Harvey might delay my hunting season.

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MCgunner

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Looks like a major hurricane is headed our way. We're far enough inland that the winds won't probably exceed tropical storm, but they're predicting epic flooding from the rains. God help 'em down the coast. I own 10 acres in the path of the storm about a mile from the boat ramp on Espiritu Santos bay, but there's nothing on it, but a couple of rusted up tripod stands. Harvey can have 'em. According to the weather channel, they could have 9 feet of water there and my land is only 8 feet above sea level. Might have to run down there after the storm and check it out, LOL.

My land is just out of Seadrift. Seadrift is just north of predicted landfall and Seadrift is only a few feet above sea level. Those folks had better be already underway with preparations and getting out.

Fortunately, I hadn't planned to hunt down there except ducks about center mass of the storm bullseye at Tivoli, mouth of the Guadalupe river. This could mess up my duck season, don't know.

Oh, well, fudge, I'll take things as they present themselves to me this season. I think deer hunting HERE might be decent this year. We have LOTS of deer this season. They might all be swimming in a few days, but hopefully they'll find dry ground. LOL We're supposed to get epic rainfall with this thing.
 
Geezuz. And I thought you were going to be talking about an invisible rabbit. Bambi will very likely have already headed for higher ground.
"...mess up my duck season..." Too early for Daffy to be moving South.
Keep the boat ready.
 
When the Guadalupe goes out of its banks, and it will with all THIS rain, it floods the delta/WMA. They then close the WMA to duck hunting. For sure, teal season will be ruined, but I don't hunt teal anymore, anyway. Too many gators down there in the warmer weather.

So, now they're saying the surge will be 17 feet in upper Lavaca bay. My old house in Port Lavaca was about 21 feet above sea level. Might not reach it, but the waves might, don't know. I WILL run down there and check it out after the storm. I lived there for 30 years without such problems, rode out one cat 2 without any problems. THIS might be the one, the return of Carla 1961. They're even upgrading expectations on strength saying it might reach a cat 4 before it hits.

I have to run buy gas for my generator in a bit. Got it out and got it running. It hasn't run since 2002 Hurricane Claudette. We'll be safe here, but if the road washes out, we might be land locked for a while until I can do a patch with the front loader.
 
Beulah (1967) and Carla (1961) were both 30-inchers. After Carla, some guys went by outboard motorboats from Victoria on down past Refugio, in the borrow ditch of US 77.

Carla pushed 17 feet of water up into Trinity Bay. Now, over 300,000 people live below the 17-foot contour around Galveston and Trinity Bays.

The outrush of floodwater after Beulah cut South Padre Island in three places. Then Braniff built a hotel in one of those channels after it mostly filled back in--but left a weak spot against future floods. The hotel later became condos.

The worst winds were Celia in 1970. 160 sustained; gusts to 190. But only around eight inches of rain. Destroyed most of Port Aransas and made a hellacious mess in Corpus.
 
Well...things could certainly get bad, hope that doesn't happen to you. But the media tends to play up such events and usually the storm ends up being something less. But the threat of rain and flooding IS something to be taken seriously. IF this storm is a slow mover (or stalls) as they think it will, it can drop a LOT of rain in certain areas.

As with any Hurricane...there tends to be windy side and a rainy side, so depending on where it makes land fall and where you are, you could certainly see flooding. Best to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
 
Got about 16 gallons of generator gas. I know from Claudette that thing eats about 6 gallons a 24 hour day. But, I won't run the thing except sleeping and myabe to cool the refridgerator/freezer down now and then. I don't expect the power will be down that long. We had a tropical storm move through here about 4 years ago that knocked out power for about 6 hours. Then, San Bernard Electric Coop came and trimmed all the trees back away from the power lines. I'm hoping THAT works this time. :D Good thing, we got some mulch for the garden out of that deal. It's about all gone now.

Got plenty of water, full tank in the RV and I need to fill up a 5 gallon plastic bladder for the kitchen I suppose. Can shower and use the potty in the RV if the power goes down. Septic system...of course...is aerobic meaning it needs power to operate the pumps. So, power goes down, it's out of business. But, I have holding tanks on the RV. Have a full propane bottle to cook with in the RV. Can't think of much else to do at this point except watch the weather. I'd be WAY worse off at my old Port Lavaca house or even in Corpus.

BTW, Art, except that it developed earlier, Carla took the same path into Port O'Connor as this one seems to be doing. It might hit a little south of there, down at Aransas, but that puts Lavaca Bay on the bad side of the storm. Seadrift, Point Comfort, Olivia, Port Alto, all toast if this thing does what they say it's going to do. Just yesterday it was only going to hit as a cat one. Guess it pays to keep alert and updated. That's a lot easier to do now days with an app than it was in 1961.
 
