zoning or lack there of

I blame George Bush. I blame George Bush for everything. My hemorrhoids, problems with misfires at 6,000 rpms, global warming, GMOs, 911, Katrina, Cubs winning the World Series, space aliens won't come here and fix the planet, everything. He's my go-to boogie man! Someone cuts me off on the road? Damn George Bush. Client doesn't show? Damn George Bush. Out of on-sale rib eye at Smiths? Damn George Bust.

How are things in Dallas? I'd assume some of the rain made it your way.

Houston infrastructure does a fairly good job of handling large amounts of water. It has improved since the last flood caused by Allison about a decade ago.

The amount of water that fell both upstream and on Houston was the culprit. It was simply too much water. An 800 year flood event claimed by some tv guy said the other day.

My city did well in handling the flood. I have watched little of the national news coverage but what I did catch focused on finding blame, Joel Osteen, global warming and creating division where ever possible. On the ground it has been different.

People of all different types helping each other. It was pretty cool to see it actually with lots of incredible stories in the shelters

It will get tense in the coming weeks as nerves fray and frustrations mount.

I was not flooded. I live near the Addicks reservoir and end up being a few hundred yards out of the zone. I fear red-beard might not be so lucky. Fingers crossed for him.

Back to work.

Not sure why hurricanes in the south-east are so unexpected.

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Stop flaming Mustangs?
 

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greenbull4439

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Two small roof leaks but other than that all good. Quite a bit of Houston is still underwater, and the rivers are still rising. Pulled around 50 people out of their home with my boat. Unreal to drive the boat down residential streets and have people running out of their homes screaming and begging for rescue. Most do not have flood insurance. Sad.

Who is to blame? Is that a serious question? Feces happens. Got to deal with it and not expect anyone to help you but yourself.

Show of hands, how many have read the article I linked in my first post?

That's what I thought.

When gov't officials don't listen to guys like the TAMU prof that is when more people suffer than otherwise normally would.

I read it. I got the impression you were lobbying for MORE land use restrictions. Was I wrong?

OK, I confess, it is all my fault. After developing properties along Greens Bayou, Spring Creek and behind the Addicts and Barker reservoir dams in their flood planes, I took the profits and bought up huge tracks of land on the Katy prairie and developed those. It is quite easy to get around any regulations for water retention reservoirs and ponds, when you spread around lots of money. Especially in the outlying unincorportated areas of west Harris County and Waller County. I have some dynamite property along the Trinity River that I could use some additional capital to develop. Anyone interested?

I read it, but it is not exactly what i would call revealing. A huge densely populated city, near the gulf, is at risk for flooding. Makes perfect sense, but what is the solution? Maybe ask every one to move to wyoming

Personally I blame Harvey, not the storm though....the actor Harvey Keitel

I think it drizzled on day last week...

Well, Los Angeles was a huge, flat, porous desert landscape... millions of people moved here and they paved the desert and got massive flooding... so they enlarged storm drains, and added more porous land.

Yeah it still floods here... but not houses underwater flooding....

We also have earthquakes WAY less often than hurricanes, but all our buildings are build to earthquake standard and most of us keep water and food stored up 'just in case'.

I don't know but would guess it costs less to rebuild every 10-20 year than to build the infrastructure to deal with the hurricanes.

Some areas received 40" of rain. If you had 20": of rain you were lucky.

You can't build yourself out of this disaster.

You can try to minimize the impact.

Short of building the city on stilts, you can't effectively plan to deal with 50" of rain in a few day span. It's not realistic or practical. If LA gets an every 1000 year magnitude earthquake, you'll need far more than a few MREs and a case of bottled water. That is effectively what happened to Houston, a storm of unprecedented magnitude.

Maybe Houston can improve drainage and development so that it can avoid flooding in future rainfall events, perhaps at least in ones that are less extreme than this. Houston has severe floods every few years. 1994, 2001, 2006, 2008, 2015, 2016, 2017. 2001 was also called a 500 year flood event. The Gulf is getting warmer, warmer means more moisture, Houston is getting more developed . . . Have to do something to at least reduce the devastation in future.

Yours is in green but now we've got a idiot celebrity that is saying it with a straight face:
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/09/08/jennifer-lawrence-says-hurricanes-may-be-natures-wrath-for-trump-victory.html

How can you be that stupid and still be breathing?

