BrazosDog02 said:
Rattler12 said:
P.H. Dexippus said:
91AggieLawyer said:
IF all this is accurate, these camps need to be relocated. There's no way to prevent reoccurrence because any plan probably can and will be overcome by unforeseen factors. We can only plan for what we know or, in the best case, imagine. Plus, we're limited in planning by resources. There was no way, for example, to get sufficient busses in there to evac all camps well ahead of the rising water. That might have been the only effective way for everyone to get out unharmed. The middle of the night is no time to try and move to higher ground. There will always be insufficient lighting under the best of conditions/most resources and the power to that lighting may be severed.
Any plan going forward that does not include a complete evacuation will be incomplete with respect to future, similar events. Further, if you have to start passing out life jackets and strobe lights for the children at your camp to be safe if a catastrophic event were to happen, you've already lost the game; relocation is an absolute must.
Ok, so how much of Houston must be permanently relocated because there's no way to prevent a reoccurrence of Hurricane Harvey?
When you start enforcing a standard of 0% risk (impossible), then there's no activity or place in this life that lives up to the standard. Life is a matter of calculated risks.
Rather than relocating, making a switchback evacuation trail directly behind the rear of the southernmost cabins and an evacuation plan that incorporates that seems like a possibility.
Or build the cabins higher up in the hills and bus the kids down to the river during the day. We're 400 or so yards from the Guadalupe and our house is at 1055 ft above sea level. The river bottom is at 965. It would take a 90 ft crest to get to us. This one was 29. Common sense says you don't house kids and have them sleeping in a flood plain
I don't think there is much point in "what we should have done". We are all angry, frustrated, and sad. It's down. Mistakes were made. Prices were paid and all we can do is move forward and do better. We are looking for excuses and people to blame for the tragedy. The fact of the matter is that the cabins should have never been there but remained there because of the failure of humans to understand past that which they personally experience. It's just a shortcoming of being a human. The plan the camp had was fine. What wasn't fine was the timing and delay in executing the plan. There is no excuse whatsoever to justify the deaths we saw. There just isn't. Ample warning was given hours prior, even days prior. We are humans and we make dumb decisions all the time and then we blame others for them. This was a result of a poor set of decisions. I doubt this camp will exist ever again in its current form by the time the lawyers get involved with it but unfortunately, these are the types of things humans need to make hard decisions and improve processes for next time. There isn't a person in the planet that will ever convince me that this was "too big to have been prepared for" or "there wasn't enough time". In the coming weeks and months we are going to get a much clearer understanding of of how much wanting was ignored. Unless parents are willfully apathetic, I bet there were hundreds of calls coming in to any number they could come into about weather and flooding. We contact our kids at camp every time a NWS convective outlook is posted 24 hours out, so you can bet your tail important people were getting notice.
And I bet that all those parents were assured that if their child's cabin was a flood risk then their child would be relocated. They were wrong, clearly. But it's just so wrong to say there is "no excuse" and that ample warning was given. Ample warning for what? Was there ample warning that all prior conceptions of how high the water can get should be thrown out the window?
And there is absolutely no way you have any idea whether or not there was a delay in executing the plan.
Let me ask it this way....
How high above what flood level is considered safe....is 5' above the 100 year storm safe? Is 10' above the 500 year safe?
Who dictates what the 100, 500, 1000 year storm levels are?
These are complicated questions.
