![]() ![]() Be especially caution at night when it is harder to recognize flood dangers.īe prepared: Make sure you have enough fuel in your vehicle for an emergency evacuation.Never park your vehicle along streams, if there is a threat of flooding.You will not be able to outrun the flood. If flooding occurs, move to higher ground as quickly as possible.Listen to your radio, TV or National Weather Service radio for the latest information on weather conditions that can cause flooding.Follow these safety rules to protect yourself and others. Nearly one-half of all flash flood fatalities are vehicle-related. Deer and other wildlife may be driven into the open and forced to cross highways to escape rising waters. Many flood-related deaths in the United States are the result of an attempt to move a stalled vehicle.Once off the road, vehicles often start to roll, making escape difficult or impossible. Your vehicle may stall or get stuck in the water, and then get pushed off the road.The road may be washed out below the water surface.Driving around them can be a serious risk. Barricades are put up by state or local officials to protect travelers from unsafe roads. ![]() If your route is blocked by barricades, find another route. If you are driving and come upon rapidly rising waters, turn around and find another route. Never attempt to walk or drive through a water-covered roadway, and beware of rising, swift-moving water. Water moving at two miles-per-hour is capable of sweeping a car off a road or bridge.Īvoid flood-susceptible areas, especially low-lying streets where water commonly pools.Two feet of floodwater can float your car.Six inches of moving water can knock you off your feet.It's a similar lesson to the levee breaches from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and a call for better and more robust protection against the inevitable next natural disaster.You should be cautious when driving or walking in flood-susceptible areas because: These models exist and it's time to start employing them in difficult to model areas like Houston.Īs with many catastrophic disasters, we come out of them realizing the limitations of our tools and systems of protection. However, the task of modeling flood zones within a city like Houston requires a more complex, detailed, and innovative computational model. This is not to say the men and women of FEMA aren't experts at what they do and invaluable in their work. These two important limitations of FEMA's models make creating a 100-year flood map a difficult task. This means the model is limited in predicting localized flood events within a specific neighborhood. The models will typically classify whole neighborhoods or groups of neighborhoods with the same land use (green space, forest, concrete parking lot, etc.) and soil type (sand, silt, clay, etc.). Ī second limitation of FEMA's flood models is the granularity within the model compared to a complex landscape such as Houston. Flooding in low-lying areas can cause water to flow in practically any direction and is not dependent on the overflow of waterways.īuildings flooded during Houston's 2016 Tax Day floods and 2015 Memorial day floods compared to. In this scenario, the FEMA model doesn't do a great job at predicting where the water will go as the models are primarily used for overflow of rivers and streams. In the second scenario picture heavy rainfall in a low-lying city with waterways throughout the city. That is, of course, if there is no significant avulsion of the rivers (where rivers abandon their current path for a new path during flood events). If there was heavy rain on the mountain, FEMA's models would do a good job at predicting the amount of water that is likely to flow down the mountain and flood rivers and streams within the mountain town. First, imagine a town at the base of a broad mountain. However, this type of modeling can be limiting in low-lying areas such as Houston. Generally, FEMA models flood events by determining the amount of water required to flood rivers and streams and once flooded where that water will eventually go. All five of the aforementioned flooding events did not meet the 100-year flood threshold. They compared these rain events to what hydrologists call a 100-year flood, meaning that a flood of that magnitude has a 1 percent or 1 in 100 chance of occurring. The study analyzed Hurricane Ike in 2008, Tropical Storms Erin and Allison in 20, respectively, and two unnamed rainstorms that resulted in flooding in 20. What went wrong? Why were the maps significantly different from reality in these five storms? ![]()
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