Texas/Oklahoma -- could that happen here?

The descriptions of the heavy rains and flooding in Texas and Oklahoma are very frightening. The worst I've ever experienced here was Irene in terms of direct impact on my house and property and neighborhood. Can weather like that happen here? 11+ inches of rain? We live in a valley and across the street from the Rahway River... better believe we have flood insurance, but still... just wondering about the combined factors of geography, climate change, etc.

I think anything is possible. Irene and Sandy proved that.

The Rahway has flooded many times. Downtown Millburn has flooded at least twice since I have lived in this area.

While I agree that this amount of rainfall would be catastrophic, I believe having the Rahway as a natural outlet would actually help us. I think if we lived on flat land with no rivers we would be in a much worse situation. The Golf Course provides a natural flood plain which pools up like a lake and holds a lot of water which would otherwise break over Valley Street and head up the valley itself. I live on the Rahway so I have some experience. During Irene one of my neighbors whose house is at a lower level than ours took river water into their basement, the rest of us had issues with sewer backup and ground water seeping into our basements through the concrete floor. That August was the wettest on record and the water table was already very high when Irene hit us. We were under about 1.5 feet in our basement, maybe more. We gave up trying to bail it out around 7 am. Luckily it was only a basement, our neighbors were using theirs as a living room and lost everything.

I can't remember how much rain we got, but the Rahway rose 2.5 feet during Irene and while it broke banks and ruined much of downtown Millburn further downstream, Valley Street didn't really flood the way streets in Houston have. We have the Rahway to thank for that, I think.

What others have said...we wouldn't have the widespread issues Houston has, because we are not built on low, flat bayou land like they are, but individual homeowners need to understand their own circumstances, and know that that much rain in a day is possible here too.

I've from TX, and during dry period, the soil is like a rock. Much worse than here.

Houston is my hometown and I am in awe (and sadness) seeing pictures from there. I'm not sure about the exact neighborhoods where I lived, but I've seen pictures of areas very close by that were completely under water.

And yet many in the Texas or Oklahoma congressional delegations deny that climate change is something to deal with through conservation or other measures.

Ay-yup.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/06/26/2202141/anti-science-climate-denier-caucus-113th-congress-edition/

Hurricane Floyd dumped about 10 inchs of rain on the area in 1999 and resulting flood inundated many of the areas within the floodplain of the rivers in Northern NJ with several feet of water, including Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn. Since then we've had Irene, which was less intense and several other non cyclonic systems that have resulted in significant flooding along the floodplain.

Texas has some serious issues with allowing construction too close to flood prone areas as well as ground water pumping that has seriously messed up some river channel geometry, which are two problems that NJ doesn't have.

Houston is just totally flat and the water table is very high in general. For example, almost NO homes there have basements because they would always be full of water or have to have multiple pumps running continously. I'm sure that there have also been bad construction choices made, but probably no more than most other densely populated areas. (How about all the homes on the Jersey shore that are not up on pilings? At least they don't do that on the Texas coast ... I was amazed when I moved up here and saw all the shore houses built right on the ground.)

The main reason that houses in Texas were built on pilings vs those in the northeast has mostly to do with the fact that the majority of houses in the northeast on the coast were built before the national flood insurance program(NFIP) was enacted, which required raising the first inhabited floor above the base flood level. In Texas the majority of construction on the coast is post NFIP, so those houses are built to reflect those base flood levels.

In Texas a great deal of the construction in flood prone areas occurred after the flood plains were identified by FEMA and insurance was offered through the NFIP. Today in many states flood plains are no build zones, but a combination of heavily subsidized flood insurance through the NFIP and a lack of regulation regarding new construction in these areas means that Texas has a large number of properties within these areas and continues to build within these areas.