[rurban]

This hurricane yes. The last comparable event was the destruction of Galveston in the early 1900ies, which led to the rise of Houston.

This is a hurricane with masses of hot mexican golf water, which decided to stop directly behind Houston to unload all the water there, the 3rd largest city in the US, which is huge and totally flat. The rivers are showing record factors of flow, 10x more than the previous flow records. E.g 70.000 cfs in La Grange. The previous record was like 6.000 cfs. You cannot deal with such numbers, but still the dams are holding.

[chrisper]

I see. Thanks for providing some context and numbers. Seems to be much larger than I thought. But it could still be that the number of these kinds of hurricanes could go up, no?

[sndean]

It being a cat 4 hurricane was bad enough, but the flooding is largely being caused by the two high pressure systems on either side of Harvey [0][1]. Storms normally aren't held in place for a week straight.

So it may be more important to try to understand whether there'll be more storms + surrounding high pressure systems

[0] https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/harvey-stall-22aug17.j...

[1] https://www.wunderground.com/news/tropical-storm-hurricane-h...