This much rain in a single storm had never happened in recorded history, so I'd let the engineers off a little bit for not designing the city to absorb that much water. There is only so
Much you can do on a relatively flat landscape.

I blame Mother Nature.
Does that make me a misogynist?

While there is some truth to this, over developing, and removing most of the wetlands in an area comes with a price imo. There is no free lunch when Mother Nature is serving...

Yes, lets blame God.

That pic of billions of dollars in wrecked aircraft is staggering. Is there a market for "flood planes "?

Nothing a power wash wouldn't fix ;)

Airport picture is fake.

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Randy

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Oops... :/

I don't think any single person or decision is to blame. I think it is a combination of very very unusual weather, warming Gulf Coast waters, development in flood plains, inadequate flood insurance and information about same, loss of wetlands, and other big and small factors.

There will be time to figure out how to prevent "the next time", and the answer may well be there is no way to do.

Yep.



This once in a hundred years stuff happens all the time now.








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It seems to me that Houston doesn't have adequate infrastructure to deal with far more frequent rain events.

Remember watching a documentary about the mississippi river basin and watershed. It talked about the water management in the delta and protecting what they could of New Orleans. AND that there was not enough capacity for the watershed and how the engineers had to decide each year what area of the watershed to hold back and then flood to keep from flooding New Orleans. I can't imagine the engineers having enough control over the rainfall to actually regulate that as well as they would like. But I would be they did what they could to minimize the impact throughout the watershed for those areas.

Al Gore. Duh.

You do not comprehend what 52 inches of rain falling in such a short time across such a large area means. The cubic acre-feet of runoff water is staggering. Lowering lake levels would not have made one iota of difference.

Texas lake levels
Lake Levels in Texas, United States

When I lived in Georgia, they didn't have snow plows. Why? Because it was cheaper to let the snow melt when it snowed--even with the loss of economic activity--than to maintain a fleet of vehicles that was only used once a decade.

Similarly, it is probably cheaper to have buildings and infrastructure designed to current standards and rebuild when this happens than to design those things to be able to deal with 52" of rain in 72 hours.

I'm pretty sure it's Bush's fault.

Melania's shoes...