How About This Weather We've Been Having?

Have patience. About 2:20 is when the song becomes relevant to the discussion.


Probably NSFW

 

Not worried about the house flooding (in the next 5 years at least) - but there's a part of my yard that is suddenly taking-on more water than I'd like from the neighbor, due to their lack of gutters + nearby ongoing street construction.

I bought a quick dam to block that area of my yard and keep the neighbor's water (commercial property) in their yard. My drainage shouldn't have to handle their **** too.

Do they work? Any experience?

Pretty sure I'll see lots of water this week (Heights area, closer to i10 and 610).

 

lmao.

 

Has the Commercial property always created issues for you in regards to drainage or have they completed some project recently that created the issue?

If their building(s) lack gutters and their rainwater becomes your rainwater, then that suggests that their land is higher than your land. if their land was sculpted differently so that rainwater drained to

• Curb and then storm drain
• Ditch
• Creek

instead of to your property, would that solve the problem or do they still need to install gutters on the building(s) so that water doesn't drain towards you?

 

3/4 crushed gravel works like magic to help soil drainage

 

Seriously -- what is a quick dam?

 

Yes, but is it for Ziggy or the business next door to pay for the gravel and sacrifice some land to do that? If the business next door did something recently that impacted the way that rainwater drained and they didn't submit a plan & get permitted, then Ziggy needs to pushback via the COH (City Of Houston).

At the moment, not enough information has been provided to do a proper assessment of the situation.

 

I've a property in Alberta that the city clear all the snow in the neighborhood and dump it on my front /side yards,the nature of soils poor drainage + frozen ground +salt +having an entire basement under ground level was quite annoying, however,dag 3 feet , filled it with gravel and it worked


now it's my goto solution even when it is not an issue yet; gravel quite cheap, near fences,around foundation, deck ,pool etc

 

Is this something that you agreed to or the City just does it and you have to accept it?

There hasn't been a buildup of Salt in the soil that hurts/impairs growing things?

 

I'm in the middle of a photo cataloguing project and found a couple more...these are walkable from the Round Mountain barn, the big one is a couple of minutes down the road at the Marble Falls ranch.





Cant' tell in these pics, but the top one is about 4 foot deep with some nice flat rocks to sit on. Bottom one is 3-7 feet and about 50' long

 

Good article about the trials and tribulations of being a meteorologist in Houston:

ABC 13 chief meteorologist Travis Herzog was on vacation in early June when another wild thunderstorm rolled into Houston out of nowhere.

Herzog was supposed to be enjoying time off after a riotous spring covering severe storms, flash flooding and May's deadly derecho. But as the late-breaking system filled the Houston skyline, he saw another frustrating "miss" for local forecasters.

"I was just kind of loosely staying plugged in, because you know, you can't get away from the weather," Herzog told Chron. "And I just kept thinking, 'Man, I'm so glad I wasn't working this week.' Because everyone is looking like fools, you know?"

The first six months of 2024 have been a challenging time for Houston meteorologists. Record-warm water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and a waning El Niño have made storm formation and severity in Southeast Texas difficult to pin down with great degrees of certainty. Add in Harris County's huge size and long history grappling with severe weather, and you have what amounts to giant geographic stove range bubbling with latent anxiety and storm potential.

"That's the challenge," said Space City Weather meteorologist Eric Berger. "A month ago we had a really strong signal for large hail, then it didn't manifest. You get to the point where you're kind of like, 'I could be okay with high pressures for a while because that makes [forecasting] a lot easier.'"

The X-factor in Southeast Texas weather is, as always, the Gulf of Mexico, which acts as a wheezy and chaotic turbocharger for any systems that enter the region. The hotter the Gulf is, Herzog explained, the more likely it is for storms crossing over land to take on energy, leading to the formation of some of the freakishly strong systems that peppered Southeast Texas this spring.

"This last El Niño took us to levels we've never observed as a human species," Herzog said. "And the water right now in the Gulf of Mexico—we've never seen it this warm this early in the year, and that's really juiced up a lot of these storms."

Predicting when and to what extent these storms will become "juiced" by Gulf energy is a daily battle for meteorologists in the region.

"Sometimes those storms develop, and sometimes they don't," Berger said. "You can have pretty similar conditions on some days, and you get heavy rainfall and severe thunderstorms. Other days, you might get some rain and the storms don't ever develop."

