Test for Dementia

[martincisneros]

Hey thanks, Martin!
btw...I here one minute they are evacuating Huston, the next they are not...what's the deal?
Joyce :)

There's not enough time to evacuate the coast and Houston.  They're banking on Houston being far enough inland for damage to be minimal, would be my guess.  The roads heading away from the coast are parking lots right now, without adding however many millions of people are in Houston to the roads as well.  Houston is one of our biggest cities.  Evacuating that would be historic and you'd never shut the media up about the progress of that and how that went when it was all over with.  That would be like evacuating Los Angeles or New York, along with every other coastal area.  A lot of gas stations along the way are already out of gasoline and not sure when they'd get more.  And a lot of stores and convenience stores along the way have empty shelves.  Right now, there's uncertainty about how strong this storm will be when it reaches land, exactly where it'll reach land, the path it'll take up into the United States, whether I'll be with the fishies, how much of a storm it'll be when it goes into Oklahoma, etc.  If it goes one way, then I'm looking at 8 inches of rain as far inland as I am, if it goes another way, then I'm only looking at a couple of inches of rain.  It just depends on whether the D/FW area gets a direct hit or whether it passes East of us.  Right now, it's looking like it'll be pretty far East of where I'm at, but there's so many questions to be answered as it reaches land before they'll know with certainty about what this storm is doing.  I'm on fairly high ground with where I'm at, so any rivers would just be passing me by if it turned out to be the worst scenario for my area.  The question marks right now include the tornadoes that this thing will spawn and where those will be, if any.  That's one reason why I modified my signature on my posts until about Sunday when this thing will probably be gone from Texas into Oklahoma and elsewhere.  Power outages are a question mark for me right now, that the news media hasn't said a whole lot about.  But if we get the 60mph winds that they're anticipating for the D/FW area and all of the accompanying flying debris, a few areas may be without power.  My area usually never is, but because we've beaten the odds thus far I've got a question mark in my mind about that.  This is not a little storm, if anybody's not really hearing many reports of this because of where you live and is thinking "but you're hundreds of miles from the coast!"  This thing's still going to be a tropical storm when it reaches either Oklahoma or Arkansas.  And then this thing could obviously combine with other weather systems as it heads north and get a little stronger again.  I'm just thankful that these storms are fairly rare.  They happen during the season for them, but they don't consistently choose the same piece of land to consistently pound.  It can be Texas, Mexico, Lousiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, and states north of them, with parts of Canada getting the tail end of these every once in a while.  I need to move, but for different reasons.

[WhiteWings]

What about San Antonio? (Someone I know lives there)
That's at least twice as far land inward as Houston I think. So much in the safe zone.
I just checked a map of Texas and I think your hometown should be "Corpus Christi"

[martincisneros]

What about San Antonio? (Someone I know lives there)
That's at least twice as far land inward as Houston I think. So much in the safe zone.
I just checked a map of Texas and I think your hometown should be "Corpus Christi"

San Antonio doesn't look like it's in the immediate danger zone on the weather maps as they're showing the weather reports where I'm at.  What kind of weather reports they're getting, though, I have no idea.  They seem like they're just barely West of the bad stuff.  Austin looks more like they might get as much rain as they can handle.  That's not to say that San Antonio won't get dumped on with lots and lots of rain.  And nobody knows yet about tornadoes being spawned by this Hurricane.  They're saying that this beep beep is 800 miles wide.  This is a MASSIVE storm.  Gustav a week or so ago that was supposed to be Louisiana's Armageddon was only about 290 miles across.  This one's a big ol' boy!  Places like El Paso and like the Texas Pan Handle are probably about the only places that aren't going to get pounded.  Galveston island is going to get buried in water.  There are few doubts about that.  It's not as powerful as other storms have been, but it's the size of this rascal that has everybody concerned.  I just heard that Louisana is where the biggest threats of tornadoes is going to be, although somehow New Orleans is somehow no longer considered in as much danger.  They're now saying that anybody bull headed enough to stay in the coastal area is forfeiting their lives 'cause this is just that bad as it's coming in.  It's still hrs away from the coast (as of when I'm typing this) and the tide's incredibly high.  This will still be a Hurricane as it reaches Athens and Palestine, which is probably within 200 miles of me.  If you've still got that Texas map handy, that should tell you how monstrous this one is.

