HOUSTON — As more than a foot of rain deluged the nation’s fourth-largest city, inundating homes, shutting down major highways and leaving at least six people dead, Houston’s mayor said there was no immediate solution.
Heavy flooding has become nearly an annual rite of passage in the practically sea-level city, where experts have long warned of the potential for catastrophe and have criticized city leaders for not doing more to address the problem.
“A lot of rain coming in a very short period of time, there’s nothing you can do,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said Monday.
Scores of subdivisions were flooded and most schools remained closed although the city itself was returning to normal. Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority resumed service and most highways within the city were open.
Outside the city and into the suburbs of northwest Harris County, runoff from Monday’s rains forced creeks over their banks and forced more people to evacuate overnight.
In addition to its location, Houston’s soft soil, fast-growing population and building boom that has turned empty pastures into housing developments all over the city’s suburbs and exurbs make it vulnerable to high waters.
Harris County has seen a 30 percent jump in population since 2000. Some of the resulting developments include adequate greenspace for runoff, but not all of them do, said Philip Bedient, an engineering professor at Rice University.
“Could we have engineered our way out of this?” Bedient said. “Only if we started talking about alterations 35 or 40 years ago.”
The National Weather Service’s chief meteorologist for Houston, Jeff Evans, said man-made climate change could be a factor, but that the data is unclear.
But Evans said that the El Nino weather phenomenon, caused by heightened surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific, could “be a player in why we’re had so many big rain events this year.”
Evans said rain fell in some places Monday at a rate of 3-4 inches an hour.
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