Houston's Misery: Another East Texas Flood Calamity

Vehicles stuck in the latest Houston flood disaster. Photo by
Elizabeth Corley/Houston Chronicle 

They knew parts of eastern Texas were going to be in trouble days before Tropical Storm Imelda came along this week.

I think few people believed it would be this bad.

Up to 42 inches of rain deluged some East Texas communities as what became Tropical Storm Imelda sat over the region Wednesday and Thursday.

The area, still suffering PTSD from the epic floods of Hurricane Harvey two years ago, had to live through the same thing again.

Enough is enough.

Two deaths have been blamed on the storm so far.  I imagine spirits are crushed, too.  People who barely got their homes back after the inundations of Harvey lost them again.

Houston meteorologist Matt Lanza @mattlanza has a great Twitter thread about how heavy these repeated floods are for the people of a city he loves.  The thread is definitely worth the read, but here's a snipped:

"I feel soul-crushed. For us in Houston (and the Golden Triangle) the last 4-5 years have been a never ending hell for so many people. It's cruel. It's depressing. It's weather, and sometimes it sucks. At some point it becomes an existential problem for SE Texas."

It looks to me like Imelda took Houston and other areas by surprise. At least more than Harvey managed to do..

As the day began, areas northeast of Houston, towns like Beaumont and Winnie were inundated as rain fell for hours at a rate of one, two, three even four or five inches per hour.

Things weren't as bad in Houston proper to start. It was raining, but no biggie. There were forecasts that it would get worse, but people headed off to work. Schools weren't canceled so the kids all left.

Then the thunderstorms with their incredible rains moved south and enveloped Houston. Several inches of rain came down in two or three hours. It was all over. The roads all flooded. People were trapped at work or school. Or they had to be rescued from suddenly flooded cars on the freeways and service roads.

I guess we now live in a climate world in which the weather will take us all by surprise much more frequently. I certainly don't know to what extent climate change influenced this latest disaster in Houston. Other factors are certainly at work, such as poor land use, poor drainage and just plain bad weather luck.

As worse-than-expected disasters keep piling up, I guess we have to be more and more on guard for when the weather turns on us in deadly and catastrophic fashion.

It's not a great feeling.

Videos:

An overview of the flooding via ABC 13 in Houston:



An even more eye-popping video from the same television station, showing aerial views of the traffic
nightmares in Houston from the flash flooding. Note the many cars and trucks flooded, and the many thousands of other vehicles stranded behind them on higher ground. But they certainly weren't going anywhere:



KHOU-TV reported on a freeway that took on water so fast that people were trapped in their cars. Good Samaritans carried people from the cars to temporary refuge on a flatbed truck. Then, others on an overpass flagged down a truck with a long ladder, so people were able to climb to safety:



Also from KHOU, havoc in Winnie, Texas. In some of the clips in this video, notice how incredibly torrential the rain is.