Prayers everyone stays dry, with no flooding.

Soggy up here in East Texas too.

I wish everyone well and hope weather events don't jeopardize anyone's safety.

Heavy rains, flooding beyond low lying areas and evacuations seem to be at least annual events in the Houston area. And sometimes more than once a year. It makes me wonder why people are so willing to put themselves in such recurring peril when these events happen so regularly.

Send some north. We are bone dry in the upper 80's.

We are bone dry too, in fact, are having drought conditions. There is a predication of rain tomorrow and for a couple of days following, and we are hoping it materializes.

My son may be moving back to Texas, but is looking into living away from the coast. If that happens, I may very well move to be closer to him and away from the hurricanes and flooding that Houston is prone to.

We just had a dry 12 month La Nina~ weather pattern. It's very unusual for my part of Texas to get this much rain from May through October. I hope that the low areas don't flood but I am grateful to get the rain. Just this week the local lake finally reached its conservation level for the first time in a couple of years. My trees are very happy right now.

Hope everyone stays safe!

"It makes me wonder why people are so willing to put themselves in such recurring peril when these events happen so regularly."

Wow,,,,,, Not everyone has the resources to up and move!!!

There is a lot to love about Houston, and it is probably my favorite city in Texas, although I also like El Paso.

Because of all the rain it gets, it is very lush all year, and because many of the swamps were too difficult to drain, the city sprawled around them, leaving many green spaces throughout the city, especially along the bayous. Here's a boulevard in the neighborhood where I lived, just north of Rice University:

North Blvd, which goes close to the museum district at one end. I loved walking down these streets when I lived there, and they are nice to drive through, since the oak trees with Spanish moss shade the street. Houston is very much an evergreen city, since winters are very mild. Houston is warmer than San Francisco in January.

I think Houston is a major city partly because it is a port, and its location in the NW corner of the Gulf of Mexico makes it one of the western-most ports of the Atlantic, of which the Gulf is a part. Then of course there is the oil industry, which grew up close to a lot of refineries, but that's another story.

There are many beautiful neighborhoods in Houston, including River Oaks, where Beyonce has a house. The people are warm, friendly, and non-pretentious, unlike people in Austin, who often suffer from an undeserved superiority complex. People in Austin are prone to bragging - people in Houston not so much. People in Austin tend to hate Houston, but people in Houston do not hate Austin, as they are more gracious.

The climate in Houston is horrible, which is one of the reasons I left, but I visited regularly shortly after I moved away. The people are what make Houston such a wonderful place, and it's too bad that they have to deal with so many floods.

I hope everyone in SE Texas and southern Louisiana is able to avoid a flood disaster.

"My guess is people don't always have a choice. And climate change is affecting people all across the country."

I've been to Houston a number of times but they were business trips and I didn't see much except the downtown and adjacent areas. Is it the case that everywhere in the entire metro area is subject to catastrophic outcomes from excessive rainfall and there are no defined flood-risk areas versus safer areas of higher ground?

I believe climate change is a concern but reasons for and consequences of seem (for now) to be squishy. The Gulf Coast as a hurricane and tropical storm risk area isn't recent. A good book about one such tragic instance is Isaac's Storm, a story about the inundation of Galveston by a hurricane in 1900.

All of this aside, my sincere wishes for safety for those in the area.

Everywhere has the potential for some kind of disaster: floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, ice storms, volcanoes, forest fires... We are more aware of these things because our population is larger and more spread out that ever.

Hi Lars, that picture reminds me of Montrose. That is a beautiful area of Houston or it was the last time I was there.

I would suspect not everyone can afford to move. Parts of Houston have probably always flooded. The drainage path and area of open land available to soak up some of the water have changed over time. The city is still growing. We bought at a higher elevation for the area because we specifically looked for that. We came in later and not everyone had that advantage. A lot of us were brought to the area for jobs. The housing market is crazy here. People are getting offers 30 minutes after going on the market with multiple offers in 24 hours and double that in 48 hours. The current asking prices for houses on my street are $100K over what I paid 8 years ago. The people who could afford to leave the flooded areas probably already have.

"Everywhere has the potential for some kind of disaster: floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, ice storms, volcanoes, forest fires..."

I think this comment has no relevance to my question about trying to move away from or avoid known zones subject to flooding in Houston, an area that gets torrential rain with some regularity. Insurance companies certainly have this information and I'm sure the municipal governments do too.

adellabedella answered my suspicion that there are those who act more thoughtfully, in saying : "We bought at a higher elevation for the area because we specifically looked for that."

Again, my best wishes to all Houstonians for safe days.

