When Allison Hit Houston--Week of June 8, 2001
  This page was born 6/15/2001.  Rickubis designed it.  (such as it is.)  Updated 4/26/01
Through the week, various parts of Houston had been hit by rain, and some areas to the south of town had already received large amounts of rain. Then, on Friday evening, there were warnings of a probable visit by tropical storm Allison. I went to a movie directly after work (I saw "Evolution").  This was at multiplex cinema on the west side of town. To understand this behavior, I suppose you'd have to live here for some time. While rain is not a threat every day, flash flood warnings are not uncommon whenever rain is mentioned here.
After the movie, I drove to a restaurant not far from downtown Houston. On the way, I hit fairly heavy rain. While I was in the restaurant, I happened to look up at one of the television sets that was playing-sometime around 9:00 pm-and saw a Doppler radar image very similar to what I show below (figure 1).

----------------------------------- 
                                                                            Figure 1.
I finished my meal, and drove home. On the way, I noticed that some of the streets started developing high water. I stayed on streets I was familiar with, and those I knew were higher--that is, that didn't dip under any overpasses, and so on. As I drove on, I notice water starting to rise, and tried to take some pictures with the digital camera I usually have with me.  Since I was still driving at the time, and the torrents of water made it difficult to see clearly, and the low light conditions; most of the pictures just didn't come out well. I made a detour near my apartment to go to an ATM. I found myself on a side street with alarmingly high water. I then drove home, and encountered more high water. On one of the main streets, the water was rising (figure 2). I got off these streets as soon as possible, and onto the lesser-traveled streets near my house. But, these weren't much better. (figure 3.) Click on the images to see them larger.

--------------------------------------------------------
                     Figure 2                                                                               figure 3
              This intersection is about a mile from my house.                                  This intersection is about one block from my house.  This is the high spot
              It's hard to tell, but that's water, not road surface.                               in the road I'm on. That truck went in up over its headlights. So did I.
When I got home,I logged on, and got the Doppler radar image shown in Figure 1. Not long after that,I grabbed my video camera and took some movie footage directly outside my apartment door. Figure 4 (below)is an image from the video.Click hereto see the video clip.(flv video 2,519kb).
-----------------------------------------------------
                   figure 4.(click image to enlarge)                                                                           figure 5.

I was very fortunate during this week. Take a look at the rainfall map (click on figure 5). I've marked where I live. Note that the heavy rainfall is not that far from where I am. In some spots they recorded over 30 inches of rain since  tuesday (June 5). The heavy rainfall hit close to downtown Houston, and on the other parts of town,  about 20-25 miles away from me.  Some of this occurred nearer the Gulf of Mexico and the Ship Channel--effectively "downstream" from where I am. Since they got so much water, though, the smaller amount  *I* received still caused flooding, since it had nowhere to go. I didn't know any of this Saturday morning. I went about my business, and this was mostly on the west side of town. I didn't see any current news media until I turned on the TV Saturday evening. I *had* heard that the heavy rain had disrupted newspaper deliveries, so I hadn't seen a newspaper. Although I knew we'd had flooding (I'd even seen some of it), I had just assumed that the water had receded much as it had done in my neighborhood.  Then, I received a huge shock when I turned on the TV. Every station was covering the disastrous flooding.  I don't know how much of this the rest of y'all saw on the news, but on the local stations it looked terrible.
The Houston Chronicle Online has a lot of coverage showing what happened this city that I call home. To those of you that have never been here, the pictures may not say  much. To me, they are quite a shock.  To see the full story, go to their page covering the flood.
Click on the link to get there: The Great Flood of 2001.

                Go back to my home page, Welcome to rickubis.com
                Go back to the See the World page.