Dan Minette wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Julia Thompson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 10:17 AM
> Subject: Re: Homeowners Associations - Dictatorships in the US?
>
> >
> > p.s. Rob or Dan, how does the tornado incidence in the Houston area
> > compare with that of the Dallas area? Dan grew up around Dallas, and
> > that's colored his perception of tornadoes a *lot*.
>
> We seem to get tornados several times per year. I've not been lucky enough
> to get a good view of one, but I've seen the start of them several times.
> At least I've seen suspicious looking clouds that can be found to have been
> in the path of a storm that soon afterwards produced a tornado.
>
> Hurricanes are a much more realistic threat here. I remember a few years
> ago when a force 4 hurricane was going up the coast and building. It ended
> up going in at King Ranch, but another 12 hours on the path and the weather
> service said it would miss the turn and end up hitting us. IIRC, it has 145
> mph sustained winds and was still building at the time. A hurricane is much
> larger than a tornado, and that hurricane was near the top end of the F2
> scale for tornados. We are a ways inland, so we wouldn't get much more than
> 75 MPH sustained winds for about 2-3 hours. :-) Rob would probably get 120
> MPH sustained winds.
If a hurricane hits the coast, we can get some rain from the edges. We
might not, but we *can*.
The worst weather I've seen around here that was just rain (and not a
storm with tornadic activity) was as a result of something like 3 storm
systems colliding, at least 1 of them having been hurricanes when they
hit the coast. (I think one of the storm systems came from Mexico.) We
got a ridiculous amount of rain dropped on us (or at least parts of the
area did -- I don't think we got more than about 18"), a major road in
Austin had to have a chunk repaved after it was flooded, a few lives
were lost, and the gathering that was supposed to be in a park by a
creek ended up in our livingroom. :) We didn't get flooded personally,
but if the foundation of the house had been a foot lower in the back, we
would have, from the water running down the hill into our back yard.
Now, to avoid the flooding problem (which someone has mentioned), for
our new house we chose a lot that is high. It's pretty much at a local
maximum and there's plenty of land lower than us very close by, so stuff
will drain off our land fairly quickly, at least on the lot we're
building on. (The lot next to that that we bought has a ravine that
most of the water on the house lot and the front part of the ravine lot
drains into.)
As far as sustained winds go at the new house, we get some pretty fierce
ones, compared to anywhere else I've lived -- there is not much of
anything to break the wind between us and Canada, or at least that's
what it feels like some days. At some point, I want to get a little
weather station, and I'll be able to report accurately on sustained wind
speeds once I have that. (It's regularly around 30MPH, we think. I'd
want instruments to confirm our guess.)
Julia
p.s. if anyone knows where to pick up a wind gauge cheap, I might be
interested in just starting with that