We need to tow icebergs from the arctic and antarctic to the Gulf of Mexico each summer to keep it cooled off. Install refrigeration plants around the shore powered by politicians hot air. Cover the water with a giant aluminum foil hat.

Even in LA, if there was a magnitude 10, MOST structures would not survive. The objective is to save lives. You could not afford to build the type of facilities for a MAXIMUM event, yet one that is an anomaly.

Seeing as how Harris County voted 54 percent FOR Clinton I hope they did bring it on themselves.

I do not think anyone can understand 52" of rain. It is like a magnitude 10 quake.

A few things to understand:

Soil: heavy impermeable clay. Water has to run off. It does not absorb
Lakes: We don't have them. Almost all are man made.
Development: We have lost 30% of our wetlands over the last 80 years. The US ACE did some of this, to get rid of mosquitos. Less stagnant water, less mosquitos. One of the articles found that the amount of water the wetlans could have held back was about 4 billion gallons. Not much compared to the dams.

Buffalo Bayou: It is known that this is how we get rid of water. They were supposed to straighten it out, dredge, etc. Environmentists have stopped the work, to "preserve the natural bayou".

Flood Control: After two massive floods in late 1920's and 1935, a flood control plan was put into place. Construction of 2 massive (66 billion gallons) dry reservoirs were built to hold the water back, and then drain it over time, to prevent flooding. The plan called for a 3rd dam, a huge levee to the north west, and two giant culverts, one north and one south to collect and divert the water to Galveston bay. WWII happened and the rest was never built. And then we haven't had major floods from 1935 to 2001.

The dams worked as designed, even in this flood. They held back 110 Billion Gallons of water. The damage would have been far worse if they had not been there.

The dumb stuff: After the tax day flood in 2016, I reviewed the 1980 US Geological Survey topographic maps. Having been a Boy Scout, I could read the maps and the color coding. It showed the maximum extent of the dam. I could see where development had taken place, which was inside the maximum pool heigth. We were not inside it, but we are less than a mile from those areas! Today, I was looking at the other (Western Dam - Barker). Houses were built inside the extent of the auxilury spillway. Houses were built next to and insde the Aux Spillway at our dam. Yes the houses flooded. It was idiotic to build them there. And it was a high end neighborhood, since it backed up to a "Nature Preserve". At the back end of the other dam, the houses were 6000-8000 sq ft houses, very expensive and were sold as backing up to a nature preserve.

This flood the dam went full. This is the first time since the dam was constructed, that it went full. The Estimate is 210,000 Acre-feet. The barker dam is similar.

How much rain? 19 Trillion Gallons from the storm and better than 50% landed in Harris County. Call it 10 Trillion Gallons. What do you do with 10 Trillion Gallons? What would 52" of rain do to Los Angeles or ANY major city in the US, let alone the world?

I blame yo mama fo jumpin into the Gulf an makin a Tsunami

Excellent post James. Unless you were here during those three days it is hard to imagine just how hard it rained and once hurricane stalled and the train started, it seemed like it would never stop. Definitely works on your psyche and not in a good way. In this area the Brazos flood gauge was the focus of everyone's attention.

In LA, 15 inches of rain would do what Harvey did to Houston
I lived in Texas for 9 years and they had hundred year floods twice

It is criminal that they want to keep Buffalo Bayou "natural" I believe it was created with steam shovels for flood control, how natural is that?

It's greed & stupidity.

Everybody wants to build their house, big and to their liking..
So new land needs to convert and it has to fit in the city planning for roads and what not.

Developers are not in the business of insuring things that only happen every once in a while.
they are in the business of converting land in more valuable land with houses on it : making money.

So they will develop things, and people will buy it without thinking if that house on that piece of land will be safe for an exceptional thing to happen.. and they will just insure against such risk.

we have similar issues, on a smaller scale here.
It keeps surprising me when people complain that their newly built house floods when a nearby creek grows after exceptionally bad rains.
What did you think was going to happen? your house is in the low point of the area!

Guess where my house is... Molenstraat , windmill street : highest point of the region.
If it floods here, it means half the country fell into the sea.

News here reports that insurance in Europe are going to rise over the damage in North America.. go figure.

Politics. We fear of running out of water in the west, and drowning in the east. And, we can't share.