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.