(November 9, 2017, 2:34 am)orta03 Wow. Are there any new construction designs that could protect homes and businesses from flooding?
Yes, that's why you see houses raised up 8-12 feet on piers (or "stilts") close to a coastline at risk for hurricanes. They're designed that way to allow for flood waters (storm surge) to pass underneath the house with a minimum of damage.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple for Houston. The last three floods have flooded people who were in 500-year floodplains - that means that in those areas a flooding event that happens every 500 years (on average) has happened three times in 27 months. Some houses in more flood-prone areas of Houston are built up higher to be more resistant to floods (the first floor may just be concrete with no interior finishing, like a garage), but many of the houses affected by the last three floods were not built to withstand flooding because they didn't have to be.
So you might ask, after the first flood or the second flood, why didn't people build their houses higher? There are a few reasons for that:
1. In many cases the flooding Houston experienced was not fast-moving water, so it wasn't powerful enough to destroy the house. It was slow-moving water that just rose, and most houses were not damaged structurally. Sure, everything in the house - drywall, electrical, furnishings - might have been ruined, but if allowed to dry properly the wood framing would be fine.
2. To build your house up higher, you have to completely tear it down and start over.
3. Most insurance companies will not pay for #2 if #1 is the case, meaning the cost for it comes out of your pocket.
So then you might ask, why don't these people just move to another area? If you flooded in 2015, most people just thought "Well, there's our 500-year flood event" and repaired their houses. If you flooded again in 2016, you had little chance of moving without taking a huge hit on the sale of your home (who wants to knowingly move into a house that has flooded twice in a year?), so you might as well repair again. If you flooded again in 2017, your house is Chernobyl. Might as well repair again.
As I said before, just a shitty, shitty situation.
The Houston city government can take some steps to improving things. The city where I live has some flood-prone areas, and the city finally started buying people out of their homes in those areas and tearing the houses down. Those areas were then zoned for no development. It was ultimately cheaper to do that than it was to fix the flooding problem or throwing money at infrastructure repairs after the floods, and it had the added benefit of moving people out of harm's way. I hope Houston does something similar. They also need to fix their zoning laws (currently they have none, which many feel has contributed to the recent increased flooding).
Sorry to write a book on this, but I personally know people who lived through this and not enough people know the whole story.