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.

Houston's Nightmare: As Bad As Katrina

Overnight, the Houston metro area went beyond the worst case scenario.

Dawn in Houston Sunday revealed a city reeling
from catastrophic, historic flooding. 

We knew catastrophic flooding was coming to eastern Texas due to stalled ex-Hurricane Harvey.

What's happening in Houston now is the beyond description.   

A feeder band of intense rains on the east flank of Harvey has been pushing into the Houston area since late Saturday afternoon and shows no signs of stopping. 

Extreme flooding is happening in and around Houston. 

I'll cherry pick some facts to give you just a partial illustration: 

-- Emergency responders and the National Weather Service office in Houston are warning people not to go into their attics to escape floodwaters. They'll be trapped and drown there, just as many Katrina victims were in 2005 New Orleans. 

People should head for their roofs instead. (Where of course people will be subject to the torrential rain, lightning and possible tornadoes.)

-- Water is entering the second floors of numerous homes in the Houston metro area.

-- 911 is so overwhelmed that people are not getting through to ask for help. Houston police are asking people to call 911 only if their life is in immediate danger.  Anyone trapped in their house but there's only several inches to a foot of of water inside should ride it out and not call 911.

--- There have been well over 1,000 water rescues so far. The number of reported deaths around Houston as of early this morning is either three or five, depending upon who you ask, but that toll will surely rise exponentially.

I-610 in Houston this morning. 

---Since people can't get through to 911, they're taking to Twitter to plead for help. Television station KHOU, which is still on the air despite the fact it is taking on water, reported Tweets like the following: 

"I have 2 children with me and the water is swallowing us up. Please send help. 11115 Sageview, Houston, Tx. 911 is not responding!!!!!"

 (The woman and her children were later rescued.)

Another Tweet:

"@houstonpolice my sister lives on sulphur 77034. She is on her roof with 3 kids please send help!!!!"

Houston police tweeted back to the man that they would tell dispatch about the situation. 

Personnel at KHOU early this morning were moving into a makeshift broadcast studio in a conference room on the second floor of their building since the studio on the main floor was flooding. 

Coast Guard helicopters have been called in to rescue people trapped in flooded urban areas.

The torrential rain in Houston showed no sign of stopping as of 8 a.m. EDT. Forecasts called for the feeder band to continue dumping downpours on Houston all day. 

Several of the storms yesterday also produced tornadoes. Some of Houston's storms today could easily do the same.  

One to two feet of rain fell on the Houston metro area overnight, and they could get another one to two feet during the day today.

Some are already saying this could become the most catastrophic flood in United States history, or at least close to it. 

This is as bad as it can possibly get, folks.

Epic Matthew Flooding Continues In North Carolina

Areal view of Lumberton, North Carolina. Photo
by Chris Keane/Reuters  

So far 11 people have died in the huge flooding in North Carolina, all caused by departing Hurricane Matthew, which dumped up to 15 inches of rain on the state over the weekend.

The flood highlights the principal danger of hurricanes - water - and the continued threat of enormous floods from a warmer atmosphere.  

Though a single storm like Matthew cannot prove or disprove global warming, some of what happened with Matthew in North Carolina might have the finger prints of climate change on it.

It wasn't entirely global warming, obviously. There have always been hurricanes on the East Coast, and many of them throughout history  have caused serious flooding.

However, certain aspect of the atmosphere might have made the North Carolina flooding even worse than it otherwise would have been.

As Capital Weather Gang notes, the Atlantic Ocean waters off the coast of North Carolina were at near record highs as Matthew came into the picture.

Record ocean temperatures increased evaporation, which put record high amounts of moisture into the atmosphere. That, combined with the strong hurricane winds propelling the moisture inland, a weather front that set up along the coast created a temperature contrast in which the wet, warm air was forced to rise over some cooler air.

Rising air unleashes even more rain, so the downpours became extreme, dumping at rates of up to four inches an hour. (For reference, here in Vermont during the summer, it normally takes four or five weeks to accumulate four inches of rain.)

The North Carolina floods come in a year that has seen other extreme so called 100-year floods in the nation, including in West Virginia, Maryland, Louisiana and Texas.

It's not so much one storm signals climate change (it doesn't.) It's just that the overall trends continue to be troubling.

Here's a kayaker's view of the flooding in Fayettville, North Carolina, which partly includes kayaking through the interior of an inundated building: