Texas News

Development in Bastrop has been temporarily put on hold. The Bastrop City Council voted unanimously last week to put a 90-day moratorium on development permits. The city wants to use this time to update its land-development rules to try to prevent flooding, an effort it’s calling Building Bastrop. The council also approved an emergency ordinance related to drainage. Bastrop Mayor Connie Schroeder has stressed that the city is “pro-development” and says the pause will give the city a chance…

FRIENDSWOOD — Recreational vehicles aren’t meant to have four people living in them for eight months — just ask the Eichberger family. The bathroom floor starts to cave in, the kitchen roof leaks every time it rains, and there just isn’t enough space for two boys and their parents to live comfortably. After Hurricane Harvey dealt the Texas coast a devastating blow on Aug. 25, 2017, it turned into a tropical storm that poured historic…

Texas is ready for the next Hurricane Harvey, Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday after participating in a briefing with President Donald Trump to prepare for storm season, which began Friday. “We are ready, and we are taking steps on a daily basis to make sure we will be able to address any challenge coming our way,” Abbott told reporters. “We’re getting everything lined up to make sure that we will be capable of responding to…

Hey, Texplainer: How can I prepare for the upcoming hurricane season? Hurricane season is coming — and it can be deadly. Texas got its most recent glimpse of that during Hurricane Harvey, a storm that slammed the Gulf Coast in August and left Houston grappling with unprecedented flooding. Dozens of people died. The storm caused an estimated $200 billion in damage. Smaller towns that rely on tourism are still grappling with the aftermath. “If we…

A new report by a group of leading Texas researchers details a variety of shortcomings with the Houston area’s current — and proposed — approach to flood control and calls on civil leaders to pursue a multifaceted and regional strategy that ensures that all communities receive better protection regardless of socioeconomic status. The report by the so-called Greater Houston Flood Mitigation Consortium — a group of scientists from universities and other institutions across the state formed…

NEW ORLEANS — There’s a theme lurking under the giant science meeting here along the Mississippi River: Extreme weather really is getting more extreme because of climate change. The human influence on hurricanes and wildfires is increasingly obvious. For years this has been a subject clouded in uncertainties. But now scientists say they have hard numbers. Wednesday morning two independent research teams, one based in the Netherlands and the other in California, reported that the…

Hurricane Harvey certainly isn’t something to commemorate.  Its powerful winds — a Category 4 upon impact near Rockport, the strongest Texas hurricane in half a century — demolished beachfront communities, wrecked vacation homes and trailer parks alike, and tossed boats and cars around like confetti. And its unprecedented rainfall, a mind-boggling 51 inches, drowned Houston, an already flood-prone city of more than 2 million, as well as communities up and down Texas’ Gulf Coast.  But when the publishing company…

For 60 years, the Texas Water Development Board has been the keeper of a master list of projects that are supposed to meet the state’s water needs for the next half century. But the latest list the agency is compiling is not about supplying water — it’s about managing it. Earlier this year in the wake of two major floods that crippled communities across the state — and just months before the remnants of Hurricane…

WASHINGTON – After a pair of massive hurricanes battered Texas and Florida, members of Congress from those states are facing an uncomfortable question: Does relief for one state come at the cost of the other? The fear among many in Washington is that the double-whammy of the two hurricanes — Harvey in Texas and Irma in Florida — could pull away federal resources needed in both states. One of the most important Texans in the middle of these…

Across Southeast Texas and along much of the Texas Gulf Coast, residents are returning to cities devastated by Hurricane Harvey. And flooding still remained in some areas of the state 10 days after Harvey first hit the Texas coast on Aug. 25. Gov. Greg Abbott has said the cost of storm recovery could reach $180 billion in federal funds, a total that would be $60 billion more than what was needed for recovery efforts after…