b'I t was on Monday, August 3, 1970, when the last major hurricane impacted thethousands of first responder units from Brownsville, Texas, around the Gulf and Atlantic Coastal Bend. None of us, even the old timers, have been through this in this par- coasts up to Boston, Massachusettsthere is no planand procedures are not plans. ticular way. Wind is wind, and rain is rain, and storm surge will be storm surge,They are all playing it by ear, as each situation arises, and as each threatening storm but once residents of Port A survived the storm itself, physically, much of theirslowly approaches American coastal cities.hell had just started. For all of us living on the gulf coast, on an island or milesAnd none of them are to blame.inland, Harvey should wake us up to the realty of our helplessness.Mother Nature has always, and will always, have its way with us. The science of We cannot predict our own weather and none of us have our own hurricane huntermeteorological observation dates back to 3000 B.C. in India, and even though today we airplanes and crewand as far as I know, none of us operate our own weather satellites.observe weather from 50,000 miles above the earth, using the most advanced comput-We are 100% dependent on the United States Federal Government to inform us, adviseers ever developedour forecasters flatly blew it with Hurricane Harvey. Other than us and warn us about dangerous weather systems. They will do it well or they will not,singing, I hear hurricanes a-blowinI know the end is coming soon, ala Credence that is completely out of our control. So, when the remnants of Tropical Storm HarveyClearwater Revivals famed ditty about a storm looming over the bayou, the National fell apart and drifted across the Caribbean and over the Yucatan Peninsula, into the gulf,Hurricane Center could have just taken August off and played golf. When the NHC con-the National Weather Service will either recognize that as a potential threat to the Texasveys serious concern over flooding, for example, from a particular weather system, the Coast, or they wont. news media on whom they rely to broadcast their advisories, and whose attention span is And they didnt. They declared Harvey dead for three days until it was two hundredshorter than a six-year-olds, starts using brainless terms like historic rainmaker. And miles into the Gulf of Mexico. That was on Wednesday, two days before it slammed intolike all stories that travel through traditional, and now social media, a single, brainless Mustang Island. label is permanently attached to the event. So, up until the afternoon of Friday, August 25th, 2017, Hurricane Harvey equaled historic rainmaker.A better term would have been Hell Maker, as there was nary a complaint about the damage Harveys rain befell Port Aransas.Boarding up your windows will not save your roof, nor will it keep four feet of water out of your house. Big cities have learned that evacuating people locally, to the strongest and least vulnerable structures inside the city, works best, and Harveys direct hit as a Cat 4 storm proved that lesson here.On Thursday the 24th, as Harvey spun in the gulf before it decided where to go, there was sudden urgency conveyed by the NHC, but it lagged in the news media. The term used over and over again was, Rainmaker, and that set into the public mindset. We were all a little concerned about heavy rains, but honestly, the Coastal Bend has never been particularly flood-prone, so no one here really worried. It was not until late Thurs-day afternoon and Friday morning that the, Holy sh*ts could be heard in most of ourIn those first days after landfall, as you drove into Port A on Highway 361, it was conversations about the storm in the gulf. obvious what worked. Cinnamon Shore worked. The residential, resort development Its easy to say that by that point, it was too late. But too late for what? that broke ground about twelve years ago survived Harvey with barely a scratch. There In 2005, that towering inferno of intellectual prowess known as Gov. Rick Perry,was some damage to some of the structures there, but overall, Cinnamon Shore made it ordered the full evacuation of Houston as Hurricane Rita approached. Corpus Christithrough a direct hit by a Cat 4 hurricane fully intact, and residents and renters, most of Mayor Henry Garrett did the same thing here, ordering everyone out the day before Ritathem displaced from their own homes, were moving in within weeks.made its eastwardly turn in the gulf and toward Houston. Both were ridiculous decisionsLet us be clear, however. Cinnamon Shore is one of the most expensive, and, yes, that resulted in far more problems than either move solved, and cost the public and thelovely, waterfront developments on the Gulf Coast, where your typical weekender runs government millions upon millions in wasted time and resources. There is little questionabout $1 million. When its developer, Atlantas Jeff Lamkin, launched the project in the that evacuation orders in Texas for Rita in 2005 were motivated mostly by what had hap- mid-2000s, he told this editor that his new property will feature (that is, as a selling pened in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, just a few weeks earlier. Mass evacuationspoint) the strongest, hurricane-survivable construction availablestandards and systems of large, coastal urban centers do not work, and that has been proven over and over again.that came into play in Florida, following the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in 1992. At the same time, the evacuation of small, coastal towns that are in the first-impact zoneIn addition to all the planned amenities for the community, high building standards were of a storm, like Port A and Rockport, did work, insofar as protection against deaths anda loud and important selling point for Cinnamon Shore.serious injuries. More than a decade later, the unthinkable but inevitable finally happened, and while Make no question about itfrom federal weather forecasters to local elected of- blue tarps line rooftops north and south of Cinnamon Shore, four months after Harvey, ficials, to the news media and private forecasters, up to and including the leadership ofthis place has been up and running for more than three of those months.40 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINEJanuary/February 2018 42 THE COOASASTTAL BEND MAFebruary 2018ories that Mattered TheC talBend.comomTheCoastalBend.com TheCooasastalBend.c50 THE C AL BEND MAGAGAZINEZINEJanuary/FEATURED: The St'