So yesterday and today, the Houston area has been hit by a few storms. There was a hurricane that passed very close by us on its way to Mexico, and the result has been waves of heavy rain that leave chaos in its wake. Highway overpasses have been flooding, and some of the low lying areas of the city have had some water related troubles as well.
What has surprised me is how calmly everyone here seems to handle things. Most of the mass transit like the light rail and the bus routes are running fairly normally, and the only precaution the hospital I work at had to take was to close down the basement levels. I guess lots of rain is common enough here that people just take it in stride. Not that we didn’t have the occasional rumors that the hospital was going to keep us overnight, or that the trains had been shut down, but even those were fairly short lived.
This reaction, of course, is the exact opposite of the hysteria we saw in the winter, when it dipped below freezing for a couple of days. By ‘dipped’ I mean around thirty degrees Farenheit. You would have thought a second Ice Age had come to the South. I heard everything from the threat of frozen water pipes to frozen car engines. We had a ‘snowfall’ that pretty much melted on contact, and everything from schools to hospitals closed down. The whole time I was remembering being snowed in my house in Connecticut, and laughing.
It’s just funny the different ways people can react to weather so differently, I guess. For anyone reading who was worried, we’re fine though, and I don’t think our area is at any risk. I hope all is going well for you guys, and I’ll see you around.
Hehe, that's hilarious. Remember the storm in '96 that dropped three feet of snow across New England? (or was it '94?) People up there just drive through the stuff like it's nothing.
ReplyDeleteIt's worse in California, though. All it has to do is rain, and people are crawling at 40 mph on the freeway, with accidents all over the place.