This is a good news/bad news situation.
Houston’s bayous performed well during Hurricane Beryl on Monday, but the storm tested the limits on how much water the system can handle, Harris County meteorologist Jeff Lindner said.
The area was aided by a hot and dry spell prior to Monday, which made the ground dry enough to help absorb some water, Lindner said Tuesday. The speed at which Hurricane Beryl moved also helped limit the damage, he added.
“A slower moving storm would’ve produced more rainfall, and a greater amount of rainfall, we would have likely had additional amounts of flooding,” Lindner said. “We were kind of right at that eight to 10 inches, which is reaching the capacity of a lot of what we can handle.”
Areas that did experience some flooding were those where it was expected, such as along Clear Creek and Brays Bayou, and high water at White Oak and Buffalo Bayous. Still, he said, that was considered minor flooding with limited damage to homes.
“When I started this 20 years ago, a foot of rain or eight inches of rain would have caused hundreds of homes to flood,” Lindner said. “Our bayous and creeks did really well.”
Plenty of work has gone into widening some of the bayous and building out further flood control infrastructure. Lindner said infrastructure improvements approved by voters after Hurricane Harvey are having a positive effect in the face of these storms, and maintenance efforts to clean up after May’s derecho storm were vital to having the area’s flood mitigation infrastructure ready for Beryl.
The next storm may not be as kind, he cautioned.
“Everything has a limit. This time, our limit did pretty well,” Lindner said. “A lot of things helped us yesterday.”
Despite more rain and thunderstorms on the horizon, officials said there was “no concern” of additional flooding this week. Those storms would be typical afternoon rain showers and thunderstorms with no expectation of widespread heavy rainfall.
Jim Blackburn, co-director of the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center at Rice University, cautioned the good tidings may not last long.
“The real issue is (the bayous) performed well, but the rainfall amounts were nowhere near what we anticipate with storms that are yet to come,” Blackburn said. “If we’d had another three or four inches, we would have had extremely widespread flooding.
Good news: We didn’t flood! The work we’ve done since Hurricane Harvey helped! The cleanup we did after the derecho also helped!
Bad news: It would not have taken much to have added widespread flooding to the misery we’re now experiencing. Climate change increases the risk that the next time will be worse. We can’t depend on what has happened in the past as a guide for the future.
So yeah. Take the win where you can. But don’t rest on your laurels. We have work to do to help minimize the risk of that next storm, which we all know is coming.
I did a little bike tour yesterday, and it looked like all of Memorial Drive east of the park was without power. I don’t know if this is due to flooding or what. There are a lot of exclusive residential areas that are affected, and I have the impression that most of the power lines in this area are buried.
There is also a significant area in Montrose without power including Hawthorne St. east of Montrose Blvd. Centerpoint may be trying to give the impression that the situation is under control, but it is obvious to me that they are still overwhelmed and unable to execute repairs.
My SW Houston neighborhood was without power for almost two weeks after Ike. Post-Beryl, power was restored Tuesday evening, so not even two full days without electricity. Isn’t there a certain amount of randomness to recovery after an event like this? Some get lucky, many don’t. I hope CenterPoint will begin an aggressive program of maintenance of their easements in residential areas while the memories of misery are fresh and opposition to tree maintenance near power lines is relatively low. Kudos to all who are working their butts off in the recovery effort.