Hurricane Harvey

[Jim Eshelman]

Hurricane Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane about 10 PM CDT (8/25/17) northeast of Corpus Christi, TX. Winds were about 130 mph. No other Cat 4 hurricane has touched U.S. soil since Hurricane Charley in 2004. EDIT: (Later clarified as 9:45 PM, and a location between Port Aransas and Port O'Connor, which would be approximately 28N08, 96W44.)

The evolving Wikipedia page on the event is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Harvey

This was the exact day of Saturn's station.

LATER (8/26): Reports are now arriving (the next day), citing "major damage" in some areas, intensified because the storm is moving slowly and concentrating its impact in the areas it passes. Casualty and injury figures haven't been reported yet, but surely there will be some. Electrical lines are down and power may be out for weeks.

Year: Capsolar
Mercury on WP (0°41')
Pluto on Dsc (3°56')

XTRA: Mercury-Mars sq. (2°09' in mundo)

Bridge
t Saturn conj. Cansolar Dsc July 31 to September 18

Quarter: Cansolar (Dormant.) Moon-Uranus conj. (3°57')

Quarter: Arisolar
Pluto sq. MC (1°47')
Jupiter on IC (3°11')
-- Jupiter-Pluto sq. (3°06')
Sun-Uranus conj. (0°14' in mundo)
-- Uranus conj. MC (3°28')
-- Sun conj. MC (3°43')

Month: Caplunar
Mercury on Dsc (0°53')
Neptune on EP (1°08')
-- Mercury-Neptune op. (3°59')
Saturn on MC (9°36')

Week: Liblunar (Dormant.) Moon-Uranus op. (0°43' in mundo)

Week: Canlunar
Moon on Asc (1°03')
Venus on Asc (2°47')
-- Mo/Ve on Asc (0°52')
-- Moon-Venus conj. (3°03')
Pluto sq. MC (1°04')
Jupiter on IC (4°03')
-- Jupiter-Pluto sq. (2°33')
-- Venus-Jupiter sq. (2°09')

Day: Capsolar Quotidian
p Asc op. t Venus (0°27'), sq. t Uranus (0°59')

Day: Cansolar Quotidian & Transits
p Asc conj. s Sun (0°06')
p MC op. s Jupiter (0°54'), sq. s Pluto (1°48'), sq. t Pluto (0°52')
------------------------------------
t Saturn conj. s Dsc (1°31')
t Sun conj. s IC (0°37')
t Mercury conj. s IC (0°46')
-- Sun-Mercury conj. (0°23')
(One could argue that co-angularity produces an implicit Mercury-Saturn partile square.)


SUMMARY
Year (+1): Mercury (Pluto).
Bridge (+2): Saturn (Can).
Quarter: (Dormant.) Moon-Uranus.
Quarter (Arisolar, +2): Pluto (Sun Jupiter Uranus). Sun-Uranus Jupiter-Pluto.
Month (+2): Mercury Neptune (Saturn). Mercury-Neptune.
Week: (Dormant.) Moon-Uranus.
Week (Canlunar, +2): Moon Venus Pluto (Jupiter). Moon-Venus Venus-Jupiter Jupiter-Pluto.
Day (CapQ, +1): Venus Uranus.
Day (Cansolar, +2): Sun Jupiter Pluto (CanQ). Sun Mercury Saturn Sun-Mercury (transits).

Simplifying this (by stripping out all the dormancies, simplifying on the wider angularities, and giving Day chart priority to the Cansolar, which was driving the Bridge) gives the following as the main data we'd have if we'd been monitoring the area for predictions:

Year (+1): Mercury.
Bridge (+2): Saturn (Can).
Quarter (+2): Pluto. Sun-Uranus Jupiter-Pluto.
Month (+2): Mercury Neptune. Mercury-Neptune.
Week (+2): Moon Venus Pluto. Moon-Venus Venus-Jupiter Jupiter-Pluto.
Day (Cansolar, +2): Sun Jupiter Pluto (CanQ). Sun Mercury Saturn Sun-Mercury (transits).
Day (CapQ, +1): Venus Uranus.

