Storms and floods on the record

The water that runs past here is Garners Bayou

Timberwood is in the Greens Bayou watershed. The channel beside the neighborhood is Garners Bayou, carried on the flood control district's books as unit P130-00-00, an open natural channel.¹

That is worth stating because the Lake Houston and San Jacinto River material on flooding is regional context, not the drainage that actually carries water past these streets. When it rains hard here, Garners Bayou is the thing to watch.

The gauge has 39 years of record

USGS gauge 08076180, Garners Bayou near Humble, has recorded an annual peak every year since 1987.² The six largest:

Harvey moved twice the water, and Allison stood higher. Harvey's 24,900 cubic feet per second is double Allison's 12,400, yet Allison crested about a foot and a half higher.² Allison in 2001 is the high-water mark on this bayou.

The whole record carries a USGS qualifier meaning it is affected by urbanization or channel change,² which is the warehouse corridor along the freeway showing up in the numbers.

What actually flooded here

Timberwood sits in two census block groups that are almost entirely this neighborhood. FEMA publishes flood insurance claims down to that level, with the street address removed.³

There are 28 claims on record, and every one of them is Harvey or Imelda.

August 27, 2017 was the day. Fifteen of the twenty-five Harvey claims are dated that day, totalling just over a million dollars.³

This matters for a question flooding leaves open. The weather service's Harvey write-up lists the subdivisions it reported on between Humble and Lake Houston, and Timberwood is not among them. These claims show the neighborhood flooded anyway. Being left off a list is not evidence of anything.

Two limits on that number. It counts only properties carrying flood insurance, so uninsured flooding is invisible here. And 8 of the 28 were on properties rated outside the high-risk zones, about 29%, which is close to the national figure of 29% of claims coming from outside high-risk areas.⁴

How much rain that took

During Allison, the gauge on Garners Bayou at Beltway 8 recorded 24.72 inches. Bush Intercontinental, six miles away, recorded 9.77 inches in the same storm.⁵ Rainfall here is extremely local.

For scale, NOAA puts a 100-year, 24-hour rainfall at this location at 17.0 inches, and a 500-year at 25.3 inches.⁶ Allison's total at the Garners Bayou gauge sits just under the 500-year depth.

Federal disaster declarations

Harris County has been named in 41 federal disaster declarations.⁷ The ones that put water or wind on this neighborhood:

Two things people get wrong. Allison names two different disasters, 1989 and 2001. And there is no separate declaration for the May 2024 derecho; it sits inside DR-4781.⁷

Wind and hail

No tornado is recorded as having tracked through Timberwood. The closest touchdown was an EF1 at 1:17 in the morning on January 9, 2022, which began about a mile north of the neighborhood and moved northeast, away, across the City of Humble. It ran 2.18 miles and did $300,000 of damage, with no injuries.⁸

The largest hail recorded near here was two inches across on March 27, 2009, about two and a half miles away.⁸ Hail that size near the neighborhood is roughly a once-a-decade event on this record.

What the record does not show

• The Tax Day flood of 2016 left no trace here. There is no annual peak at the gauge for 2016 at all.² The Memorial Day flood of 2015 registered only a modest peak. Both of the famous Houston floods of those two years largely missed this watershed.
• No weather service narrative for Harvey names Humble or Garners Bayou, despite Harvey setting the discharge record on this bayou.
• No claim can be tied to a street. FEMA removes the address.

What neighbors can add

The gauge says how much water moved. It cannot say whose house it went into.

• Harvey, August 27, 2017. Fifteen households here filed a claim that day. Which streets? Did the water come up out of the bayou, back up through the storm drains, or run across the ground?
• Allison, June 2001. The gauge says the water stood higher than in Harvey. Almost nobody talks about Allison here. What happened?
• Imelda, September 19, 2019. The weather service logged six feet of water on Will Clayton Parkway and the Eastex Freeway that day.⁸ Was the neighborhood cut off, and for how long?
• March 4, 1992. Fourth largest flow ever recorded on this bayou, and nobody has written down what it did.
• The detention areas inside the subdivision. Have they ever been changed, and did anything change after the warehouses went up along the freeway?

See also

• Flooding and drainage, for flood zones street by street
• Storms and power outages
• What is around us