By State › Texas

Texas: Overview

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Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Texas exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Texas go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

Hurricanes and the Gulf Coast

Texas has more than 350 miles of Gulf Coast, and every hurricane season carries a real chance of landfall somewhere along it. Hurricane Harvey, which struck the Houston area in August 2017, is the reference case: it stalled over southeast Texas for days, dropping rainfall totals as high as 60.58 inches near Nederland, the highest storm-total rainfall ever recorded in the continental United States, flooding more than 300,000 structures and causing an estimated $125 billion in damage. Harvey was a flood disaster more than a wind disaster, a distinction that matters for how you prepare: wind-rated construction doesn’t protect against a storm that simply refuses to move.

A grid that has already failed once, statewide

Texas runs its own electrical grid, managed by ERCOT and largely isolated from the two interconnected grids covering the rest of the continental U.S. That isolation was central to Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, when a deep cold snap outside the grid’s typical planning range triggered cascading power plant failures and left millions without power, some for days, in freezing temperatures. The manual’s Case for Preparedness page covers Uri in detail as a national case study; the short version for Texas specifically is that it’s the state where it happened, and the grid structure that made it possible hasn’t fundamentally changed.

Flash flooding: the Hill Country’s defining hazard

The Texas Hill Country, including Kerr County and the areas around the Guadalupe River, sits in a region meteorologists sometimes call “flash flood alley,” where thin soil over rock, steep terrain, and Gulf moisture combine to produce some of the fastest-rising floodwaters in the country. The July 2025 Central Texas floods, when a mesoscale storm system dropped roughly four months’ worth of rain in a few hours, killed at least 136 people, the deadliest inland flooding disaster in the U.S. since 1976. See the Risks page for the full data.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Texas: households on or near the Gulf Coast need hurricane-specific evacuation and flood planning in addition to the manual’s general Tier 1-2 supply guidance, households anywhere on the ERCOT grid should treat extended winter power loss as a real, not hypothetical, scenario, and anyone in flash-flood-prone terrain, the Hill Country especially, should treat “move to higher ground immediately” as a standing instruction for any period of sustained heavy rain, not something to decide in the moment.

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