MCgunner said:
Got about 16 gallons of generator gas. I know from Claudette that thing eats about 6 gallons a 24 hour day. But, I won't run the thing except sleeping and myabe to cool the refridgerator/freezer down now and then. I don't expect the power will be down that long. We had a tropical storm move through here about 4 years ago that knocked out power for about 6 hours. Then, San Bernard Electric Coop came and trimmed all the trees back away from the power lines. I'm hoping THAT works this time. :D Good thing, we got some mulch for the garden out of that deal. It's about all gone now.

Got plenty of water, full tank in the RV and I need to fill up a 5 gallon plastic bladder for the kitchen I suppose. Can shower and use the potty in the RV if the power goes down. Septic system...of course...is aerobic meaning it needs power to operate the pumps. So, power goes down, it's out of business. But, I have holding tanks on the RV. Have a full propane bottle to cook with in the RV. Can't think of much else to do at this point except watch the weather. I'd be WAY worse off at my old Port Lavaca house or even in Corpus.

BTW, Art, except that it developed earlier, Carla took the same path into Port O'Connor as this one seems to be doing. It might hit a little south of there, down at Aransas, but that puts Lavaca Bay on the bad side of the storm. Seadrift, Point Comfort, Olivia, Port Alto, all toast if this thing does what they say it's going to do. Just yesterday it was only going to hit as a cat one. Guess it pays to keep alert and updated. That's a lot easier to do now days with an app than it was in 1961.
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Sounds as if you are well prepared. You'd be surprised to know the number of people who are not. We have several power outages a year in my part of Deep East Texas, owing to storms and the many trees (pineywoods) we have here.

So, when major storms like Hurricane Ike and Rita that managed to spin up through here...hit, we are out of power for many days (some folks for weeks). I have a 12KW generator and a smaller one that I can fire up to power the house, but you quickly find out just what a 'bargain' electricity is....after you've gone though a couple hundred gallons of gasoline.

Not to mention the inconvenience of having to get up in the middle of the night to refill them.

Rita took out over 100 trees (big pines and oaks) on our property. Others around us....worse than that.

Hope you will be spared any significant damage.
 
I believe reports the day of....2 weeks ago they called for 7-9" of rain here for the weekend. That was on Thursday. "It's going to be bad. You need to be prepared for massive flooding". Was supposed to rain Friday-Sunday. Well Sunday rolls around and we had gotten a total of a 1/2". That's 0.5 inches! The weather men are as bad as the media in making a situation worse than it is.

I understand that a hurricane is a whole other animal. But it's still the same weathermen. I think they all hold stock in Lowe's and Home Depot.
 
Nope, now they're talking cat 3 hitting Rockport, which is about 40 miles south of where they'd originally predicted in Port O'Connor, but they're actually predicting 19 feet of storm surge in upper Lavaca Bay. WOW. Port Lavaca is currently a ghost town, everybody out. It's only got 12000+ population, though. The plant where I worked is on the other side of the bay near Point Comfort. It will no doubt be inundated and I had a friend I used to work with tell me they have operators working "storm duty". They'd by golly better know how to swim and the area around there has lots of rattlers and cottonmouths. If they asked me to work hurricane duty, I think it'd be time to tell 'em to "take this job and shove it". :rofl: Seriously, I've been through these things before, was 8 years old when Carla hit and remember that one well. Even riding out Claudette, barely a cat 2, was a scary experience. The eye went right over the house. During the first part of it, the north wall of my house was flexing in and out with the 108 mph wind gusts. I'd driven my truck to downtown Port Lavaca to take pix of damage and when I got out of the truck back at the house, the back side of that eye wall hit and, MAN, it's just like you read about...WHAM! You cannot stand up in 95 mph winds and this one, Harvey, is now up to 110 mph and it's building. No, the weather people cannot stress the danger enough IMHO IF you are actually in the path of this thing. All Houston has to worry about is rain and, heck, they flood all the time. :rofl: I think we'll be fine here. ONLY thing I'm worried about is enough rain to wash out the road. Then I'll have to wait for it to go down before I can try to patch the road to get out. There are folks down the road, though, that will be stranded that have a maintainer. He keeps the road from getting TOO bad. But, I can fill in small wash outs like we've had before with my bucket on my little tractor if I need to.

