# Hurricane Harvey from luke strawwalker...



## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

I'll post some pics as I can... we're still in transit and will be for awhile, so it may take some time.

First, the drainage creek that runs into our farm (through the watergate) in front of our house (in the background)...









Second, the water in the road ditch just north of my brother's house (and his yard)...









Third, the pasture in front of my brother's house...









Fourth, the main road ditch in front of the farm...









Fifth, where the drainage canal exits the farm around the middle of the west side, and flows under the main highway...









Sixth, my folk's old house and carport and driveway at Needville where they used to live in the middle of the farm...









Seventh, another shot of their house and drive...









Eighth, the south end (low end) of the farm by Hurta Road (from Hurta Road)









Ninth, Buffalo Creek, directly across Hurta Road from the farm, where all this water empties into... usually about a foot deep (mostly wastewater from Needville), now about 12 feet deep at least...









Tenth, Jay drives the Ford 5610 down through the pasture to my folk's old place to turn off the electric fence charger and check on things... the water is about 18 inches deep, as you can see by the half-submerged front tire of the tractor, with water nearly up to the front axle...









Eleventh, the flood gate where the water exits the farm in the drainage canal...









Twelfth,the water in the pasture behind my brother's back yard...









Enjoy! OL J R


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Here's some pics from Shiner...

Betty and I played "the dove released from the ark" yesterday and drove down from our motel in San Antonio 2 hours to Shiner, which is about not quite half way to Houston (halfway to Needville, which is 45 miles SW of Houston downtown). We needed to feed Nanny's dogs, check on the place, make sure everything was okay, check fences and cows, etc. Everything there on the farm is okay, except for four trees that went down, but nothing major.

First, a steel building that blew apart on the highway just north of Shiner as we came in from Moulton...









Second, a line of Texas National Guard vehicles waiting, presumably, to move out to I-10 to head east into Houston...









Third, a damaged barn just off Hilltop Road east of Shiner...









Fourth, a tree blown down on the farm just below the tractor shed...









Fifth,the big pond (about an acre) brimming full from the 15-17 inches of rain... with breakers on it due to the 25-30 mph winds while we were there...









Sixth, the overflow drain coming out of the pond, running downhill to the little pond on the other side of the farm...









Seventh, another tree blown down between the ponds...









Eighth, the little pond (in panoramic mode, we'll see if that works on here)








Ninth,another tree blown down in the middle of the farm...









Tenth, pipeline sign on the back hill was laid flat in the wind...









Eleventh, the little pond again, in case the panorama didn't work... brimming full of water...








Twelfth, a little damage to the roof of the big barn... minor compared to what a lot of folks face...








Thirteenth, I saw this cow hunkered down in tall grass and checked on her... she had a calf yesterday morning... I think I shall call him "Harvey"...









Fourteenth, another pic of momma and Harvey...









Fifteenth, she got up the second time I went back there...









Sixteenth, "thank goodness! The brewery is safe!!!" LOL A humorous picture I sent to my BIL in Indiana who enjoys Shiner Beer when he's down visiting us...









Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth, Peach creek between Shiner and Gonzales... which is normally at most a foot deep and maybe a few feet wide, now an inland lake, draining the countryside into the Guadalupe River a couple miles away in the Guadalupe Valley... It came over the road and shut the road down for part of the day yesterday...

























Finally, twentieth, the sun always comes out in the end, blindingly bright on the westward heading road towards Gonzales, on the ridge overlooking the Guadalupe Valley as we leave Shiner back to San Antonio...









Later! OL J R


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## JD3430 (Jan 1, 2012)

Hope you'll be OK
Prayers sent from the red commonwealth of PA


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## ozarkian (Dec 11, 2010)

Take good of your animals and yourself.


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## hillside hay (Feb 4, 2013)

Best of luck to you and yours.


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## somedevildawg (Jun 20, 2011)

Good luck JR....


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## carcajou (Jan 28, 2011)

Best wishes, hope things turn around quick for you.


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## Ray 54 (Aug 2, 2014)

Good to see you and your livestock still have some high ground.


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## Palmettokat (Jul 10, 2017)

JD3430 said:


> Hope you'll be OK
> Prayers sent from the red commonwealth of PA


Amen


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## Tim/South (Dec 12, 2011)

Glad to see you are alright. I keep watching the news and things certainly are a mess and the storm still will not die. Amazing no more lives have been lost.

Keep your powder dry.


