apart stars wandering too close. Such phenomena, called tidal disruption events, can produce very bright flares which temporarily illuminate the black holes. In this talk, Professor Dai will show how massive black holes destroy and eat stars, why general relativity is important in the whole process, and how the properties of massive black holes can be probed through such events. She will also discuss how the frontier of this research topic has been pushed forward by using modern telescopes and large-scale computer simulations.   Prof. Jane Dai is a theoretical astrophysicist working at the University of Hong Kong. She obtained her Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 2012. She was a joint postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and the University of Chile, and then a postdoctoral associate at the University of Maryland. She joined the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark as an assistant professor before moving to Hong Kong. Her research interests include black hole accretion disks, jets, tidal disruption events, X-ray reverberation mapping, and computational relativistic astrophysics.   Introducer and Co-host: Peter Maksym, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics               Zoom Registration Link       Join us next Thursday for "Time Reversal Symmetry and Unconventional Superconductors" with Aharon Kapitulnik, Stanford University       Aspen Center for Physics | 970-925-2585 | patty@aspenphys.org       Donate           Connect with us       ‌ ‌ ‌     Talks will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel.

 

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