Enormity

The pictures out of Houston are astonishing. This one tells the tale:

Instant sea

There's a bayou a block away, but this is not a bayou at the moment. And there's more rain, potentially a lot more, on the way. This area is about four miles southwest of downtown Houston.

Everywhere you look, you see devastation. About 5.6 million people live in the Houston metropolitan area. By contrast, the Twin Cities has a metro population of 3.5 million. Try to imagine evacuating the entire Twin Cities metro, then adding another 60% more people, and you see the problem.

We haven't had a hurricane of this magnitude since Katrina in 2005, but this one might be worse, because it's sticking around the Houston area. Katrina, for all its fury, at least kept moving, traveling almost all the way to Chicago before finally dissipating. This storm might still be in Houston on Thursday. Dang.

Under normal circumstances, we might have been whining about it being a rainy weekend here in the Twin Cities. I think I'll not worry about that any time soon.