Houston flooding extensive? or not?

[Dinsdale]

@AlsoNamedBort

Here’s a pretty good tool that shows water before and after the flood:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41094872

Thanks

[snowthx]

@rbroome

For the rest of the country, there will be 2 noticable effects:

1. there will be a short uptick in gas prices, but the global glut will keep that under control,
2. Don’t plan on buying a used car for the next 4-6 months. Even those folks who didn’t have flood insurance have car insurance. Once those checks start coming in, there won’t be a used car left in the country. Baton Rouge La. has extensive rain induced flooding in 2016. 4-6 months after that, local used car dealers were out of stock. When there was a bad flood up in the N.C./Va. area last year, car dealers were buying used cars all over the southeast sight unseen for over the asking price.

And anyone who wants to earn big bucks hanging sheetrock while living rough can do very well in the Houston area for the next couple of years…

I was thinking about that. There are likely to be thousands of flooded autos, trucks, and other machinery after this. As I understand it, even if a car can be cleaned-up and made operable after being submerged, in the eyes of an insurance company, it’s totaled, and not allowed to be re-sold. That said, it’s possible to end-up with a flood car should some unscrupulous dealer decide to sell them. Can anyone confirm that assumption?

[TSBG]

@snowthx

I was thinking about that. There are likely to be thousands of flooded autos, trucks, and other machinery after this. As I understand it, even if a car can be cleaned-up and made operable after being submerged, in the eyes of an insurance company, it’s totaled, and not allowed to be re-sold. That said, it’s possible to end-up with a flood car should some unscrupulous dealer decide to sell them. Can anyone confirm that assumption?

Totaled cars can be re-sold above the board, but insurance for such cars can be expensive. It is also possible to get sold a totaled car not labeled as such by an unscrupulous used car dealer. I haven’t has any personal experience with this but it was discussed a bit in another thread recently.

[Corry_El]

@SamuelA

This still does catastrophic damage to the interior of a house - the water inside the place will ruin any flooring and require the place be gutted to the studs to a height of at least 4 feet. It will probably also require replacement of most or all furniture, cabinetry, appliances, doors, and all motor vehicles that were flooded.

So you’re talking about a 50k to 150k bill, per homeowner, roughly.

I agree low death toll is no surprise. You can have massive cost of flood damage with a tiny % of people affected unfortunate enough or who make bad enough decisions to die.

On the costs, say just take the low end of your range, since it’s easy to have significant, and hard to pay for without insurance or govt grants, flood damage below $50k. A CNN story today gave estimate of $55bil property damage (from Moody’s), one a couple of days ago in NYT gave $30bil from a small data analytics firm. Obviously calculating a number of people/households from that is even more of a guess since you don’t know the distribution or what cut off* but just blindly dividing by $50k, $50bil would be 1 million households. A huge absolute number, but not an actually large % of the households in the whole TX/LA coastal area affected, which extends well beyond the Houston metro area.

*for example we had to replace our furnace after Sandy, and it ended up shortening the life of the hot water heater though at first we got it going again. So obviously there was flooding and not insignificant cost (FEMA money covered a pretty small %). Ten blocks away at our old address there were good TV shots of waterway streets with National Guard trucks with fording kits rescuing people, but our street is a little higher, so ~18" of water in the basement. I’d guess it’s similar in all kinds of places not far from the most dramatic TV shots of Houston neighborhoods.

[edwardcoast]

@Okrahoma

From here: apparently estimated 80% of homeowners in Houston do not have flood insurance.

There will be huge losses for people, in tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands for some, not covered by insurance.

That might be typical. If don’t qualify to get flood insurance from FEMA, it is expensive so most people don’t get it. Typical home owner’s insurance doesn’t have flood insurance and most people don’t know this.