Texas lawmakers are grappling this week in a special legislative session over how to communicate better when heavy rainfall and potential flooding disasters occur, prompting Harris County officials to remind residents of the tools available to track local conditions in real time.
Of the 5.2 million people in Harris County, only about 44,000 are signed up for the Harris County Flood District’s flood warning system alerts. The text messaging system doesn’t provide a forecast; those tools are available at readyharris.org, but it does let users know when significant rainfall is occurring in an area they’re tracking and provides historical data for their region of interest.
“If a storm is coming, sometimes it’s helpful to know over the last 24 hours or seven days if you’ve already gotten a lot of water in the area,” said Emily Woodell, chief external affairs officer for the Harris County Flood Control District. “If it’s going to rain a lot more, maybe I’m at an increased risk.”
It can also help people who have evacuated to determine if the water levels are too high for them to return home, she said.
“It helps people make informed decisions for themselves, but it also helps keep them on the same page as the people who are making really tough decisions about life and death,” Woodell said. “It kind of helps to make sure we’re all singing from the same hymnal, especially when things are chaotic during an emergency.”
The maps available at harriscountyfws.org may look familiar. They’re the ones used by television meteorologists to show rainfall levels throughout Harris County.
About 370 gauges are placed throughout Harris and five other counties to measure rainfall, flow rates in the channels, and how high the water is in a channel. Residents can sign up for alerts by typing in an address and selecting the gauges closest to their homes, offices, or locations they frequent.
“The gauges talk to each other and they talk to us, and all of that is displayed through the flood warning system,” Woodell said.
Even when alerts aren’t going out, users can click on “channel status” on the website to check the current risks. A green light means there’s no flooding risk; yellow means water is close to coming out of the banks; and red means water is spilling out of the channel.
“When we are engaged at the Office of Emergency Management during a flood event, we are looking at this constantly,” Woodell said. “It tells our elected officials and our leadership where to send resources, where people might be at risk, where property might be at risk, and it really helps us to know where those risks are and respond effectively.”
One major criticism of the deadly July 4 Hill Country floods was that there was no siren system alerting people — including hundreds at Camp Mystic — that they needed to seek higher ground. The campers and staff didn’t have access to cell phones, and even if they did, many Texans suffer from text message fatigue as their phones light up all day with everything from banking notifications to Amber alerts.
Harris County’s flood warning system uses text messaging but also has an option for email alerts. Users can check the website on their desktop or the mobile-friendly version on a smartphone if they want to minimize text messages.
“We’ve been judicious in how we set them up so you’re not getting them if there’s not a risk,” Woodell said. “We want to make sure these are relevant and they’re not just spamming people.”
“When there’s a critical amount of rain falling in a concentrated amount of time, usually in a 15-minute increment, that’s when it will alert you,” she added. “When I get alerts, it’s maybe on average, a couple of times a season. It’s really not that often. Of course it depends on where the rain is falling at any given time. A couple of years ago I got way more alerts than I am this year.
“In a region like Harris County, where this is our major risk, I think you of course have to be judicious about the alerts you turn on and off, but when it comes to flooding, more is better,” she added. “For me, I’d rather know my risk. We’ll push out as much information as we can to make sure folks are making the best decisions, but we need folks to participate alongside us.”
Harris County’s flood warning system was developed in the 1980s with about 10 gauges and the public website launched in the early 2000s, Woodell said. The tool also offers a way to look at what was happening in a particular area during major flood events. For example, within four days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in August 2017, some of the gauges show up to 31 inches of rainfall.
“If you’re making decisions about where to put your office or where to buy a home, you can look at these historical conditions,” Woodell said. “[If a high rainfall count is recorded], this doesn’t mean a home flooded but it certainly means that water was high in that area.”
A perk of the flood warning system is that it’s personal and can be tailored to specific areas, Woodell added.
“Arming yourself with that granularity of information is really important,” she said. “It really helps people make good decisions. That’s what it’s all about, right, is people being safe.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
