The fact that Hurricane Harvey left tens of thousands of Texas residents homeless is of course sad, but the "American tragedy" could go beyond the United States and spread to the whole world.
The fact is that the hurricane captured Galveston Island, where the biological laboratory of the University of Texas School of Medicine is located - a building stuffed with deadly viruses, microbes and bacteria, for example, bird flu, West Nile encephalitis, SARS and others, perhaps even more terrible and terrible, about which journalists are simply silent.
Due to flooding, communication with the island was interrupted. Of course, the laboratory is a modern building with basements at a depth of thirty meters, that is, a structure capable of withstanding, according to the assurances of the creators of this object, a hurricane of the fifth category on the Saffir-Simpson scale, while Harvey reached only the fourth category. However, there is a danger that, due to power outages, the pressure in the blocks in which dangerous viruses and bacteria are stored will drop, and this can already lead to a real tragedy. And although the building has an autonomous electrical supply, only it also requires fuel, which today is not possible to bring to the island.
Environmental lawyer Jim Blackburn openly expressed at one time the sober idea that he did not understand the inhabitants of Texas who agree to create such a dangerous laboratory in such an unreliable place - on Galveston Island, but no one listened to him then. And now the Texas authorities are in tense anticipation: how will it all end? We can only hope that the next stupidity of the Americans will not lead to a new global catastrophe (as was the case with the bacterium "Cynthia"), by the way, everything happens again as if in the damned Gulf region …