From Drought to Flooding - and random thoughts

We needed rain, it was so dry. Now TV is reporting that people’s homes are flooding in some areas around Houston after a couple days of rain. It has rained steadily all day.

We enter Hurricane Season tomorrow, so this is a good time to make sure your family has an evacuation plan and supplies “just in case” we get another Rita or worse. Hey, we live on the coast so we have to be ready for hurricanes every year – they are the earth’s mechanism to transfer the heat build up near the equator. The hotter we get, the more intense they will be. But it sure beats worrying about earthquakes, which aren’t so visible. We just need to make sure we can get through a Category 4 or 5 if it hits us like Katrina hit New Orleans. Roofs blow off at 110 mph and Rita hit 160 before slowing down last year.

Are we prepared? For some things we are more prepared than in the past, but others remain totally unprepared. Our hurricane response will be better (unless we are the ones who get hit and sustain major damage), but the latest list issued by the Homeland Security Dept on a likely terrorist attack -- includes Houston. It wouldn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out why.

But even a non-terrorist act could show how unprepared we are. For example, we live within the shadow of the South Texas Nuclear Plant, yet we have no system in place to deal with a radiation leak if there was just a mechanical failure (like Three Mile Island). Mechanical failure, in fact, is more likely than a terrorist attack on the plant. Ironically, Nuclear power offers one of the few sources of new power that avoids the global warming impact of coal plants.

As a former farmer, I still enjoy rain, especially after a long dry spell. There are worse things in the world.

We could really be building a bold new system to produce alternative fuels with less pollution to break our oil addiction and reduce security threats if our leaders made it a priority like the first moon shot. Our national and local security depend on it…Energy independence is as much a part of our security as border control...