The biggest "miss" for forecasters this spring was last month's devastating derecho, which ripped across Harris County and cut deep into the heart of downtown Houston on the evening of May 16. In less than an hour, the storm blew down large trees, shattered skyscraper windows and knocked out power to more than 1 million CenterPoint Energy customers. Herzog recalls trying to make sense of the historic system's 100-mph gusts in real time.

"We knew there would be a wind threat, but no one could've gotten on TV that morning and said 'We're going to have Category 2 winds come through this afternoon,'" Herzog said. "You see that the potential is there, but it's so rare and extreme, no one's going to make that call...sometimes you see things so extreme, you're like, 'Is this really happening?'"

While accuracy is important, accountability after a "miss" is another key element for meteorologists establishing and maintaining trust with the community. A formative moment for Herzog occurred early in his career while listening to a talk given by Bob Ryan, the legendary and longtime meteorologist at ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington, D.C.

"He was like 'Any time you're wrong, do you homework, figure out what went wrong and explain it to your audience. They will forgive you,'" Herzog said. "People understand that predicting the future is hard."

Anticipating extreme weather in a town like Houston is a loaded and delicate art for meteorologists like Berger and Herzog, who are charged with making sense of rapidly changing conditions and communicating that information to readers and viewers bruised by generations of storms. Natural disasters like Hurricanes Harvey and Ike, and the Tax Day flood of 2016, are fresh in the minds of many who come across their reports. This often makes delivering the daily forecast a balancing act of urgency and calm.

"The real challenge is messaging," Berger said. "Because on one hand, you don't want to freak people out once a week. On the other hand, you want to try to provide a heads up for what's coming."

After a violent, stormy spring, Houston now heads into the heart of a potentially historically active Atlantic hurricane season. With as many as 25 named storms and 7 major hurricanes projected to form this season, meteorologists are working to calmly prepare Houstonians for the next act of tenuous weather in their region.

"This is Houston, Texas," Berger said. "We're right in the Gulf of Mexico, and we're vulnerable to this kind of weather.

"Most of the time, things are going to be fine for most people. But yeah, hurricane season. This is almost certainly going to be a busy one."

https://www.chron.com/weather/article/texas-storms-houston-meteorologists-19515023.php

 

Appreciate the worry and detail here! But it's a complicated issue that would require a drawing to explain. I simply need/needed a quick-and-dirty temporary solution because I was out of the country and returning to likely heavy rain. Thus asking about the quick dam product. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Quick-Dam-10-ft-Flood-Barrier-QD610-1/203556356 - something that could be shipped in a tight window. i don't think sand bags ship easy.

The long-term issue/solution is a different beast. I can take care of it. But not overnight.

 

Very interesting. My backyard overflows into my pool when it rains really hard. Wonder if putting these around my pool would prevent that.

 

The reviews come across as mostly positive, so that should give you confidence. Since the drainage problem at the moment is apparently only impacting your yard rather than your house, some leakage isn't going to be a dealbreaker. Since it comes across as a temporary solution, you do need to push forward with a long term solution.

Have you projected - plotted where the water will go since you are changing things from the way that it used to be? If the dam directs the water towards drainage (creek, ditch, storm drain) then all is good. If it directs water back to your neighbor, how much water can they take on before they have their own flooding problem?

 

I'm not sure about where this water will go yet, but it'll be interesting to see.

What I BELIEVE happened was the derecho took out their existing gutter + downspout so now water comes barreling down right near a specific part of my backyard at a fast rate. It would take a heavy dose of concentrated rain for this issue to occur, not gradual slower rising waters.

All the water goes downhill but COH is doing a street project that seems to be impacting street flooding from heavy concentrated downpours. Gradual rising water would probably not be an issue. COH project actually addresses drainage in a major way.

 

Does it flow from one direction (ie downhill)?

 

On a side note, it's amazing how full gutters are optional on many (expensive) new homes nowadays (I even heard of sod in the backyard being optional in at least one case which I found hilarious).

Anyhoo. If you divert the water, make sure you're not causing it to go into someone else's yard, or somebody else is going to be ticked off. If you really want to go nuts, get something like an Aquadam/cofferdam solution... (post pics if you go that route. lolol).

French drains may be the solution long-term if you can't get the neighbors to change or the city involved. They've worked for me for years. I decided to be nice neighbor after Duane & Susan next door decided to raise their yard and everything started to drain into my yard. I was about to call the city in on them, but decided to get some French drains with catch basins installed. No issues since then. I may be installing some French drains when I build my next house just so I can "make sure" there's sufficient drainage around my house (well, unless Son of Harvey pays a visit).