What Have We Accomplished and Learned in 3000 Days Since Harvey?
11/15/2025 – Today marks 3000 days since Hurricane Harvey – 8.2 years.
In that time, I’ve researched and written 2,941 articles about flooding that have been read 2,737,740 times.
Those articles contained 1,989,909 words (not counting this one). That roughly equals 25 novels.
I’ve also shot 63,526 photos to support that work.
Before I run out of Coke Zeros and power bars, I’d like to look back and ask:
- What have we accomplished since Harvey?
- What have we learned that can reduce future flooding?
What We Have Accomplished
I asked Harris County Flood Control District (HCFCD) for a table showing how many structures have been removed from floodplains since Harvey and where. I wanted to show how much we have gotten for our tax dollars.
Unfortunately, they didn’t provide me with exact information requested. Instead, they referred me to two pages on their website.
One showed general areas where they were buying out homes. It provided a round number for the number of buyouts to date: 3,000. But they have 5,000 remaining to close on. Total cost for 8,000: $1 billion dollars. Prorated cost for 3000: $375 million. They never did tell me how many were in each watershed.
The other link led to a list of completed mitigation projects. It showed we’ve spent $1.7 billion to date. But as far as I could see, only a couple of the project summaries linked to the spending page disclosed how many homes were removed from floodplains. That adds another 900 homes. Now, we’re up to 3,900.
But how much did we spend on them? They list conflicting information on different pages. The second page shows $400 million more than reported on the first page, for a total of $2.1 billion. Both are dated October, 2025.
So, for each reported home that HCFCD has removed from floodplains since Harvey, they’ve spent somewhere between $436,000 and $538,000.
In fairness, most of the projects completed to date do not involve construction. Said another way, we’ve spent a lot of money preparing for construction on other projects with preliminary studies and right-of-way acquisition. It could also be that the summaries of some projects simply did not list their benefits.
But of the 41 total projects completed to date, it appears that only a handful involved actual construction that removes homes from floodplains.
What Have We Learned?
So what can we deduce from those observations?
It costs far more to remove homes from floodplains than they are worth in most cases.
After floods, private profit turns into public cost. Wouldn’t it be much more cost effective to just:
- Not build homes and businesses in risky floodplains or elevate them?
- Teach people how to avoid flood risk and give them the tools to do so?
- Unify floodplain standards throughout the region, so people downstream don’t bear the brunt of insufficient mitigation upstream?
- Actually enforce those floodplain standards instead of looking the other way?
- Turn those floodplains into parks that support recreation, healthier lifestyles and home values in adjacent neighborhoods?
- Stay involved in mitigation efforts after a flood instead of pretending the next flood is a 100-years away?
So far, we’ve spent a little more than $2 billion to prevent another Harvey. But the storm cost $125 billion. Let’s not forget that. That’s the last lesson.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 11/15/25
3,000 Days since Hurricane Harvey