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## hcriddle (Jul 5, 2014)

Hey Luke glad to hear you guys are ok. I was down in your neck of the woods yesterday and thought about you. We escorted 25 buses down to Needville and dropped them off with another DPS unit to escort them on into West Columbia to evacuate folks down there. I spent most of my time north of you on the Brazos evacuating people and livestock along the river. It was still rising as of a couple of hours ago but everyone is out as far as we know. Been a long weekend.

Hope you dry out soon.

Buddy


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Thanks for the well wishes. Like I said we came through smelling like a rose compared to a lot of people... mostly in developments built on low ground.

Here's some screen caps I took during the storm...









First, the path projection according to the hurricane tracker app... with the white "cone of uncertainty"...









Second, the storm on radar on Thurday, 24 August at 11:57 PM, the day before it came in... The red pin marks the Needville Farm...









Third, the radar Friday 25 August at 7:31 AM before it came ashore that night...









Fourth, radar showing the storm on Friday 25 August at 5:52 PM...









Fifth, radar at landfall, 9:43 PM Friday 25 August...









Sixth, road closure map due to flooding, TxDOT website, Monday 28 August, 10:02 AM...









Seventh, rainfall totals by radar from the Intellicast website, Sunday 27 August 11:54 PM...









Eighth, rainfall totals by radar, Intellicast website, Monday 28 August, 9:43 AM...









Ninth, Harvey rainfall totals by radar from the Intellicast website, Monday 28 August, 9:59 AM...









Tenth, FarmLogs app rain totals, Sunday 27 August, 5:06 PM...









Eleventh, FarmLogs app yearly rainfall chart for Shiner, showing the "spike" of rain from Harvey, with the rainfall total displayed in the calculator overlay on the left side of the screen, and the year-to-date total shown in the pop-up box on the chart...









Twelfth, FarmLogs app yearly rainfall chart for Needville, showing the "spike" of rain from Harvey, with the rainfall total displayed in the calculator overlay on the left side of the screen, and the year to date total shown in the pop up box on the chart...

Enjoy! OL J R


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Some screencaps forwarded to me from my wife from Facesnook and from my brother...

First three are of the Colorado River from the bridge on Highway 90-A between Eagle Lake and Altair, Texas... how it looks in the wake of Harvey...





















Next two are pics I grabbed from the web and Google Earth of the same river-- the first pics are looking downstream, but these are looking upstream at the railroad bridge that is right beside the highway bridge (but slightly upstream).















The last pic is of the approach to the San Bernard River bridge, on FM 442 between Needville and Boling, Texas, the next town over from us...









Later! OL J R


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Went to Shiner yesterday to take my Mom up to see my uncle Ronel in the hospital in San Antonio, where he's been since Sunday evening after Harvey came ashore... He's slowly on the mend, I guess... they started dialysis and he's on the transplant list...

Anyway, I went through Wharton on my way to Shiner. Wharton is the next major town west of us (23 miles away in the adjoining county) and sits smack on the Colorado River. They sometimes flood even in heavy rains because the river busts its banks. It flooded BIGTIME due to Harvey. We hauled a half-pickup load of food, toiletries, and supplies that my SIL's church took up in Indiana that we hauled back with us, over to the church in Wharton that is disbursing the supplies to those in need. Keira took some pics when we drove through the worst flooded part of town, for a project she's working on. We saw some cotton modules that were swamped and had red muddy waterlines on them from where they sat in flood waters anywhere from a foot to about four feet deep. Needless to say that cotton is history on the parts of those modules that went underwater. I'll have to get those pics from Keira later.

I took some pics myself on my way from Wharton up FM102 thru Glen Flora to Garwood.

First pic is a big cotton field of about maybe 80-100 acres behind the Walmart... the whole thing went underwater to some extent-- behind the Walmart there was about 3-3.5 feet of water in about 4 foot high unharvested cotton-- the red soil staining the water turned the cotton a ruddy muddy rusty red, ruining it. Corn stalks from other fields floated in and are stuck in a jumble in the unharvested cotton (corn harvest was in July, cotton is usually in August). About a mile up the road at the other end of this field, the water was only about a foot deep, but still, the field is probably a write-off because I don't know of any way to harvest the white undamaged cotton at the top without getting some of the muddy red cotton at the bottom of the plants... raising the picker units will only work "so far"... It's kinda hard to see the damage from the pic-- much more evident in person...









