Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath

In the weeks following Hurricane Irma, parts of Florida have been awash in millions of gallons of sewage. Meanwhile, in Texas, oil refineries and chemical plants have dumped a year’s worth of cancer-causing pollutants into the air following Hurricane Harvey. In both states, doctors are on the lookout for an uptick in respiratory problems, skin infections, and mosquito-borne diseases brought on by the water and mold the storms left behind.

Thanks in part to better emergency planning and response, the immediate death tolls from Harvey and Irma seem to be far lower than those of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, which took some 1,400 and 117 lives in the US respectively. So far, a total of 80 deaths have been reported in Texas after Harvey, and there have been at least 42 deaths in Florida as a result of Irma.

News coverage of natural disasters like hurricanes Harvey and Irma is often similar to coverage of war zones. There are flashy, dramatic graphics, wide helicopter shots of destruction on the ground, stories of heroism in the face of danger, and reporters broadcasting live from dangerous areas. Much of the language is similar too: Storms bring an “onslaught” of rain and winds; neighborhoods are caught in the “line of fire,” etc.

News networks do this because treating natural disasters like war gives them a compelling way to tell stories about storms like Harvey and Irma.

Whenever hurricane season arrives in the Atlantic Ocean — typically between June and November — a bunch of meteorological terms get hurled around. Tropical storm. Tropical depression. Category 3 hurricanes. Category 4 hurricanes.

So what’s the difference between all these types of weather events? One way to understand this is to walk through the different stages of a hurricane, step by step. We’ll use Hurricane Irma, which started out as a wave off the African coast and went on to pound several Caribbean before it hit Florida as a Category 4 storm in 2017, as an example:

On Monday morning, the Mexican foreign ministry issued a statement withdrawing the country’s offer of aid to Hurricane Harvey-ravaged Texas.

It was a surprising reversal for the government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, which had, just last week, hammered out a plan for a logistical support relief package for Texas.

Soon after Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts got underway in Texas, Hurricane Irma started pummeling Florida. Though Irma hasn’t dumped anywhere near the 50-plus inches of rain Harvey unleashed on Texas, it was still a massive storm that brought destructive storm surge, rain, and heavy winds to Florida. Flooding is the primary worry this week as the storm moves into Georgia and the Carolinas, with up to 15 inches of rain still forecast for some parts of Florida.

While Hurricane Katrina in 2005 still holds the title of the most expensive natural disaster in the US at $160 billion, Harvey alone — not to mention Harvey and Irma combined — could leave it in the dust. The two hurricanes could cost US taxpayers around $200 billion, estimated Larry Larson, a senior policy adviser at the Association of State Floodplain Managers.

When Charmaine Neville spoke to a local television station a few days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, she didn’t just want to talk about the storm. When she took shelter on the roof of a school, she said, she was raped by a stranger.

“I had lain down and gone to sleep and somebody woke me up,” she said in an interview with the TV station WAFB. “They put their hand over my mouth, and a knife to my throat.” Her rapist threatened her, she added: “If you don’t do what I want, I’m gonna kill you and then I’ll do what I want to you anyway and throw your body over the side of the building.”

“It’s awful. I haven’t dosed in 5 days.”

The message popped up on my Facebook feed on August 29, a day after Hurricane Harvey first hit Texas. A woman named Clair, a methadone patient who lives near Houston, could not make it through the flood waters to get the dose she needed. She was going through withdrawal.

The recent Category 4 hurricanes making landfall in the US have revived the perennial discussion about the relationship between extreme storms and climate change. Despite what you might think from the dueling headlines, it’s actually a fairly complicated issue — complicated not just because of the physics, but because of the politics.

Here are nine things you can say about Harvey, Irma, and climate change.

As the waters recede, Houston families and insurance agents are surveying the damage to the city: water-logged homes, ruined appliances, sagging roofs, and streets littered with debris.

Now the city faces this question: Who is going to rebuild the nation’s fourth-largest city as construction companies nationwide struggle to find workers?

The White House announced the 12 organizations that have been promised personal donations, totaling $1 million, from President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump to go toward Hurricane Harvey relief efforts.

The Red Cross and the Salvation Army are the organizations set to receive the most aid, with donations of $300,000 pledged to each. The other 10 organizations on the list, which have each been promised donations of either $25,000 or $100,000, are: Reach out America, Samaritan’s Purse, ASPCA, Catholic Charities, Direct Relief, Habitat for Humanity, Houston Humane Society, Operation Blessing, Portlight Inclusive Disaster Strategies, and Team Rubicon.

It’s hard to fathom the amount of rain Hurricane Harvey dumped on Texas and Louisiana. Some weather stations in the region recorded more than 50 inches (over 4 feet!). It’s a once-in-1,000-years flood. And the consequences have been catastrophic: At least 46 are dead, around 30,000-40,000 homes have been destroyed, and 35,000 people relocated to emergency shelters. The recovery is expected to cost well more than $150 billion, and it will take years to complete.

It’s all because over six days, 27 trillion gallons of water fell over Texas and Louisiana, as Ryan Maue, a meteorologist with WeatherBell, told CNN. (The calculation is simple, he says on Twitter: It’s depth of rain multiplied by the number of square miles covered.) That’s one million gallons of water for nearly every person who lives in Texas. For reference, here’s what one million gallons of water looks like hovering above an average-sized person.

After Hurricane Harvey hit Houston this past weekend, some organizations — like megachurch pastor Joel Osteen’s 16,800-seat Lakewood Church — came under fire for not doing enough to help those displaced by the flooding, which has killed at least 46 as of Friday morning. But for other religious groups in the region, including several of the Houston area’s Muslim communities, Harvey was a call to solidarity — and action.

