The storm, which was slowly moving northeast through the eastern Texas region, was expected to bring rainfall of 5 to 10 inches through Friday and could deliver 20 to 25 inches to some places, according to the Weather Prediction Center on Wednesday afternoon. Parts of southwest Louisiana could see 4 to 8 inches of rain, with isolated totals of 10 inches. The rainfall could result in “significant to life-threatening flash floods,” the center said.
“Houston’s not seeing a lot of the heavy rainfall that it could be seeing,” Scott Overpeck, meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s Houston/Galveston office, said Wednesday morning. “Higher rainfall amounts may hold off till overnight as the system moves north.”
The Flood Control District for Harris County, said Wednesday afternoon that some of the creek and bayou water levels were slowly falling.
Imelda is the latest storm to hit a rain-weary region that has been battered by major storms and catastrophic flooding in recent years, from the so-called Tax Day floods of April 2016 to Hurricane Harvey two summers ago. Harvey lingered over the city as a tropical storm. Heavy rain, high winds and tornadoes leveled entire neighborhoods, and some residents are still recovering.
Emma Wood, whose home was recently rebuilt after flooding during Harvey, had not yet unpacked in her new home by the time Imelda rolled in.
“I’m still looking at all of these boxes,” she said Wednesday.
Wood, 81, had lived in her three-bedroom home in southern Houston for decades when it flooded as high as her shin in 2017. The house reeked of mildew afterward, she recalled, and floodwater left the floor warped, so she had to remember to step up and down when walking into her kitchen.
“It was dangerous for me,” she said.
When she had the chance to tear the house down and start anew, through a city recovery program, she jumped at the chance. She got the keys to her new house just last month.
As the rain dripped on and off Wednesday, she said she was less worried than in past storms, because her new home had been elevated several feet above the flood plain.
“There’s no sense of getting tired of them, because it’s the good Lord’s work,” she said of the repeated storms. “If it’s going to rain or flood, we just have to bear with whatever happens.”
Glenn LaMont, deputy emergency management coordinator for Brazoria County, just south of Houston, said Wednesday afternoon that the rain had dropped significantly. “We’ve got very little rain falling in the county,” he said. “Drainage is catching up. We’ve had a few residential roads, a few small roads impacted.”
LaMont said that the county had not received any reports of flooding in homes and that scattered showers were expected Wednesday evening and Thursday night.
The weather service’s Houston/Galveston office said online early Wednesday that in preliminary precipitation totals, Brazoria County had received more than 10 inches of rain while parts of Galveston County had gotten 8 to 9 inches. A flood watch continued for parts of southeast Texas through Thursday morning, it said.
The storm, which had been moving at 5 mph after making landfall near Freeport, Texas, on Tuesday evening, was about 80 miles north northeast of Houston on Wednesday afternoon with maximum sustained winds of about 30 mph, according to the weather prediction center.
Several school districts canceled classes, while universities in the area delayed opening.
This article originally appeared in
.