[martincisneros]

Hey thanks, Martin!
btw...I here one minute they are evacuating Huston, the next they are not...what's the deal?
Joyce :)

Updated info: low lying areas of Houston were evacuated, but most of the city wasn't.  40% of the residents of Galveston island are trying to stick it out on Galveston island.  Governor Rick Perry just called this storm a tsunami because the waves are coming in over 20 feet high.  Over 600,000 people have been evacuated.  And, this fits perfectly with this test for dementia thread because anyone that would try to stick out what the top politician in Texas has called a tsunami without a direct "thus saith the Lord" that they've heard is DEMENTED :dontknow:

I would have stayed in Galveston if the Lord had told me.  I'm hanging on to everything that He's told me.  Absolutely everything.  The last couple of Hurricanes are the first ones I haven't had to get involved anyway, because they've been evacuating the animals at long last per a new federal law that passed after Hurricane Katrina when too many people stayed behind, many of whom died, because they weren't willing to rescue their animals.  If it's a new federal law that animals have priority in rescues, then that's at least one thing that I can say that President Bush did right.  For those not familiar with the process of American law, a law like that would have been argued out with the Senate and Congress (I'm being very brief on the process) and when they've signed off on it, then the President has to sign it for it to become law.  If Bush turned it down, then I believe the Congress could still pass it if they had enough votes on a revote.  But, all indications are that Bush signed it into law.

[joyful1]

Are you okay now, Martin? Do you have power on? I heard that millions are still without power!
Joyce :)

[martincisneros]

Are you okay now, Martin? Do you have power on? I heard that millions are still without power!
Joyce :)

I'm doing fabulously as always.  Probably over 90% to 95% of the outages were in Houston and it's immediately surrounding towns/cities.  I haven't watched any news/weather coverage in a few hours 'cause they're only repeating the same exact stuff over and over again right now, probably speaking mostly to the evacuees.  My guess would be that Dallas got more excitement than Fort Worth did, though we didn't do too badly on rain.  I know that my area got 3 or 4 inches of rain, if nobody else in all of Fort Worth did 'cause it started pouring hard at noon and never stopped until a little while ago.  So, that's about 9hrs of pretty solid rain that my area got, whatever the tally winds up being when all of the totals are in.  I haven't seen any flooding, but I didn't go out either.  Church picnic understandably got canceled with not knowing what the weather would do and I had things around the house to see to.  I've heard that 4.5 million customers are without electricity.  And some customers are going to be really big business buildings or apartment complexes that don't charge an electric bill.  So, just a handful of customers [in some cases] could easily be hundreds and hundreds of people.  My guess is that you could double that number and you'd have a better idea of the number of people without power, or of how this has complicated everybody's lives with schools, stores, office and apartment complexes, and other stuff.  If that number's too high for Houston, it was city after city after city that was losing power, losing reception of their cable television and local stations, etc.  One person called in to "www.khou.com, channel 11" in Houston from Beaumont and said that that was the only channel that they could get on an old television with rabbit ears.  A lot of buildings lost roofs, the tallest building in Houston that has 75 floors lost most of their windows.  I didn't sleep all night, watching Houston's channel 11 that was being broadcasted here locally on one of the digital channels 'cause it was an affiliate of the channel owners that opted to show Houston's coverage of it.  This link www.khou.com ought to be interesting for at least the rest of the month on what's the latest with rebuilding.  I wanted to go down there today, after the worst of it had passed, and see what I could do in terms of helping with animal rescues if there were any wild animals that survived by the skin of their teeth and weren't on any of the trucks that took hundreds and hundreds of animals out of there before the Hurricane struck.  But I couldn't track down anyone that I knew would be interested, to try to team up on some unofficial business.  My concern isn't just for animals that might have had to suck it up with this storm, but preparing for that usually means taking all of the right gear if someone's stranded in their house with 8ft of water or whatever.  This one time I didn't feel good about going by myself.  Perhaps because of how tired that I was, so when trying to reach some folks for a couple of hrs failed, I wound up just going to bed to catch up on my sleep.  I try not to violate that "bleh!" on doing something by myself when I feel that in my gut.  Who knows?  Maybe tomorrow.