Houston (part one)
Have a look:
You'll need to click on that for the full-size image, but it's worth your time. Basically, the Houston metro area has had 25-35 inches of rain since Harvey came to shore Saturday morning. Most of that came in a 48-hour period.
I read somewhere that the amount of rain that had fallen (as of yesterday) was equivalent to the entire continental United States receiving .16 of an inch of rain.
What's happening right now in Houston? It's raining. Pretty hard.
It will be a long, long time before anything seems normal again in Houston.
It's not just Houston, either. From Rockport to Houston, the entire Gulf Coast has been savaged, and further inland, the Colorado River is at its highest level in 104 years. There is still massive and unprecedented flooding to come.
If the storm had tracked 50-75 miles west, Austin would have been crushed by 30+ inches of rain, but instead, it was spared. 7-8 inches of rain in the metro area, which was incredibly fortunate. Or not, depending on your point of view, because Houston is much less well-equipped to handle the rainfall.
I'm not going to post a bunch of weather *orn--you can find it everywhere--but here's one shot that's worth seeing:
See that "4-22" sign? That's a runway designation. You're looking at an airport, and not a small one, either.
Could the flooding have been avoided? No. Did Houston's development policies make this exponentially worse than it needed to be? Absolutely yes, and we're going to talk about that tomorrow.
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