Glad you made it through it !!!!

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When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, and HAVOC !

So am I. It's the luck of the draw (I've been "missed by meteorological bullets" as well, although I too live in a flood plain [which is also in a seismically-active place]), and any of us could find ourselves in the wrong location at the wrong time. Also:

Another factor which has worsened the flooding (this isn't a criticism; my native city of Miami is in the same circumstances, and so is Washington, D.C.) is the fact that Houston is largely built on swamp land that has been mostly paved over and "concreted-over," which has greatly reduced the ability of the soil to absorb rainwater.

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Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

Thanks GH and blackshire...

Yes, that's quite true. Houston has sprawled to the point it's surrounding us and stretches for 50 miles in every direction from downtown. The sheer number of houses and new buildings and roads and pavement and parking lots has really increased the amount of runoff, that's true.

Course, when you get close to a year's total in rainfall (or even half a years like we got), it's a recipe for a mess. Baytown got 51 inches, which is MORE than a year's rainfall (at least compared to Needville). My grandparents lived in Baytown and Highlands (directly across the freeway just north of Baytown) during WWII; grandpa Leon worked in the refinery making aviation gasoline, thus he never had to go to the war-- essential war work.

It's going to be a mess for a LONG time...

Now hear tell there's no gasoline to be had. I know we payed $2.50 a gallon once we got to Indiana (we're in northern Indiana for my youngest nephew's wedding, which was today and really nice). School is supposed to start up again Sept 11, but that may prove difficult without diesel to power school buses and for folks to get back into evacuation areas... let alone put their houses in order again...

Later! OL J R

Later! OL J R

__________________
The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!

We had a similar--but fortunately "slow-motion"--situation in Miami in the spring of 1987, when it rained constantly (but not in torrential amounts) for about two months because a stable atmospheric "conveyor belt" kept a system dumping rain on us. As the weeks dragged on, streets and yards gradually flooded and concrete swimming pools started popping up out of the saturated ground; if we didn't get a normal years' worth of rain during that time, we got almost that much. Having that occur in Houston within less than a week greatly speeded-up and worsened the problems--and left no time to really prepare!

I'm glad you all were able to make the wedding, but school...yes, that will be..."interesting."
Did your grandfather ever mention any tricks for making gasoline and/or diesel "keep" longer? That's becoming a nation-wide problem (we pump crude oil in Alaska, but we have only one small working refinery, down south; most of our gasoline and diesel are shipped from outside the state). Besides filling containers to the brim (to prevent contact with air) and storing them in a cool, low-humidity environment, maybe filling the ullage volumes of partly-empty containers with dry carbon dioxide or nitrogen gas would displace the air and prevent the fuel from "spoiling?" (I know that Sta-bil [see: http://www.google.com/search?q=sta-...1k1.w0t-u5s0Oyg ] is available, but I don't know if it preserves fuel for very long periods.)

__________________
Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

Sta-bil will keep it "fresh" for several months. Most motorcyclists up north add Sta-bil, top off the tank, and store them for the winter. Nothing else is needed with EFI. Some guys with carbs don't even drain the floats. They just run the bike long enough for the Sta-bil mix to get in the floats. My Canadian friends usually park the bikes in early October and don't ride again until May, so that's about 6 months.

I've heard Seafoam works just as well as Sta-bil at preserving gas. Any decent two stroke oil has preservatives in it that will do the same. I've run the same 2 gallon jug of chainsaw gas for about a year without mixing up a new batch now that my mother doesn't burn wood anymore.

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I love sanding.

Bingo !

I started reading an article about how all the concrete in the Houston area had compromised its ability to absorb the rain. I thought, "Really?, 51 inches in 2 days, and you're blaming the flooding on concrete." Hmmm....

Seems like, along with the record rainfall, there's a record number of folks stepping up to say stupid stuff

Doug

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YORF member #11

Good--thank you for letting me know (about Seafoam as well; I hadn't heard of it)! I don't drive anymore, and I had never used Sta-bil when I was still driving, but I know several people here who still drive, and Sta-bil or Seafoam would help them store some (less expensive) fuel until the refineries in Texas are able to resume their normal production quantities.

__________________
Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

I think the gasoline itself is okay... it's all the "additives" that they put in it that actually goes bad... ESPECIALLY that FRIGGIN' ETHANOL!

Now, don't get me wrong... I think alcohol is great-- for top-fuel dragsters and monster trucks and stuff like that... and if you want to build a street engine to run on it, FINE... but this corn-lobby "gasohol" ethanol crap that's been foisted on the average consumer over the last 20 years or so is just a mess... it was a piss-poor solution in search of a problem, done for the wrong reasons in the wrong way, and made a heck of a lot more problems in the meantime... I'm more partial to the way the Brazilians do alcohol-- the vehicle starts on straight gasoline, warms up to operating temp, and automatically switches over to straight alcohol-- none of these idiotic "blends" that absorb water and go bad and eat up seals and stuff...

