Houston’s bayous performed well during Hurricane Beryl on Monday, but the storm tested the limits on how much water the system can handle, Harris County meteorologist Jeff Lindner said.
The area was aided by a hot and dry spell prior to Monday, which made the ground dry enough to help absorb some water, Lindner said Tuesday. The speed at which Hurricane Beryl moved also helped limit the damage, he added.
“When I started this 20 years ago, a foot of rain or eight inches of rain would have caused hundreds of homes to flood,” Lindner said. “Our bayous and creeks did really well.”
Plenty of work has gone into widening some of the bayous and building out further flood control infrastructure. Lindner said infrastructure improvements approved by voters after Hurricane Harvey are having a positive effect in the face of these storms, and maintenance efforts to clean up after May’s derecho storm were vital to having the area’s flood mitigation infrastructure ready for Beryl.
The next storm may not be as kind, he cautioned.
“Everything has a limit. This time, our limit did pretty well,” Lindner said. “A lot of things helped us yesterday.”
Despite more rain and thunderstorms on the horizon, officials said there was “no concern” of additional flooding this week. Those storms would be typical afternoon rain showers and thunderstorms with no expectation of widespread heavy rainfall.
Jim Blackburn, co-director of the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center at Rice University, cautioned the good tidings may not last long.
“The real issue is (the bayous) performed well, but the rainfall amounts were nowhere near what we anticipate with storms that are yet to come,” Blackburn said. “If we’d had another three or four inches, we would have had extremely widespread flooding.
Lindner echoed the sentiment, noting that what the area encountered Monday was a weaker hurricane, and that the damage from a relatively weaker storm should serve as a wake-up call for residents, especially those more inland.
“Look at where we are this morning. We had 80-mph winds in Conroe,” Lindner said. “It’s not just a coastal problem. You know, you can get high winds and heavy rainfall well inland. We’re talking power outages this morning all the way up to Shreveport.”
Blackburn said he measured eight and a half inches of rain at his home in Houston between Brays and Buffalo bayous, which did not approach a 100-year storm.
A 100-year storm has a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shifted the classification of a 100-year storm in Houston from 13 inches of rain in 24 hours to 18 inches.
Blackburn said climate change is making such rainfall standards obsolete.
“You really can’t depend on the past to predict our future like we used to be able to do,” he said.
With that in mind, Blackburn said the emphasis should be on buying out property currently in floodplains, and residents currently living in a floodplain need to be prepared for flooding.
“I don’t think our community has ever been proactive about talking about floodplains and trying to keep people out of the floodplain,” he said. “We need to make more room for water in our community, and we don’t have enough room for water right now.”
After Hurricane Harvey, Harris County and the city of Houston did change development rules in flood zones, mandating development had to be built above the 500-year floodplain.
Harris County also has been working on buyouts for years, including the launch of the country’s first mandatory flood buyout program . Since Harvey, the county has bought out more than 1,000 properties. However, the process to buy property can take upwards of almost two years, leaving the county with a backlog of tracts targeted for buyouts.
The best time for governmental agencies to buy out properties is immediately after a flooding event, before owners have sunk money and taken on debt for repairs, Blackburn said.
“We tolerate building and rebuilding and rebuilding the same flooded houses year after year, decade after decade because we are hesitant to basically step up and say, ‘Look, we need you to move,’” he said. “We built a lot of new projects, but the scale of these projects does not approach the scale of the flood we’re dealing with.”
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