Also people do not want to leave loved ones and where they were born and raised. I am stunned by Elmers response to the poor people who live there. God's speed. Hope nothing happens in your home town!! But I guess you live in the perfect place.........

Judy, from what I've read in the past, here and elsewhere, it's par for the course.

Not everyone has the resources to up and move!!!

That is a concern. But at a certain level of misery, one can hopefully save and plan and find a way. I started a new thread asking people about whether they would stay or move in miserable situations.

https://www.houzz.com/discussions/6124623/would-you-stay-or-would-you-move#n=11

I don’t see a problem with Elmer’s question. Is there a correlation between elevation and demographics in Houston? Are the flood zones low income areas? Totally different situation but by me and in countless other coastal areas you can spend millions to live in a flood zone. I feel terrible when homes are destroyed but would hope the purchase was a calculated risk.

Elmers response

par for the course.

His responses are often thought provoking. The resulting new perspective can be a useful tool if one's own situation is approaching a necessary life decision.

Thanks Lucille. You get it, some others do too. But not everyone does.

To answer foodonastump's question, no there's isn't a correlation between flooding and the economic situation along the Gulf Coast, here's why.

As someone from the deep south most of this area is flat with a slow slope to the water. So why does is flood? Most of this land was/is swamp or farmland ( rice and sugar ) or with these being desirable living & work areas there's a lot of concrete. Swamp is saturated and doesn't absorb water. Rice patties leave the land exhausted, lacking nutrients and compacted to the point it can't absorb water. The influx of other states has cause building booms that covered the land with concrete. So whether it rains on the coast or inland there is less land that can absorb the rain fall or the run-off. That's why coastal flooding is unpredictable, a frequent statement I would hear was "I've lived here 30, 40, 50 years and we've never flooded before".

Also neighborhoods don't stay the same. Areas that were upper middle class when I was little changed and became quite poor by the time I was an adult. Areas that were poor farmland became high-end neighborhoods in that same time span.

I hope it doesn't flood. Hope everyone stays safe

Flash flood watch in Houston has been cancelled for now.

Kid II lives in Houston so I keep an eye on the weather there off n' on.

Every time it rains hard in Houston, the streets flood.

In Houston, the streets are supposed to flood. They’re designed as secondary storm channels to hold storm runoff and allow it to drain through storm sewers into bayous and rivers.

(So, really no different than anywhere else that has raised curbs, gutters, borrow ditches, storm sewers, crowned roadways, highways.... Only the ones in Houston & other areas with high rainfall amounts get more exercise.)

Easier to understand if you've experienced a flash flood (like I did one time in Santa Fe) somewhere that don't generally need to deal w/ excessive rainfall.

More: Why do the streets flood so easily in Houston

Rainfall in Houston has been below normal (first four months of this year). A little more than half the usual amount. 50" average annual rainfall.

Good news for Houstonians.

I learned some information that differs somewhat from what cilantro said.

Sometime in the last 5 or 6 years, I don't remember when nor if it was at the time of one of the catastrophic storms, I saw a TV interview with the director of the local Houston flood control district or agency. I don't remember if it was a county agency or a city one.

Anyway, standing in front of a completely flooded freeway underpass, the interviewer asked why the Houston area was subject to such frequent flooding. I don't remember the exact words he said but I remember the very clear message. I'll try to paraphrase and reenact his comments as if quoted:

"We have two factors at work here. First, this area can expect to experience very heavy rainfall events with regularity. Second, our drainage system is inadequate for even moderately heavy events and the only possible outcome is flooding.

When the drainage system was first engineered and constructed, there was a shortage of money and an unwillingness of the local population to pay more to have an adequate job done. So, what was done was severely compromised, the best they could do with limited funds. It was known at the time to be inadequate. As the years went on and the city developed, periodic efforts to try to obtain more resources and money to improve and enhance the system were always met with resistance. Many times when significant improvements were proposed, they met opposition and little or nothing was done.

Because of the development that has taken place, we are where we are now and it would be prohibitively expensive to fix the major known problems in the existing system. I'm sorry to say that regular flooding is to be expected."

---------------------------

The technology is known. The tragic risk of life and inconvenience in the area is the result, according to the boss, of poor choices and compromised systems.

There are plenty of places where low lying inhabited ground is protected from flooding with ease. New Orleans is one although the jeopardy is always there because of ill-maintained dikes and its own risk to major storms. Much of the Netherlands is below sea level but is protected by sophisticated water management systems and well maintained dikes. Looking up and seeing a boat passing by in the nearby river or canal, higher than the ground one is standing on, is an eerie reminder of how much low ground there is. That experience can be seen in the NO area too. .