![]() "It's really too easy to lose the momentum a year or two or three after the storm and to not make the sacrifices really to buy and build the infrastructure that gives us some protection against a storm of this magnitude." "We need to invest in protection and we need to put resources against this so we don't suffer these damages in the future," says Schofer, who notes that similar ideas were discussed and then dropped after Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy and other flooding disasters. "We're so flat and the drainage is so slow in many areas that we should consider the idea of holding some of this stormwater back and then pumping it out at a later time," he says.īrody says the discussion needs to also go beyond engineering and to policies on a regional scale "and look at where we're putting people, pavement and structures in relation to flood vulnerability." Bedient says such a gradual slope doesn't allow for floodwaters to move fast enough, so it backs up into nearby streets, parking lots, homes and buildings.Ī search and rescue team pulls people out of an area flooded by the overflow of Addicks Reservoir in Houston on Tuesday. That system consists of natural bayous and man-made channels that funnel water from west to east to flow out of the city and into Galveston Bay. "And because of that, we have very slow draining systems." "We have a slope that is less than one foot per mile," says Phil Bedient, who teaches civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. Houston sits just under 50 feet above sea level and is among the flattest major metropolitan areas in the U.S. Here are three reasons Houston was, in the words of one expert, a "sitting duck" for catastrophic flooding. ![]() ![]() ![]() Urban planners and civil engineers say a combination of natural and man-made factors has created a chronic drainage problem that left the city especially vulnerable to Harvey's torrential rains. There isn't a city in the United States, and there are probably very few anywhere in the world, that could have handled Hurricane Harvey's 50 inches of rain without significant flooding.īut Harvey was Houston's third flood in three years to surpass the "100 year flood" mark. The Sam Houston Tollway is submerged near the Hedwig Village neighborhood in Houston on Tuesday. ![]()
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