[Jupiter Sets at Dawn]

Landfall was 30 miles ENE of Corpus Christie between Port O'Connor and Port Aransus.

[Jim Eshelman]

Harvey degraded to a tropical storm and has hit Houston, causing great damage. I did a quick check last night for a friend living in Houston and noted (all partile or nearly so) Pluto setting in the Capsolar, Saturn setting in the Cansolar, Mercury-Neptune across the horizon for the Caplunar, and CapQ Asc exactly conjunct Mars.

At least five deaths have occurred in Houston - nearly all the deaths from Harvey over all (one death occurred earlier, near the coast).

Just as Hurricane Katrina did all of its famous damage after it degraded to tropical storm status, Harvey may end up being known primarily as the Houston storm - and the charts are a square fit.

Also of interest is that Houston was in the line of maximum totality of the recent total solar eclipse. Moon was 0°02' and Sun 0°08' off Houston's MC at the time of totality, with Mars square Ascendant and Mercury also foreground - the Mercury/Mars midpoint (which I've seen before as "destructive wind") only 0°01' off MC.

[Jim Eshelman]

Reports have started coming in about the enormity of this. We are a ways from getting damage statistics. FEMA's acting head said they expected to be there "for years" helping with recovery, seemingly comparing the scope of damage to Katrina. Texas (some reports are saying) hasn't seen anything of this scope for half a century, so the numbers presumably will be high - at least with property damage (and we have yet to see for casualties, currently listed as 8).

Original landfall is now being cited as near Rockport, TX. which is 28N01, 97W03, but I think Houston will be remembered as the impact zone. "Catastrophic inland flooding" is pounding the Houston area, with whole towns under water.

Previously, Texas' worst disaster ever was the Galveston Hurricane in 1900, in which 8,000 (or perhaps as many as 12,000) people died. Therefore, I don't take seriously the claims that this will be "Texas' worst disaster ever," at least in terms of casualties. OTOH it wouldn't be hard to outstrip Galveston in terms of property damage since (in today's dollars) it only hit about half a billion dollars despite the virtual elimination of Galveston altogether.

[Jim Eshelman]

I haven't been able to find a time when Harvey hit Houston, but - a good measurement of local impact - I did find a Saturday morning report saying that, in anticipation, transportation terminals were shutting down August 26, 2017, at 2:00 PM. Let's use this to check the charts for Houston.

Year: Capsolar
Pluto on Dsc (1°55')
Mercury on WP (2°01')
Sun on Dsc (9°20')

Bridge
t Pluto conj. Capsolar Dsc 7/15-12/7
t Saturn conj. Cansolar Dsc 7/17-10/23
Event window: July 17 to October 23

Quarter: Cansolar
Saturn on Dsc (1°16')
Venus on Asc (5°34')
Moon-Uranus conj. (3°52')

XTRA:
Mars-Jupiter sq. (0°04 in mundo) is locale-distinctive
Neptune squares the foreground Venus (0°15')

Month: Caplunar
Neptune on EP (0°15')
Mercury on Dsc (1°53')
-- Mercury-Neptune op. (3°59')

XTRA: Venus-Uranus sq. (1°42' in mundo) is locale-distinctive

Week: Liblunar (Dormant.) Moon-Uranus op. (3°20')

Week: Canlunar
(There always has to be a lunar ingress that just shows the rain - and this one shows the devastation, too.)
Moon on Asc (0°48')
Pluto sq. MC (0°24')
Jupiter on IC (2°37')
-- Jupiter-Pluto sq. (2°33')
Uranus sq. Asc (1°39')
Venus on Asc (4°38')
-- Venus-Jupiter sq. (2°09')
Moon-Venus conj. (3°03')

Day: Capsolar Quotidian & Transits
p Asc op. t Venus (0°00')
------------------------------------------
t Pluto conj. s Dsc (1°07')

Day: Cansolar Quotidian & Transits
p Asc conj. s Mars (0°37'), sq. t Uranus (0°59') & s Uranus (1°03')
-- t Uranus sq. p Mars (0°15'), s Mars-Uranus sq. (0°26')
p MC sq. s Pluto (0°27') & t Pluto (1°17')
---------------------------------------------------
t Saturn conj. s Dsc (0°42')
t Mercury conj. s IC (1°18')
-- implicit Mercury-Saturn square (0°36')


SUMMARY
Year (+2): Pluto (Sun Mercury).
Bridge (+3): Pluto (Cap). Saturn (Can).
Quarter (+2): Saturn (Venus). Moon-Uranus (Venus-Neptune).
Month (+2): Mercury Neptune. Mercury-Neptune.
Week: (Dormant.) Moon-Uranus.
Week (Canlunar, +2): Moon Jupiter Uranus Pluto (Venus). Moon-Venus Venus-Jupiter Jupiter-Pluto.
Day (Capsolar, +1): Venus (CapQ, -1). Pluto (transit, +2).
Day (Cansolar, +3): Mars Uranus Pluto (CapQ, +2). Mercury Saturn Mercury-Saturn (transits, +2).

[Jim Eshelman]

Statistic of the morning: 11 trillion gallons of water have been dumped ono Texas.

The storm withdrew to the Gulf of Mexico to reload, and then is headed back in to Galveston and Houston, hence the "four more days" prediction on rain. This is going like a military campaign! And it does seem it will be moving on to Louisiana.

[Jim Eshelman]

The new landfall of Tropical Storm Harvey was just west of Cameron, LA. It was announced at 4 AM, so occurred sometime before that perhaps not long before that).

Death toll is now up to 30.

Cameron's Liblunar has Mars 0°11' from square Midheaven. (See the map I posted yesterday.) The Caplunar, for that matter, has Neptune closely rising tied into Mercury setting and Saturn culminating a little wider. Pluto is transiting a few minutes from its Capsolar Descendant,

[Jupiter Sets at Dawn]

Scratch previous - according to the Weather Channel, the US Weather Service in Houston reported:
"Harvey made its third and final landfall around 3:30 a.m. CDT Wednesday morning near Cameron, Louisiana, with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph."
I think that's as close as we'll get.

[Jim Eshelman]

Death toll is at least 37 now... and then there were the explosions...

[Jim Eshelman]

Two explosions occurred at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, TX this morning, August 31, 2017, about 2 AM. The concern seems to be chemical spills which, of course, get into the water that is flowing everywhere and touching everything and everyone. (The threat is being downplayed. The plant was mostly evacuated, apparently just a few "keep things running" folks on site.)

The plant had been damaged by the storm and its sequelae. There may still be more explosions. (A little before 2:00, Neptune crossed MC locally. Saturn set not long before that.)

Crosby is close enough to Houston that the solar and lunar ingresses are all the same: Pluto setting for the Year, Saturn setting for the Quarter (and both of those planets transiting their respective angles currently), Mercury-Neptune for the Month, Uranus and Pluto for the flow-through Week.

As for the day, the CapQ is more of an "It's OK, folks" chart with transiting Venus exactly on Descendant (only 07' at 2 AM) and the CanQ angles had moved off the more volatile planets to, also, a benefic showing with transiting Jupiter still in orb of IC.

[Jim Eshelman]

Dilemma: Do I write this up as a hurricane or a flood? It's really the Houston event, and the hurricane (originally a Cat 5 hurricane) had degraded to tropical storm by the time it reached Houston. However, the Houston charts look like classic hurricane charts and do not have the markers of floods (which is where the sub-hurricane storms tend to fall). That is, primarily Pluto + Saturn (hurricane markers) instead of Jupiter + Uranus and some Saturn (flood markers).

Or not include it in the book because it's so ambiguous, even though it's something of a landmark event of the last year?

Hmm, I'll figure something out.

[Jupiter Sets at Dawn]

Or write it up showing the ambiguities and why it's both. I think that's better because this is Sidereal astrology, and we don't leave out things that don't prove the point.

[Jim Eshelman]

Oh, c'mon, you know me. I go out of the way to show examples that look bad, with the hope we'll learn something from them. This isn't that sort of thing, though. It's an event that could be in one category or another and the boundaries aren't clear, and where I place it could have a disproportionate (and arguably disproportionate) effect on how the numbers fall. (It's a valid research principle to exclude extreme outliers that would distort results; but this isn't that, either.)

