Now. Good afternoon to you. I’m Tom Zizka. We’re glad to have you with us on this wet Sunday afternoon. Perhaps you notice rain storms pounded the area over the last couple of hours.
Lightning high water rescues ponding on the roadways with all the usual spots. This is a trans star shot the North Freeway at airline traffic moving along pretty well. The rain has stopped. The roads are very navigable. At the height of the storm there was ponding in all the usual areas.
Drainage was briefly overwhelmed. Some drivers were stranded in the water. They couldn’t help themselves but go into the high water. Some rescues were necessary. Both Hobby and Bush airports were reporting ground stops for about two hours time at last check.
Meantime, CenterPoint energy reports there are more than 4000 customers without power in the Gulf Coast. Weather authority had a busy Sunday. Meteorologist John Dawson is finally catching a breath. He’s got a first look at the forecast. Hello, JD?
Yes. Starting at 1:00 we started coming on here with Fox Local and giving you those weather updates.
Allison, meteorologist Allison Gargaro started it off, and then I took over in the afternoon. And things are much better right now. The strongest of the storms are right along the coast here, and most of it actually out over the waters.
But Brazoria County and down towards Matagorda County, you see that yellow indicating those heavier downpours as well. So certainly something that we’re looking at, I’m just going to double check, make sure nothing up to our north is really very well organized.
There’s a little bit of rain out toward the College Station area, but really the focus on where we saw most of that rain is going to be pretty much in the downtown Houston area. Just showing you real quick the last 12 hours. Of radar, estimated rainfall totals.
Look at these numbers that we see here. We actually don’t have the numbers on right now. But look at these these deep yellows. They’re representing quite a bit of rain accumulation. I’ll put some numbers on here for you so you can kind of see what I’m talking about.
Perhaps as much as close to four inches of rain there in that area.
That’s kind of along the where the East Loop and the South Loop kind of get together. And right in this area there’s again up to four, maybe even up to five inches of rain in a very short amount of time, even though that much rain has has falls in the urban areas like this, that concrete, it creates quite a bit of problems. And we actually have one of our reporters right here near this area at at the 610 and east side of 610 and the Broadway. Leslie Delasbour has a live report for us.
And talking a little bit about what all that water, the problems that it can create. Yeah. JD, we are at the scene of a high water rescue that just wrapped up here again on South Loop, South Loop East, excuse me and Broadway, I want to step out and give you a look of what we’re seeing.
Houston Fire Water Rescue pulled off about 15 minutes ago, and there are four cars stalled from our vantage point. One of them is nearly underwater.
Here. We witness HFD rescue two men, one out of the white minivan, as well as the white SUV that you see in front of you. And again, from our vantage point, it looks like everyone in all four vehicles have made it out safely. There’s a crowd of folks on the other side of the highway standing by and watching. So some of the other folks that might have been rescued are over there that lost their car, but this water is coming up pretty high.
We’ve had to actually move back a couple steps ourselves to stay safe. This tow truck that’s on your screen just pulled up about ten minutes ago, maybe, and it’s trying to work to get some of these cars out of this water.
But again, here everyone is safe and alive. No one is trapped in their vehicle and HFD has cleared this area up as of now. But as you can see, people are still going through this water and this is not something that we want to advise, even though it might look low or you might think your car is big enough to make it through, it’s Houston.
We all know it floods here. So you want to make sure that you turn around, don’t drown. Do not assume that your car can make it through because you don’t want to be in the situation like these folks. And this is there’s so many incidents like this actually happening around Houston today.
We were at another one not far on 45 South and Woodridge, where the same incident happened.
Multiple people or multiple vehicles were stalled under an underpass just like this one. But again, right now people in this area have made it out safely. So JD, we’re going to send it back to you. Yeah. Thanks for that report there.
And yes, again, we’ve had multiple locations like that where that water gets in there. And if you don’t know how deep that water is, you need to make sure you’re not driving in it. When you can see the vehicle ahead of you go through there. That kind of gives you a better idea of how deep that is. But the important thing is to be very safe.
I do want to stress there that we are currently have no watches or warnings from the National Weather Service, so we’re in a better spot right now than we were earlier. Our tower cam here in the Galleria area shows those clouds that are out there and other parts around town, with maybe some light showers happening. At the moment we are still dealing with some very humid air, but the temperatures have been quite a bit lower today than where we’ve been seeing them, because those showers and storms came in the peak time of the afternoon, when we would normally expect the hottest parts of our day. So our futurecast is going to show us as we continue through the rest of the evening. Our rains are going to completely come to an end.
Our skies might even clear enough a little bit. Partly cloudy skies this evening, but we get back to tomorrow morning and we’ll start to even have some of these isolated areas popping up as soon as the sun comes up. And then we’ll continue to keep those isolated spots becoming a little bit more scattered when we get to the afternoon.
So it won’t be as widespread as what we saw today, but we could certainly have some of the same things happening if those same areas receive these downpours that drop 2 to 4in of rain in a couple of hours, we could have a more isolated area of impact. So we want to just sort of make sure that we’re staying aware of what’s happening tomorrow.
I know a lot of people are going to want to be just moving around. It’s a holiday for many folks. So once we get past that rainy Labor Day, isolated chances on Tuesday, and then when we get into Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, some slightly drier air is going to move in. I’m not sure we’ll notice it as much in the afternoon, but be prepared to have some surprisingly pleasant mornings once we get into Thursday and Friday. JD, thank you.
Back to those quick storms that caught a lot of drivers off guard this afternoon.
Some had to be rescued when their vehicles were submerged in the high water. Photojournalist Chandler Watson has more on a rescue near downtown. We’re here at the corner of Saint Emanuel and Polk Street, where there is a current high water rescue happening right now. We’ve got the tow truck hooked up here with the tow cable, along with a strap, which they had to dive underneath the water to get to a hooking position to the car.
They got those tow straps hooked up to that right now, but this just goes to show how careful you need to be in Houston when there’s a flash flood warning. As you can see, this happened relatively quick. It seems like they were coming eastbound down Saint Emmanuel here, and this just happened. All of a sudden, the flood meter over there says it’s at four feet now and it’s currently receding. When I first got out here it was about five feet.
But again.