Dad and Grandpa farmed maize (grain sorghum or "milo") when I was a kid... then thanks to that IDIOT Jimmy Carter and his grain embargo of the Soviet Union, which collapsed the grain markets and very nearly collapsed the entire US ag economy in the process (leading DIRECTLY to the farm economy collapse that plagued agriculture throughout the 1980's) Dad and Grandpa quit growing maize in about 80 or 81, IIRC. The price tanked, so they parked the combine in the barn and planted wall-to-wall cotton for the next 15 years... Anyway, Dad would usually take a car battery out and put it in the combine and start it up once a year and back it out of the barn and run it up and down the turning row, turn on the thresher and header and unload auger just to blow the dust out of it and keep everything freed up and turning, and then put it back in the barn. He did that for a few years and then since we weren't using the combine, he just quit doing it and left it in the barn. Fast forward about 10-12 years, and cotton costs have gone through the roof, and grain sorghum prices are a lot stronger than they've been in a decade... so I decided to plant half the farm in sorghum. Dad told me I'd better get that combine fired up and see if it'd even run after all those years sitting before I planted, because I might either be totally rebuilding that old machine or looking for a newer one (and figuring out how to pay for it) before harvest if I didn't.

SO, I pulled a battery out one of the vehicles and went and bought a few cans of "fresh" gasoline (this was back in the mid-90's) and went down there to the old barn to work on the combine. I had taken a couple old five gallon pails to drain out the old gas from the huge gas tank on the old combine, as I knew it was probably less than a quarter tank, but with a 50 gallon or so tank, that's STILL a lot of fuel! I grabbed a bucket and shoved it up under the end of the tank and unscrewed the drain bung on the bottom, and it popped out with a "WHOOSH!" of old gasoline that drenched my hand as it started pouring into the bucket...

Now, this was NOT the water-clear, watered down CRAP gasoline we get TODAY... the stuff that if you fill a five gallon bucket full of it, it *sorta* looks like a bucket of warm pee, with a yellowish tinge to it... No sir! This was Good OLD FASHIONED LEADED gasoline... the kind that sparkled EVERY COLOR OF THE RAINBOW as the sunlight played through the stream of gas pouring into the bucket out of the bottom of the tank, and that had that STRONG, OVERPOWERING, TAKE-YOUR-BREATH-AWAY **GAS** odor of my childhood! Not this wimpy watery barely-smells alcohol type CRAP they sell at the stations nowdays... I looked in the bottom of the bucket, and this stuff was a bright reddish-purple, just like I remembered from the old days... and it smelled MUCH better than the brand-spanking NEW gas I had just bought! My hand was BURNING like I'd been splashed with acid, from the POWER of this old gasoline, which despite being close to 15 years old was WAY STRONGER than the new crap I'd just bought! SO, I reached under the tank and screwed the bung back in, tightened it up, and poured the gas I'd captured in the bucket back in the top of the tank, and reprimed the fuel system... once I got everything done and hooked up, I climbed in the combine cab-- moment of truth... choked the engine, flipped the lever to full throttle, turned the key, and pushed the starter button... she rolled over for about 20 seconds, coughed, sputtered, and died. Turned her over again for about 10 seconds or so and she popped and fired off and sputtered a bit, leveled out, and ran like a swiss watch! ON FIFTEEN YEAR OLD GASOLINE!!!

I remember as a kid when we'd be getting the combine or cotton pickers out of the barn... I'd help Dad or Grandpa put the battery in them and prime the fuel system... you had to be REALLY careful because in any nook or cranny or area where you least expected it, there was likely to be a football-size nest of yellow-jackets ready to sting the living snot out of you at the first opportunity... Grandpa or Dad would usually just step back a few paces when they found one, and squirt gasoline out of the squirt can they brought to prime the fuel system on the picker before firing it up at the nest-- even if you missed, the smell or overspray was enough to kill those yellow jackets or send them dropping like flies to the ground, flailing and dying in their death throes... I tried that years later and I might as well have been tossing a half-jar of ice-water on them-- just made them MAD!!! I had to go to town in the truck and get a can of Bengal wasp and hornet killer to get rid of them, because the modern water-clear alcohol gas did NOTHING to them...

SO, that's my experience with modern gas... IMHO you want something that'll store indefinitely-- go propane... diesel isn't much better than gas anymore for shelf-life... and if you DO store it, you have to stabilize it as well... and hope you don't get a bunch of algae or other crap growing in the tank...

Later! OL J R

__________________
The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!

While Carter was no favorite of mine, in theory the grain embargo was a good thing (to weaken the U.S.S.R.), but in practice, other countries happily snapped up the grain export business that U.S. farmers were forced to give up. Regarding the gasoline:

I agree--the formula of the basic hydrocarbon fuel itself remains the same, but today's gasoline both contains additives and *lacks* others (such as tetra-ethyl lead) that "old-production" gasoline didn't (or did) contain. Both in Miami and here in Alaska, we (and I) found that the large swings in temperature--and humidity--made/make gasoline "go bad" pretty rapidly, both from water condensation and (especially in south Florida) microbial infestation. (This is even worse in heating oil, diesel fuel, and jet fuel [RP-1's low sulfates content might make it less attractive to the microbes]).

__________________
Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR