Better flood-warning system
RH: How did you create the Texas Medical Center’s warning system?
PB: They were tired of just watching Brays Bayou come up, and they needed more advanced time to deal with things. They came close with a 4.5 inch rain fall. It was really scary. The Texas Medical Center CEO at the time, Richard Wainerdi, called me and said ‘we’ve got to get this more high tech.’
I had just come from some meetings in Oklahoma, where I ran into a guy who was an expert on rainfall radar, which first launched in the mid-1990s. I told the medical center about this brand new technology. We started working with it, and to make a long story short, it worked very well. We went from there, and the medical center funded us to develop the system.
Shortly thereafter, in 2001, Tropical Storm Allison hit, and it worked beautifully. We predicted everything very accurately. FEMA gave us some money to further advance system — we called it FAS2 — and around 2010 we expanded it to become FAS3. It’s probably monitored well over 150 storms.
RH: How does it work?
PB: The radar data gets sent to a private company in Oklahoma to calibrate it and measure the rainfall. It’s fairly sophisticated. We then load that data into our models and we can predict the elevation of Brays Bayou.
All the data from the radar, the cameras and the gauges are packaged into a website. It’s a lot of information in one place, where a single decision-maker – a CEO or a security official — can easily make sense of it and make a call based on that information. We spend a lot of time training the medical center personnel on our system and getting feedback on what they want to see.
We have a traffic light system on the web page to warn people. When we estimate Brays Bayou will rise above a flow rate of 24,000 cubic feet per second, it turns red. We were at 28,500 on Memorial Day. They locked down the medical center before that. I helped them design the system that allows them to lock seventy-five doors and gates around the Texas Medical Center. It shuts down like it’s a castle.
RH: How does the Memorial Day flooding here in Houston compare to major flooding in the past?
PB: Everyone wants to compare it to Tropical Storm Allison, but this is much smaller. They used helicopters to get 650 people off the roofs in the medical center back then. At the time, it was the worst urban flood in the U.S. history.
RH: If we had unlimited resources, what could Houston do to protect residents from flooding?
PB: There’s some low hanging fruit. There are low water crossings, near the Galleria, at 1-45, on the U.S. 288 bridge. They all go underwater when there’s 6 to 8 inches of rain. Everybody knows it. They need to watch these hot spots carefully with cameras and send out emergency vehicles to block them to traffic. It’s common sense.
At the next level, they need to go into the watersheds that are contributing to flooding and build models like the FAS3 and make them available to the public. The problem is the public gets flood alerts for the whole county. That doesn’t tell them anything. It’s a bunch of numbers. Nobody understands what 6 inches of rainfall in three hours means. You need a simplified system that’s communicating to the public whether their area is in trouble.
People get all these county-wide alerts, and they quit paying attention. Harris County is 1,700 square miles. We’re giving people the same alerts in Tomball that we’re giving people in Clear Lake 50 miles away. I don’t want that kind of prediction.
RH: Whenever Houston has flooding, we hear about people who get stranded in cars in flood water. Why doesn’t the “turn around, don’t drown” message seem to resonate?
PB: During Tropical Storm Allison, there were twenty-two deaths. Twenty of them were on the road in cars. That’s one of the reason I’m in business. It’s difficult for normal people to comprehend the sheer madness of water out of control. In Wimberly, the water rose 40 feet in one hour. You can’t wrap your head around that. It’s coming from far away, and it’s a quiet killer.
