Weight of Harvey flood-water caused Houston to sink
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
First posted: Thursday, September 07, 2017 04:45 PM EDT | Updated: Thursday, September 07, 2017 04:52 PM EDT
HOUSTON — A California geophysicist says the sheer weight of the torrential rains brought by Harvey has caused Houston to sink by 2 centimetres.
Chris Milliner, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, says water weighs about a ton per cubic meter and the flooding was so widespread that it “flexed Earth’s crust.”
He told the Houston Chronicle that he used observations from the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory and other statistics to measure the drop.
Milliner says it will only be temporary. Once the floodwaters recede, there will be an “opposite elastic response of the crust,” similar to jumping on a mattress.
He refers to the phenomenon as local elastic subsidence and says it’s found in other places that experience significant seasonal changes in water or ice.
Weight of Harvey flood-water caused Houston to sink | World | News | Toronto Sun
Saving dogs in flood-ravaged Texas
By Jenny Yuen, Toronto Sun
First posted: Thursday, September 07, 2017 06:51 PM EDT
Team #Harveydogs is on their way to Houston — come hell or high water.
Eight volunteers from Redemption Paws, the only disaster-relief dog rescue group in Canada, loaded four vans with supplies in Toronto Thursday and headed towards Texas to bring 40 shelter dogs to Canada. By bringing the dogs north, the group wants to make room at Houston shelters for locally displaced and lost canines impacted by Hurricane Harvey.
“Houston, at any given time, has about 1 million homeless dogs,” said Nicole Simone, founder of Redemption Dogs, an umbrella group that oversees Redemption Paws. “Hurricane Harvey did not create a dog problem, it merely caught the public’s eye with what the dog situation is in Houston.”
The not-for-profit group will return with “bottom of the barrel” dogs — animals that have been sitting in shelters for a while. These dogs, which include senior pooches, puppies and Great Danes, will go to foster care when they arrive in Toronto on Monday.
“Some of the dogs that are coming in were surrendered by people who lost their home, didn’t have home insurance and just couldn’t afford to keep a dog anymore,” said Simone. “One dog was placed into rescue because of immigration issues. The family didn’t feel safe living in America anymore. By and large, the dogs we’re taking in were abandoned after the storm or went through the storm and were evacuated from shelters.”
While this is the group’s first mission to the U.S. for storm relief, they are already looking at potentially organizing a rescue trip to counter the fallout of Hurricane Irma in Florida.
“None of these have ever seen snow before, so we want to keep them at a good pace and make sure that once they’re in their homes, there’s no more big adjustments,” said Simone. “They haven’t had an easy life, but we’re hoping to change that for them.”
jyuen@postmedia.com
Bo is looking for a new family in Toronto. He lost his Texan home during the recent flooding.
Saving dogs in flood-ravaged Texas | Home | Toronto Sun
