When Hurricane Harvey left so much of Houston underwater, it highlighted a problem that’s been getting worse for years: Harris County’s existing floodplain maps just don’t work.
Hurricane Harvey makes landfall on the Texas coast on August 25, 2017. In the year since the historic storm, flood control officials have promised to change that, and they already had plans to redo the maps, but new data on the geography of the area and the amount of rainfall forecasters expect in the future means the new maps could look drastically different.