re: What major US city (like top 50) would fare best?

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Here is an article discussing flooding in the Chicago area from 5-8 inches in a 24 hour period, 2-3 inches of rain per hour at the highest rate.

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But this was not normal rainfall; it was extreme tropical rainfall. Meteorologists measure rainfall rates in inches per hour at a given location. A rainfall rate of 0.5 inches per hour is heavy, while anything above 2.0 inches per hour is intense (you'd probably stop your car on a highway, pull over, and wait out the passing storm). Over Clear Creek near where I live, from 11pm to 1am that night, 10.6 inches of rain fell, about as much rainfall as New York City gets from October through December. That happened in two hours.

he next night, the heaviest band of rainfall set up over western Houston, where affluent suburbs are generally protected by two large reservoirs. The Addicks and Barker facilities were built before World War II following devastating floods in Houston. Combined they have a capacity to store about 400,000 acre-feet of water, or about the same amount of water that goes over Niagara Falls in 10 days.

The reservoirs filled up for the first time ever during Harvey, forcing the US Army Corps of engineers to release water into bayous that were already flooded, worsening conditions downstream in central Houston. Dramatically, this occurred near the very height of the storm. It seems insane, but this was the best of several bad options. Had the Corps not done this, the dam walls might have failed, leading to a catastrophic release of a wall of water as much as 100 feet high.

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