Houston, eight months in

October, 2018: To understand the trauma that residents who flooded in Hurricane Harvey still experience when it rains, it is helpful to understand how the flatness of the topography and the outdated floodwater infrastructure are unable to carry away the sheer mass of water that drops in rainstorms. Residents who grew up in the area described street flooding as a routine aspect of living in Houston. But the increased intensity and frequency of rainstorms, and the massive growth of the city that paves over green areas which previously absorbed and slowed some of the water, are new. I tried to capture the visceral quality of Houston’s tropical rainstorms, which were entirely new to me, with this video.