Second pic is in Glen Flora, where they're building an enormous trash mound from all the stuff they're hauling out of Wharton... I guess they're sorting out ruined appliances and stuff, maybe waiting for the trash dump to be available, since it's behind the neighborhood that flooded the worst and may still be flooded or out of commission or something?? We used to drive right by it when I was in the police academy-- the police shooting range was back there...









Third pic is north of Glen Flora... apparently it was flooded bad enough and fast enough there to float round bales up nearly onto the roadway... they're still laying helter-skelter right up on the edge of the pavement. One huge corn field across the road from this pic, about probably 200 acres, which had been harvested back in July and disked flat, had a couple freezers or refrigerators that floated out into the middle of the field that had not been retrieved, but I couldn't get a picture of that while I was driving...









The next couple pics are on the cutoff between Matthews and Garwood. This section of road is notorious for flooding BADLY in even just heavy thunderstorms, if conditions are right. I've driven through 3-4 feet of water in my pickup on that road before, years ago-- it was literally up to the front edge of my hood... course they close the road now if it gets over ankle deep. I saw stuff in trees beside the road that showed the water would have completely covered my minivan I was driving with a foot or so to spare-- so about 6 feet deep water over the road during the worst of it. This picture is of a HUGE soybean field, probably upwards of 100 acres or so, of what HAD been BEAUTIFUL 4 foot tall soybeans... They drowned in the flood waters and are now totally dessicated, but the leaves are stuck as they were in full pod fill stage and were lush and green, not even starting to senesce yet as they do when they mature... I'm sure these are a total writeoff...

















The next pic is the fenceline in the corner of a ranch near an intersection in the road where I turn... cornstalks washed up and just leaned the fences over or flat took the fences out in some places...









The next pic is heartbreaking to us hay guys... This fellow was out piling up several thousand bucks of hay to be burned... beautiful bermudagrass hay, that unfortunately when the river came out, the ground wasn't high enough, and they sat in 4-5 feet of water for an extended period of time...

















Got a newsletter from the county extension in Wharton county-- Wharton is still a largely rural, agricultural county, with a good extension service. Our own county is so friggin' urbanized with suburban sprawl that our county agents don't do much but gardening stuff anymore. The newsletter said they had had helped with the rescue of about 50-some-odd dogs, 2 cats, various numbers of goats and other livestock, and several hundred cattle that they were still caring for out at the county fairgrounds, trying to reunite them with their owners. When I talked to the youth minister at the Wharton church who was dealing with the supplies we delivered, he told me he had friends who were ranchers over there and they THOUGHT they had taken all the appropriate measures to prepare their herds and land before the storm, and were completely taken aback by the severity of it and were still trying to save their livestock and restore washed-out fences and water and all that... what a mess!

Later! OL J R


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## 2ndWindfarm (Nov 11, 2014)

Thanks for posting all those pics, JR. It's a whole different perspective entirely to see the impacts across the surrounding landscape versus what the major network news broadcasts from the city proper!!

It is a mess... Gonna take some time and sweat!

Best wishes and Godspeed for the future!


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

This is a little park about a half mile or so from my daughter's school... at least it WAS... now it's an ENORMOUS garbage pile. The trackhoe up on the shoulder of the pile gives you an idea of the scale-- thing is 20 feet high at LEAST... there's room out there for at LEAST two full size softball/baseball fields, including the outfields, and that's just the "front" of the park...

Had to laugh at the "littering/dumping" sign... they don't take their own advice!

Betty and Keira drive by it every day on their way to/from their schools, and they've been getting bad snots from all the mold/mildew going airborne out of all that debris coming out of flooded houses... Betty came home sick as a dog today-- not sure if she can even go to school tomorrow...

Later! OL J R


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## Palmettokat (Jul 10, 2017)

The mold can be dangerous. Some is very serious. Have them cut off the vent while passing near it.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Palmettokat said:


> The mold can be dangerous. Some is very serious. Have them cut off the vent while passing near it.


Yeah, especially since Betty has had sinus/tonsil/allergy issues since she was a kid... she used to get tonsil stones... basically hard chunks of crud that formed a concretion in the ends of the eustachian tubes that drain fluid from the inner ear down the throat, behind the tonsils... her tonsils had an abnormally large "flap" of skin attaching them to the walls of the throat, shrouding and partially covering the drain tube opening. She had her tonsils removed a few years ago, and the tonsil stones have pretty much stopped, but she still has a lot of sinus infections and allergies and stuff...

There's a LOT of mold and crud in the air down here and probably will be for MONTHS til winter finally clears it out...

Later! OL J R : )


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