I'll probably end up adding it as a flood instead of a hurricane, because it's primarily the Houston event, and the Houston effect was primarily the flood after the hurricane had degraded to a tropical storm. I already treat Hurricane Camille and Tropical Storm Camille (same storm) differently in different locales for different phenomena.

Then again, one could argue that - on the scale of worst hurricanes - this one, by the time it hit, wasn't in the club. Across a century of hurricanes, based on usual criteria such as deaths and property loss, this one was tiny. It's only our proximity to it that makes it stand out so.

I'll think it through...

[Jupiter Sets at Dawn]

I don't think leaving out Harvey because we're not sure how to classify it is an answer.

When I was a child in NY, we had hurricanes. They were hours of wind, and then days of flooding, and then weeks of cleaning and throwing away most of people's possessions. Most are remembered as floods that happened because of hurricanes. The flood of 1972 was caused by Hurricane Agnes, but it's remembered as the Flood of '72. Miles and miles of road signs on metal posts bent over at a right angle by the water.

Tornadoes are about wind. Hurricanes are about water. Always. Storm surge, some of them, and that's also wind. But inland the rivers flood. Hurricanes are two or more stages. First the storm, including tornadoes spawned by the storm, then the flood or the other aftermath.

So what causes flooding? A hurricane's rain? Or a dam breaking? Or an ice dam? Or rain high in mountains? Does that make a difference in the charts for the flood?
Floods don't just show up. They're caused by something. The water comes from somewhere. I don't know.. should they be classified by where the water came from? I think that might be right. Do we have enough data to do that?

[Lance]

Five feet.

We got exactly five feet of rain.

I'm not arguing one way or the other. I'm just still in disbelief.

[Jim Eshelman]

FYI, here's the lead-in and lead-out to the discussion in the book:

America’s wettest hurricane ever dumped at least 11 trillion gallons of water onto Texas, pooling at depths over five feet in Houston. Like Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Harvey had its greatest impact after it degraded to a tropical storm, moving slowly from the Gulf of Mexico north to Houston, causing much damage along the way.

The death toll was modest for such storms, at 108 (of which 69 were a direct cause of Harvey and the rest were indirect causes). Economic damages, though, were more than $125 billion, nearly all from the catastrophic inland flooding of Houston: The city was buried under water for weeks, as were entire smaller towns nearby.

As an interesting astrological aside, Houston was in the line of maximum impact of the August 21 total solar eclipse. Moon was 0°02' and Sun 0°08' off Houston's MC at the time of totality, with Mars square Ascendant and Mercury also foreground – the Mercury/Mars midpoint (which we have seen elsewhere as “destructive wind”) only 0°01' off Midheaven.

I have not been able to find a time for when Hurricane Harvey reached Houston. However, one significant peak of local impact occurred at 2:00 PM on the 26th: In anticipation of the storm, transportation terminals shut down, effectively sealing the city from easy coming and going.

Earlier & Later Impact of Harvey
While Harvey will surely best be known as a Houston-centered event, earlier and later activity is worth mention and, perhaps, independent study.

Hurricane Harvey made first landfall as a 135 mph Category 4 storm August 25, 2017, about 9:45 PM northeast of Corpus Christi, TX – apparently closest to the town of Rockport. Chart factors were essentially the same as discussed above: Transiting Saturn was farther from Cansolar Descendant, but was stationary on the day of impact.

After inundating Houston, the storm withdrew to the Gulf of Mexico to reload and gain strength, then headed back toward land. It made shore as a tropical storm, just west of Cameron, LA August 30, 3:30 AM. By then, Moon had entered Libra and the new Liblunar had Mars 0°11' from square Midheaven for Cameron. The Caplunar was also a stronger chart, and Pluto transited within a few minutes of the Capsolar’s Descendant: These should all be studied individually.

On August 31, 2017, about 2:00 AM, two explosions occurred at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, TX just outside Houston. The plant had been damaged by the initial storm and subsequent conditions. Though the plant had been evacuated, grave concerns rose of toxic chemicals entering the deep flood waters which were continuous across large stretches, though no actual reports subsequently issued of toxic leaks.