New Houston Flood Mitigation Consortium

An article posted by Leah Binkovitz dated December 28, 2017 on the Urban Edge website describes the Greater Houston Flood Mitigation Consortium.  


The Urban Edge is a website maintained by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research.  The Urban Edge articles are described as "Stories about why cities are great and how they can do better".

Christof Speiler outlined the mission of the Consortium in a Houston Chronicle article on November 16, 2017.


The Consortium is a group that was founded to collect and centralize good research on flooding in the Houston area.  Participating institutions are Rice, Texas A&M, Texas Southern, Texas State, University of Houston, University of Texas, Houston Advanced Research Center, and Local Initiatives Support Corporation-Houston.  Please refer to the link below for additional information:


The Consortium has published a set of Fact Sheets along with other documents that are particularly informative for Houston area residents wishing to learn more about flooding-related issues.  The titles of these are listed below:

GHFMC Fact Sheet #1: What is a floodplain?
GHFMC Fact Sheet #2: How do we assess damages?
GHFMC Fact Sheet #3: What is a Detention Basin?
GHFMC Fact Sheet #4: How are floodplains designated?
GHFMC Fact Sheet #5: How does rainfall drain away?
GHFMC Briefing Document #1: Flood Warning Systems
GHFMC Briefing Document #2: How do Addicks & Barker Reservoirs work?

The figure posted below appears in the Urban Edge article.  It provides a good explanation of all of the possible reasons for flooding, whether a structure is in a mapped floodplain or not.

Readers - if your property is located outside of mapped floodplains and was flooded during Harvey, does this diagram help you to understand the reason(s)?  For example the December 8, 2017 blog post reviewed the probable causes flooding in a particular area of University Green.  In that case #2 from the diagram above was a significant factor.  The local topography contains closed bowl-like depressions that are slow to clear of accumulated storm water.

On a related but smaller scale, residents can mitigate flooding due to ponding by raising the ground level of any depressions that may have formed on their lots via ground subsidence or erosion.

Also, are you aware of the Consortium and do you follow the issues that are presented?


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