Not sure how straightforward sellers are, but getting elevation of home is straight forward. Harriscountyfws.org has a page for each of their stream gauges that includes the top 8 or so flood elevations over last 20-25 years. Just find one in the same watershed near a home to figure out flooding situation.
Doing almost all passive flood control and water absorbtion is impractical but Houston has gone way too far the other way. The amount of flooding Houston has been going through in recent years is also a major cost on competitiveness and an impediment to the city. Passive absorbtion also doesn't need to be done in giant projects but can also be done on smaller scale through home landscaping and things like medians on roads. Individually those don't add up but can add up. Also we can do things like using permiable pavers instead of of just relying upon concrete and asphalt.
The info is easy to find on the web. The problem is that the status changes. When I bought my house, I was in the 500 year plain. I wasn't willing to buy in the 100 year plain. Since then, they expanded the Willow Waterhole and I discovered after the flood that I had been remapped into the 100 year plain. That whole area has been getting worse and worse with development upstream. So buyers go in thinking 'oh it's a flood plain but this particular house has never flooded before.' That might be true, but past experience should not be taken as a guarantee of future results.
They couldn't find the money to fix the drainage systems but didn't seem to be an issue finding the cash to cover NRG Stadium. The sad reality is that the City will propose a vastly under designed bandaid fix and cross its fingers that another Harvey/Allison event won't happen again. That's pretty much how these things go, especially in a city full of spineless citizens that believe in the old adage "rich people know best". So expect the politicians to stay conservative, preserve the rights of insensitive developers, and do the bare minimum so as to have people believe something's actually been resolved.
It's gonna flood again pretty bad for sure. When it's hard to say. But hopefully I won't be around here by the time it happens.
That's an interesting article, but no way they build all those 12 mile tunnels under I-10 for 400 million - it would probably cost a billion plus and they would still be working on it.
Right, the price would have been probably a lot higher, and I think the 400 million estimate was even in 1996 dollar amounts so even higher w/ inflation. I think what sucks is the research was done 20 years ago but it was filed away. Obviously I agree with you completely on if it were feasible, but I'm just wondering if there was something else they could have proposed over the last 20 years instead of ignoring the crazy growth and continuing to build like Houston isn't flat etc
Has there been any serious talk in the Houston news wrt buying out the flood prone houses to increase the green spaces? My parent's house might be a candidate for a buyout.
It's back. Does anyone know if such a wall would protect Houston, or would the wind just go up-and-over the wall and push the water in the bay into Houston?
The "coastal spine" idea is based on a similar project that was completed in Amsterdam. It has helped them greatly. One estimate found that if $12 billion was spent on a 17-foot tall coastal spine off of the Texas coast, it would reduce a Category 4 storm with $60 billion in damage to $6 billion.
