re: Houston drainage grid 'so obsolete it's just unbelievable'

It's not every 100 years. It's each year you have a 1/100 chance of a storm of that magnitude happening.

It's like throwing dice. Sometimes you roll 7 five times in a row and sometimes you roll craps.

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Should we not allow houses on lakes or rivers too? No one accounts for this amount of water. Not the USACE, not HCFCD, nobody.

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I think it depends. People should know the risks of these areas and build accordingly. As it stands, we tell people that it's a 100-year flood area. That sounds rare but it's really 1% chance in any year. Some properties in Houston have flooded twice in 2 years.

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Every drainage grid is obsolete when you get 50 frickin inches of rain in 3 days

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something something global warming and not mentioning that it wasn't the storms strength but unfortunate fact that it was forced to sit on the city of days

I heard one weather commentator yesterday say the amount of water that fell in the Houston area is the equivalent of 5 days of water going over Niagara Falls.

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I heard one weather commentator yesterday say the amount of water that fell in the Houston area is the equivalent of 5 days of water going over Niagara Falls

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Based on the claims of 1 trillion gallons in Harris County, that works out to about 2.6 days of flow from the Mississippi River at New Orleans.

There is a big difference between flooding that happened and flooding that should have happened. With that amount of rain, flooding was going to happen. The big question though is how much? There's clearly some major drainage issues, you shouldn't have 20 feet of water on an interstate system or whatever they have in pictures. When you have traffic cameras under water, that's not acceptable levels of flooding.

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not even New Orleans, because at least they have pumps there that work at approximately 50% capacity, from time to time, when we can get the antiquated generators to run supplying ancient 52Htz electricity that is only used for this crazy system thereby preventing a direct hook-up to the public utility

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FIFH.........

For the Meyerland area a big change was reconfiguring the drainage for the medical center expansions downstream

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I could be wrong but weren't a lot of those streches of interstate and highway dug out so deeply to serve as a fallback in case of these huge rain events? I

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Very well could be and it makes sense to a degree, but at the same time I'm not sure flooding your main means of evacuations is a great plan. I also understand putting some water into the streets as they normally drain fast, but when your streets are 10+ foot under water that does seem like poor drainage.

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I could be wrong but weren't a lot of those streches of interstate and highway dug out so deeply to serve as a fallback in case of these huge rain events?

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This is only partially true. Streets serve as an efficient means to drain runoff to your large collection systems, i.e. built drainage, natural basin, etc. Streets are never designed to hold significant amounts of water for any sustained period of time.

Think of it as the relationship between neighborhood streets and freeways with the freeways being your large collection systems. If your neighborhood street has bumper-to-bumper traffic at any point, something is not functioning correctly. That could be an uncontrollable event outside of the neighborhood, maybe an accident somewhere that causes traffic to re-route to your street. Or it could be development related, someone built too many houses or built a commercial use that creates a lot of traffic that can only be accessed by the neighborhood street. Or a combination of both, which I think is the drainage analogy here.