What weather events have you been in? I was in the great icestorm Ontario/Quebec in about 1998.

[kentauros]

17. I think there was one woman that drowned in an elevator,

because it lost power and then did what it was programmed to do: go to the bottom floor and stop. Being a piece of dumb electronics, it didn't "know" that the ground floor was underwater. So, she couldn't get out and was trapped

The sunken portions of I-10 and 59 were underwater. The 59 portion just filled up from run-off while the I-10 portion was flooded by White Oak Bayou when it came out of its banks. There's a bend in the bayou near the freeway, and as the floodwaters were raging though, then went up and over that bend and into the freeway. By the time it filled up, all you could see were the tops of tractor-trailer rigs.

At the time, I worked on the northwest side of town and decided to try to get to work once the rains had stopped. Well, I got to my exit and couldn't because all the feeder roads were flooded! I even saw cars in parking lots that were in three feet of water. I had to go way past my exit to turn around and even then, it was flooded, just not so much that I got stuck. The freeway was high and dry, so I went home and called in. But it was weird seeing everything around the main roadway flooded.

A good friend of mine ended up working for the City of Houston by getting a job on the heavy trash pickup work needed in the flooded areas. According to him, six-months of using one of those mini-cranes on a dump-truck, lifting soggy remains of carpeting, drywall and everything else that got flooded. It was a mess for a long time. However, it also spurred the city to build some very large retention ponds and they have helped in preventing subsequent flooding