One priest checked submerged cars to ensure no passengers were trapped inside. Jewish outreach organization Chabad House sent truckloads of food from New York and Miami. According to ThinkProgress’s Jack Jenkins, at least nine houses of worship in Houston, and several more outside the immediate Houston area, have opened their doors as shelters to afflicted residents or engaged in community outreach. Among them are the Woodlands Church, Salt and Light Ministries, and a number of mosques, including the Brand Lane Center in Stafford, Texas.

In the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, one thing has already become clear: The US federal flood insurance program is massively underfunded.

On the August 23 episode of The Weeds, Matthew Yglesias and Sarah Kliff discuss flood insurance policy in light of Hurricane Harvey, the future of the single-payer health care debate, and a white paper on delaying kids’ entry to kindergarten.

Early Thursday morning, a series of explosions were reported at a chemical facility in Crosby, Texas, about 25 miles northeast of Houston. Flooding rains from Tropical Storm Harvey cut off power to the facility on Sunday, knocking out critical refrigeration systems at the location. The plant manufactures organic peroxides, chemical compounds used in manufacturing construction materials, which can ignite when not stored at a low temperature.

Plant crews worked on restoring the power and containing the chemicals, but on Wednesday, the site, as well as a 1.5-mile radius around it, was evacuated in fear of an imminent explosion.

After Hurricane Katrina hit, some 100,000 New Orleans residents decided to stay in the Houston area to rebuild their lives. I was one of them, driving in bumper to bumper traffic heading to a new city, leaving my house behind me.

Now, 12 years later, I’ve once again found myself packing up my car and running from a disaster worse than anything I’ve seen since Katrina.

There is nothing surprising about a hurricane hitting the central Texas coast in late August, as Hurricane Harvey did on Friday night. Hurricanes have been recorded since Christopher Columbus encountered one in 1495. We know they occur with some regularity in the Atlantic at this time of year.

But Harvey soon became an inordinately severe tropical storm, as it pulled water from the atmosphere down to Earth with extraordinary efficiency and intensity. Since Friday, it has dumped an estimated 21 trillion gallons on the Texas coast, and broken the rainfall record for a single tropical storm or hurricane in the continental United States, fulfilling all meteorological predictions that it would be “unprecedented” and “catastrophic.”

At the same time that the federal, Texas, and Houston governments were all working together to respond to the historic disaster that Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath have caused, they’ve all been at each other’s throats over a state immigration law that was poised to go into effect before the waters receded.

But Texas’s cities have just won a huge victory over the state (and the feds). On Wednesday night, federal judge Orlando L. Garcia of the Western District of Texas issued a ruling stopping most of the state’s “anti-sanctuary-city” law SB4 — which attempted to force local police departments to assist federal immigration enforcement — from going into effect as scheduled on Friday.

If you’re watching the reports of unprecedented rain and historic flooding unfolding in Texas from the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, you might be wondering what you can do to help.

If you live in the Houston area, the sheriff’s office is asking for people with boats and vehicles that can handle high water to help with rescues.

Republicans in Congress are reportedly moving to slash funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency just as FEMA goes to work rebuilding Houston and the Texas coast from Hurricane Harvey.

Searching to pay for President Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico, Republicans in the House are preparing to cut about $876 million out of FEMA’s total budget of $13.9 billion, the Associated Press reports. The money cut from FEMA would cover about half of Trump’s “down payment” for the wall, according to the AP.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) said around 24,000 National Guard members would be deployed throughout Texas, with about 10,000 Guard members coming from other states.

On Monday, Abbott activated all 12,000 members of the Texas Military Department, which is the state’s agency that houses the Texas Army, Air, and State Guards. Tuesday, Gen. Joseph Lengyel, the chief of National Guard Bureau, said a dozen other states may get involved. As of yesterday, that help included around 346 Air Guard members, four planes, and three helicopters from at least seven states.

Neighbors help neighbors.

That’s the message the Mexican government has for Harvey devastated-Texas. Our Southern neighbor has offered the state aid and assistance to help recover from the catastrophic floods.

Tropical Storm Harvey broke all records for rainfall from a single storm in the continental United States, and its consequences are likely to be felt for years. While the worst of the storm has cleared out of the Houston area, know that this story is not yet over.

It’s just beginning. Tens of thousands are displaced from their homes, search and rescue operations are still underway, flood waters have not yet receded, and the total cost of the storm has yet to be fully tallied. Cleanup and rebuilding efforts will likely take years.

In Southeast Houston, a weather station has registered more than 51 inches of rain from Tropical Storm Harvey. The measurement is preliminary, but if confirmed, it will mean Harvey has broken the record for the greatest amount of rain recorded from a single tropical storm or hurricane in the continental United States. It’s more than 4 feet of rain.

The previous record was 48 inches, also set in Texas, during Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978. (52 inches were recorded in 1950 in Hawaii during a cyclone. Harvey could very well beat that record too.)

After surveying Hurricane Harvey damage in Corpus Christi on Tuesday, President Donald Trump addressed victims of the storm and praised those who had gathered to hear his remarks, “What a crowd, what a turn out.”

According to a press pool report, Trump spoke to a “throng of hundreds” outside of the Annaville Fire House, though not all were supporters. Some, apparently, were protestors: “One banner read ‘Liar, cheat, racist’ another read ‘Latinas against Trump’ and another ‘You pardoned Joe, what about José?’” per the pool report.

This Tuesday, Houston’s Lakewood Church — one of America’s largest and most prominent megachurches — announced plans to open its doors to evacuees of the Harvey flooding, following several days of criticism over its pastor, Joel Osteen’s, response to the crisis.

Osteen is a prominent televangelist whose teachings have reaped him rich rewards: he has a personal net worth of almost $60 million, gained largely through book sales, and Lakewood Church itself can seat 16,800 people. (The site was the former home of the Houston Rockets.)