Based on the number of people affected, amount of water involved, and other factors, meteorologists have warned, there may be no parallel available to any other rainstorm in U.S. history as Mashable's Andrew Freeman reports Tropical Storm Harvey has dropped more than 11 trillion gallons of water on Texas, triggering catastrophic, unprecedented flooding in the Houston area.
In response to the historic flooding in Texas, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (i.e. FEMA) was quoted by CNN saying that his agency is gearing up for a years-long effort to help the recovery from the damage wrought by Hurricane Harvey. "FEMA is going to be there for years," administrator Brock Long said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." He said that "this disaster is going to be a landmark event."
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Courtesy of Weather Channel weather producer, Matthew Sitkowski, here is a photo of what Houston's East Loop at Market Street on the I-610 looks like right now. As Sitkowski says, "this image and the forecast of what is still to fall.... This is surreal." He is right: we added a photo of the same location from February 2016 to show the "before and after." Here is the result:
The following time-lapse video shows the Buffalo Bayou next to Houston rising over the past day...
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In a matter of days, Hurricane Harvey evolved from a tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico into a Category 4 storm, making landfall on Friday night near Rockford, Texas with sustained winds of 130 mph. After making landfall, Harvey immediately stalled, pummeling the same area for hours, before inching slowly north and dropping in intensity.Several local communities could be left underwater for days.