Floods in vulnerable Houston no surprise, despite controls

HOUSTON (AP) — The flooding, property damage and loss of life as torrential rains this week hit the Houston area should be no surprise.

"It happens fairly frequently," said Sam Brody, director of Texas A&M University's Center for Beaches and Shores. "Houston is the No. 1 city in America to be injured and die in a flood."

The Harris County Flood Control District, the agency working in recent years with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on hundreds of millions of dollars in projects to ease the flooding impact, has been around since 1937, itself a product of catastrophic flooding two years earlier.

"Houston is so vulnerable," Brody, who's been studying the issue for 15 years, said Wednesday. "There's very little topography. They've added hundreds of miles of pavement and can't keep up with all the positive initiatives. ... So we get these floods."

Brody and two co-authors, in a 2011 book about flooding causes and consequences, used federal weather and health statistics to quantify fatalities in Texas and Houston, where most deaths over the years have occurred when motorists become trapped in flooded underpasses, he said.

Flood control efforts on Buffalo Bayou alone, one of several that meander throughout the nation's fourth-largest city, have cost a half-billion dollars over the past decade. They've included bridge replacements, and the addition of detention ponds for rain runoff and green spaces that serve as parks in normal times.