What's Going On Outside Russia?

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

A British man was treated for colonic cancer in Turkey and was infected with ebola. What a luck! :doh:

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Are (were) you drunk?

You know better?

Like Leo occupied UAE and Taliban sold Trump to Mexico?

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Texans having fun, LBC reporting...

Houston. Is it where the NASA operations center is located? Are they flooded there too and does it mean sputniks are about to start falling from the sky?

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

With Houston being America's 4th-largest city and now largely under water with at least a meter of rain thus far in many places, I suspect falling satellites are the least of their worries. That part of the country is fairly flat, so the water levels don't have to rise very far before creeks become rivers and rivers become lakes. The further inland one goes, the higher the landforms and the less the flooding, so what folks will experience depends largely upon where they live there. That said, a meter or two of rainwater in just a couple of days will easily flood streets or low spots, sometimes severely, even on higher ground.

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Where is Texas there? That square-headed thing on the left?
I couldn't see any labels, nor city names...

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

Yes, Texas is the largest state outlined on the map and located above and to the left of the storm markers. Houston lies a little below the head or top of that ragged-looking series of earlier gray storm track markers that show how its path kind of reversed after penetrating into Texas. Galveston, a sister city, lies between the two zones where the markers cross the coast as the storm moves ashore and then departs. Since the storm rotates rapidly counterclockwise, it pulls massive amounts of moisture from the ocean onto the land ahead of itself. When it moves so slowly, stalls, then reverses its path over land as this did, there is a colossal amount of water drawn in to fall as rain. The rainfall bands largely fall in an area the size of that shown in yellow for a storm of this size; local intensities can easily be 6-12 cm/hour ahead of and inland of the storm center due to the rotating moisture off the ocean, and in this case, persisted for several days above Houston.

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

To add perspective, there is also a lot of storm-wind damage (blown down and un-roofed buildings, blown and piled-up debris, toppled trees, power lines down, etc) and some fire damage where various buildings caught fire due to falling power lines igniting natural gas services but fire-fighters couldn't get to them. There's a lot of contamination floating in from a variety of sources: 1/3 of the nation's oil refining is done there, along with a lot of chemical production whose facilities are inundated, and literally thousands of fuel-containing vehicles are under water; sewage plants are underwater with their contents floating around. Now they've now got everything from snakes to fire-ants to swamp critters invading flooded buildings to escape the still-rising water. As it stands currently, the historical records for continental US rainfall in a 48-hour period have already been shattered. The literal trillions of gallons of rainwater (which is expected to at least double before the storm dissipates) have little place to run to in flat country with a storm-surged ocean still sitting at high levels.

Of course, there are places that may experience comparable Monsoon flooding at times like India, etc. but this is truly a 'first' for the US. The biggest problems for the people in Texas are yet to come in the days immediately ahead since it is going to take so long for things to subside. Much of the rescue/relief traffic is still by boat, and that's a very slow process with such large areas and numbers of people involved.

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

And now there's an ordered evacuation of a 7-square-mile area near Houston, Texas because of the probability of the Arkema chemical plant exploding due to the flooding water. It's knocked out power and diesel backups for essential refrigeration units used by the factory to keep their organic chemicals at low temperatures for maintaining stability. The problems just keep unfolding for that area...

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Well, I'm not into sports, but now listening to BBC Scotland, they're saying Scots beat Angles in Six Nations.
Never heard of those Nations before, googled now and now I know.
It's a rugby union of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Italy and France...
Do they do rugby in Europe there really?

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Not creating a new topic and my old "Movie" one being closed, here it goes:)

"Adam-12" - a good old series!
Being a linguist and doing better with phonological spelling, caught a couple of funny "lazy" talk results.

1. Selling a new English word to you. "Bananasly":) American vowels are pronounced differently, plus a final consonant approximation in "but":)
2. The "laziness" again - legit thing but still: the operator says "handle code 3" and it sounds exactly "anal code 3", /h/ being quite weak on the Comstock (the composer - LOVES pipes) background (and in some dialects almost silent) and /d/ usual loss in American English between consonants.

(The Lounge seems very loosely populated and I'm having wagons of topics not yet deleted.
If interest, I'd start some.)

[A Former User]

A Former User last edited by

Huge fire in California, BBC says.