Bob Rehak has published an index that organizes 83 causes of Houston area flooding into three groups: 15 natural conditions such as extreme rainfall, flat terrain and high groundwater, 27 human actions that increase flood risk, and 41 human failures of omission.
Rehak describes the post as a summary and taxonomy drawn from more than 3,100 earlier posts on his site rather than new analysis. The piece argues that flood disasters rarely have a single cause, that Houston’s flat terrain makes the region especially vulnerable to backwater effects, and that watershed-wide coordination matters more than jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction fixes. It references the San Jacinto Basin, which drains into Lake Houston.
ReduceFlooding is this site’s primary source on drainage and flood control. Lake Houston Today also carried Rehak’s count of significant Houston flooding events since Hurricane Ike earlier Monday.
