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Texas: Risks & Trends

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Same standard as every other page on this site: every figure below is independently sourced, and figures that vary across sources, or measure genuinely different things, are flagged as such rather than collapsed into one number that looks more precise than the underlying data actually supports.

Hurricane Harvey (2017): the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the U.S.

MetricFigure
Direct deaths, Texas 89
Additional indirect deaths in the following months 35
Peak rainfall total (Nederland, TX) 60.58 in, a U.S. record
People who experienced 30+ inches of rainfall ~7 million
Structures flooded 300,000+
Estimated total damage ~$125 billion (2017 USD)

Harvey’s defining characteristic wasn’t wind speed, it made landfall as a Category 4 but weakened quickly. The damage came from the storm stalling over southeast Texas for days, turning a normal hurricane’s hours-long rain event into one that lasted the better part of a week over the same ground.

The July 2025 Central Texas floods: deadliest U.S. inland flood since 1976

MetricFigure
Total confirmed deaths, all counties 136+
Kerr County deaths 117
Camp Mystic deaths (campers and counselors) ~27
Peak rainfall in a few hours 20.33 in, roughly four months' typical rainfall
AccuWeather preliminary total economic loss estimate $18-22 billion

Why the damage figures vary so much across sources

Wikipedia’s infobox-style figure for this event (roughly $1.1 billion) reflects a narrower, more immediately confirmable category, direct infrastructure and insured-loss estimates available soon after the event. AccuWeather’s $18-22 billion is a broader preliminary total-economic-loss estimate, covering business disruption, tourism loss, and long-term health costs alongside direct property damage. Both figures come from real methodologies measuring different things; neither is a rounding error of the other, and the wide range on the AccuWeather figure itself reflects that it was issued while the disaster was still unfolding.

The mechanism matters as much as the rainfall total: a mesoscale convective system pushed tropical moisture over the Hill Country’s thin soil and steep terrain, the same regional combination behind the area’s informal name, “flash flood alley,” and the Guadalupe River rose dozens of feet in under an hour in several towns.

A third standing risk: the ERCOT grid

Texas’s electrical grid is deliberately isolated from the two interconnected grids covering the rest of the continental United States, a structure that avoids most federal interstate regulation but also means Texas can’t easily import power from neighboring states during a shortfall. Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 demonstrated the consequence directly: see this site’s Case for Preparedness page for the full data on that event, 210 confirmed deaths statewide and roughly $195 billion in property damage, mostly from cold exposure and frozen or burst water pipes during days of grid failure.

What these have in common

All three of Texas’s defining risks, hurricane flooding, flash flooding, and grid failure, share the same practical lesson: none of them are rare, remote-probability events on the scale this manual otherwise treats as background risk. Texas has a named Atlantic hurricane season every single year, the Hill Country’s flash-flood geography doesn’t change, and the ERCOT grid’s structural isolation is a standing design choice, not something fixed after 2021.

Sources