Hang on Texas, here comes another one

Today the east coast of Texas is bracing for Hurricane Dolly. Until today, Hurricane Dolly was only a tropical storm but it was recently upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane as it set its sights on Texas’ coastal region. All over the news are reports of residents running to Home Depot to stock up on plywood and flashlights. Government officials have prepared for a mass exodus from the area much like they witnessed during Hurricane Rita – an exodus that brought major highways to a standstill in the heat of summer.

This storm is expected to resemble that of 1967’s Hurricane Beulah which dumped more than 36 inches of rain in some places in south Texas and spawned more than 100 tornadoes. In the years since Beulah, the levees holding back the Rio Grande have been steadily deteriorating and officials suspect that there will be little chance of them holding back the 15 inches of rain this hurricane is expected to dump on the region.

Déjà vu. Didn’t I hear something like this back in…say, 2005? Yes. Yes I did. Twice actually. Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina. Three years ago. Rita, the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded and the most intense tropical cyclone ever observed in the Gulf of Mexico caused $11.3 billion in damage. Katrina was the most expensive and one of the five deadliest hurricanes in the history of the U.S. It was the sixth-strongest Atlantic hurricane ever and the third-strongest hurricane on record that made landfall in the U.S.

Both hurricanes struck in the same year.

Now here I am, religiously watching the news, waiting to see how bad this one is going to be. Already this year, we witnessed Hurricane Bertha set the record for the longest lived pre-August Atlantic tropical cyclone. I can’t help but feel like I’m watching a NASCAR race at Talladega simply to see the big wreck. I just find it so disturbingly amusing that nature seems to be giving the finger to the climate change skeptics that still remain...albeit violently.

Hang on, Texas. You’ll get through it. And certainly now after the second 500-year flood on the continent’s largest river, FEMA will be there to help when it’s all said and done…won’t it?