Local News

Harvey Rainfall Would Fill NFL Football Stadiums

August 28, 2017 / 6:57 PM EDT / CBS Detroit

click to expand

HOUSTON (AP) — A meteorologist has calculated that by the end of Wednesday Harvey will have saturated southeast Texas with enough water to fill all the NFL and Division 1 college football stadiums more than 100 times over.

Ryan Maue of WeatherBell Analytics says that already 15 trillion gallons (57 trillion liters) of rain have fallen on a large area, and an additional 5 trillion (19 trillion liters) or 6 trillion gallons (23 trillion liters) are forecast by the end of Wednesday.

An Army Corps of Engineers official said Monday that Harvey is bringing amounts of rainfall seen only once in a thousand years.

[Hurricane Harvey: Ways You Can Help In Houston]

Edmond Russo, a Corps deputy district engineer for Texas, made the comment at a Houston news conference Monday

Two dams — at Barker Reservoir and Addicks Reservoir — protecting downtown Houston and under the Corps' management are built to withstand 1,000-year floods. Some levees in outlying areas are designed to protect against flooding that happens every 100 or 200 years.

Meteorologists say that sometime Tuesday or early Wednesday parts of the Houston region will break the nearly 40-year-old U.S. record for the biggest rainfall from a tropical system — 48 inches, set by Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978 in Texas.