I'm beginning to think there's no hope for duck season, though. They might open the WMA late in December, early January, if the water goes down enough by then. I won't have an RV spot to stay at down there, though, will likely all sustain damage in this storm. If I leave by 2AM, I can make it down there when they open the gate at 4AM. I don't know if I'm dedicated to duck hunting enough for that. LOL

If I get to go to Waco next week to hunt doves, it's not supposed to rain up there much if at all. I'm going to play THAT one by ear. Can go even if I have to delay a week.
 
Hey, MCg, was that an ethylene plant?

I worked on the Coastal Zone Management Program for a couple of years, '75-'77, and then with the TX Coastal & Marine Council for two more. Had occasion to work with Herb Saffir and Bob Simpson of the Saffir/Simpson hurricane scale. And a little bit with Neal Frank, then the head of the Miami Hurricane Center. Fantastic learning experience, plus four years of brain-picking on the bug'
n'bunny PhDs. I rambled up and down the coast from Brownsville to Port Arthur and back, several times. :)
 
The plant where I worked, after getting laid off by Dow Chemical in Freeport, was Formosa Plastics. They built the place in 1982 and we did our EPA abatement in 1982 for start up by December of 82. I first worked in the lab there doing NOx testing of stack gas, the wet testing in the lab.

They make Vinyl Chloride and Polyvinyl Chloride plastic. They now have other plants there, expanded in about 1989, and they have down stream production of product at "Nanya Plastics". They have a PVC pipe production plant in Wharton and film and other production near Edna.
 
BTW, I can get out regardless, now. Guy lives off Lost Wood which runs into our road up from the creek jump I was worried about, has a key to the gate to another private road. He unlocked it so we all could get out if the creek jump washes out. So, now, no worries. I STILL hope the rain ain't TOO epic. :D
 
In October of 1995 Opal hit a little farther east and tracked through north GA. I'm in the NW corner of the GA and didn't have power for a week. Over 4000 trees down in Marietta, (a northern suburb of Atlanta) and there was more damage in the NE corner of the state than during the super storm in March 1993 where 3-4' of snow hit areas of GA. This was during archery season and just 2 weeks before rifle season. Many unpaved roads and trails in the mountains weren't cleared until after hunting season. We got mostly wind, fortunately little rain.

This was a CAT 4 storm, but I'm over 450 miles inland from landfall. It is hard for me to imagine what it is like right on the coast during these big ones. Be careful.
 
MCgunner said:
I'm beginning to think there's no hope for duck season, though. They might open the WMA late in December, early January, if the water goes down enough by then.
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Don't be discouraged. In 2005 Katrina passed by on its way to the Mississippi coast and dumped 16" of rain in 8 hours (24" in all) on my place. It flooded the whole 60 acres except where the house was. That was the best duck season I ever had. Teal season consisted of limits every day and I wound up the season with scores of ducks.
We had teal, woodies, Fla. mallards, blackbellies, redheads, ringnecks, and widgeon everywhere.
 
This should clean the lily pads from Hog, Goff, and Frenchmans Bayou. I'm guessing Green Lake also. Better tie your hat down in the mean time.
 
It's rained 6 inches in the last 18 hours so far and that thing is parked near Gozales. The significance of THAT is it's dumping on the Guadalupe river watershed, which runs down river and floods the Guadalupe Delta WMA which will be closed to hunting. I've seen that river put water over state highway 35 for all 3-4 miles of the flood plain. Takes a while for all that water to run off and get normal again through all the bayous in the delta. When that happens, you can't even get NEAR the delta, just a big lake with a few trees sticking out. :D
 
Well, bring your lawn chair and fishing pole. I'm sure you'll get to use it. :rofl: Of course, there's not much left of Port Lavaca from reports I'm getting from friends and family. They're not letting anyone back in until at least Friday, telling everyone to stay out. LORD, I'm glad my house there sold.
 
It's really turned into some something quite amazing.....and devastating. It's going to take years and BILLIONS of dollars to repair this already. And it's not over yet. Hunting and fishing in south and deep east Texas is going to be messed up for awhile.
 
We're over 10" now as of early this AM. I got the friggin' truck stuck down at the gate. Water was over the creek jump, so was going to go the other way and use the gate. It was closed and locked, dang it. I was backing up to my drive, no place to turn around, and got off track of the road as I couldn't see it for the grass and water, and stuck the truck. Neighbor has a tractor and a 4x4 big truck with a winch, but I don't wanna bug him until the rain lets up and that might be a couple of more days. But, I ain't going anywhere, anyway. The truck is fine right where it is. I still have my KLR650 if I need to get out for something. I have a car, but it's worthless in this mess.
 
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