Holy Shite look at those floods in Houston

[malaise]

16 inches of rain

[Buzz Clik]

1. Parts of Houston have shut down -- during rush hour! Flooding there can be quite dangerous.

[hobbit709]

2. You have to remember, Houston was built out of a swamp.

When the water comes it can't run to a lower point.

[malaise]

4. True but 3-4 inches of rain per hour only makes thing way worse

https://weather.com/safety/floods/news/houston-southeast-texas-flooding-impacts
<snip>
A widespread disaster unfolded early Monday morning in the Houston area as torrential, prolonged rainfall came down at rates as high as four inches an hour, flooding waterways at rapid rates and leaving residents trapped in their own homes.

Rainfall totals of 10 to 20 inches have been measured in southeast Texas to the northwest of Houston as of 6:30 a.m. CDT, according to the Harris County Flood Control District. In some places, rainfall rates of 3 to 4 inches per hour were reported.

"This is a mind-boggling situation," said Jim Cantore, storm tracker for The Weather Channel.

[hobbit709]

6. Around here I've seen what we call toad stranglers-up to 10 inches an hour.

[malaise]

7. Freaking wow!

That's a lot of water

[hobbit709]

8. My wife used to say it was raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock.

There are times it rained so hard that I couldn't see the street from my front window and I've got a small front yard.

[cloudbase]

3. Some parts of Houston flood when there's a heavy dew.

This one is pretty bad. I'm dry (for now) but staying in all day.

[malaise]

5. Stay away from the water

[cloudbase]

9. Thanks.

Even the stray cats we feed haven't ventured out this morning.

If you're in the area, stay dry!

[panader0]

10. Flood in Houston by Savoy Brown:

[malaise]

12. Thanks

[dembotoz]

11. looks like that ham guy should be building his ark park in houston

they would probably let ham discriminate against workers of other faiths there too

[malaise]

13. LOL - yah think?

[Jeffersons Ghost]

14. I heard it was 17 inches

[of something like bullshit Chinese crack-code]

[SheilaT]

15. Another huge problem with Houston is

that not only is it on very low and very flat ground, but much of it has been paved, and there's no where for the water to go when it rains. I read that probably twenty or thirty years ago, and the piece pointed out that things would only get worse as the population grew.

Yes, this is a very substantial rainfall, but the geography and the man-made stuff don't help at all.

[Igel]

16. Parts of Houston have always been paved.

Gumbo soil cracks and is like rock. Crappy permeability, so once the cracks fill up as the clay expands the water soaks in very, very slowly. It can rain an inch, you dig, and 6 inches down it's still dry.


Making Houston's flooding worse was crappy planning. We're from 15 to 100 feet above sea level. The storm drain systems wasn't planned from scratch, it grew and was added to. Some newer communities drain downhill and hit old storm drains with less carrying capacity. Water comes gushing out of the culverts and floods the older neighborhoods.

It used to be that the older neighborhoods were mostly minority and poor. That's not entirely true now, but the problem remains the same. (Houston has a decadal storm drain redevelopment project going on, opening the old lines and expanding them from the bay up through the city. We're in something like year 2 of implementation, and it'll take longer than 10 years. There's a dedicated tax, with pretty much no exemptions. Even public schools have to pay it. Or that's what the law said--I'm outside the city and miss a lot of later changes from court decisions.)

[SheilaT]

17. Thanks for that information.

I don't know a great deal about storm drains, but it seems as though there's a very basic problem of: if you build the storm drains, where do they need to carry the water to?