Overdevelopment in Houston a huge reason for catastrophic storms

Houston is a very green city for a large city. The development over the last 20 years has definitely changed the city but compared to other cities its still very green

I know this is anecdotal but a European visitor once told me all the trees here is something that appeals to Europeans

 

Hurricane Harvey is all Trump's fault.

Happy?

Spoiler

Or maybe there is a consensus wrt the relationship between urban sprawl and flooding.

 

There was similar research done after Katrina about how dredging the Mississippi and preventing it from flooding the area downstream from New Orleans led to wetland erosion that reduces the amount of water that can be picked up by a storm.

 

Houston's urban sprawl used to be so bad that i actually think it left vast areas of undeveloped green spaces all around the city

 

I spent a ton of time in Brazoria county which was trashed by Harvey before it hit Houston. I'm sure they'll be glad to know that their rural status protected them from all that flooding they thought they had.

Call me back when they quantify it. I'm imagining the effect they are citing is probably much smaller than you would like to believe. Highest rainfall from Harvey was in Niederland, east of Beaumont. How many tall buildings do you think Niederland has, to trap warm air above it?

Possibly when people dont respond to your threads because you believe they are chastened by the devastating hard evidence you are destroying their illusions with, they are actually not responding for other reasons that may or may not be just a little less flattering to you?

 

Agree with everything you say here. BTW, it is Nederland. I live there. We did indeed receive the highest rain total from a tropical event in US history followed closely by Groves Texas which is not too far away. There are very few tall buildings in the Golden Triangle which consist of Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange. Nederland and Groves sit right between Beaumont and Port Arthur.

 

I am not sure what the OP is trying to get at here. Is he suggesting they tear down the tall buildings in Houston?

 

51” in a few days is not something you think you would need to “develop” for. Or 16” in 12 hrs. I’m not convince buildings cause more moisture and rain amount, not to a level that contribute to catastrophic flooding.

 

And the title is highly misleading. The overdevelopment, and I wouldn't disagree that the almost total lack of zoning in Houston and the surrounding area plays a significant role in that overdevelopment, didn't cause the storms. They helped to make the flooding even worse than it would have been otherwise, in my opinion. The word "storms" should be replaced with "flooding," OP, in my opinion. With the amount of rain Houston had, the flooding was going to be outrageous anyway. Unregulated development just made it worse.

 

The storm stalled out and drifted for several days. It drifted back into the Gulf and even made a second landfall. Any storm that stays around that long will dump a tremendous amount of rain. As stated earlier in the thread the most rainfall was around the Beaumont area which is not near as "developed" as Houston. While the development in Houston may have contributed to the issue slightly, any storm that lingers this long would drop torrential rains anywhere even if the area was completely uninhabited. I think the authors of the article are reaching here because the development in Houston had nothing to due with the steering currents(or lack thereof) that caused the storm to drift for so long in the same areas.

 

You are saying the mere building a skyscraper causes more rain to fall on them?

 

Only thing I saw related to this was how dangerous it was to build so many subdivisions closer and closer to the reservoirs.

Yes, Houston was built in the middle of a bayou and the more cement you have, the more flooding you have because water doesn’t soak into cement like it does in marshes with high vegetation.

There’s nothing about Houston’s flooding issues that is a huge surprise. Climate change will create more and more Harvey’s because of... well science. Warmer water temp creates more water brought up in the clouds and heavier and heavier rain. Houston has major renovations to do and they might need to rezone entire neighborhoods to hold back more water to not overwhelm buffalo bayou.

Houston’s flood problems have more to do with the suburbs than the actual city development.

 

Find it kind of funny the OP was whining about no one responding to his thread immediately. Poor poor Senator.

Harvey was a near "perfect storm" in terms of how it hit the lower Texas coast and nearly wiped out Rockport, Aransas Pass, Port Aransas and other towns in that area (places that don't have many big buildings and over-development)...only to go back into the Gulf and sit on us (just without the wind, luckily). Having big buildings didn't cause it do to that.

 

That's the professor's argument. Kinda weird to see so many posters reject this theory out of hand. Like people are worried if you give this effect any weight, it would undermine one's own pet theory for Harvey. In my view, a lot of things were happening here. Climate change is one. There were two high pressure systems trapping the hurricane on our coast. There is the reckless overbuilding, especially on the upstream side of town. I think there's room to say tall buildings squeezed out more moisture from the clouds too.

But so what? What are we going to do? The feds are run by a climate change denier, so I'm not even going to worry about that one. Knocking down privately-owned buildings because they are too tall probably won't be happening. We could make city planning rules going forward to cap building heights. But, it seems to me the things we've already talked about are still the obvious things to address -- more drainage infrastructure including probably a third reservoir, and smarter urban development.

 

Houston is one of the ugliest metropolitan areas in the country and it's because of the lack of zoning laws.