Houston has a flooding problem. Beryl is further proof that it is difficult to solve this problem.

Piles of trash along the pillars of a highway bridge marked the height of floodwaters along White Oak Bayou in the Houston Heights neighborhood. Police barricades showed where a driver abandoned his vehicle in fast-rising waters on Jensen Drive in Kashmere Gardens. In Meyerland, sheets of water remained in the storm’s wake, but many homes in the stately neighborhood were raised after Hurricane Harvey ravaged them in 2017, keeping Beryl’s damage to a minimum.

Beryl probably won’t go down in history as one of Houston’s most devastating floods, not even this year. Still, the hurricane was a reminder that the nation’s fourth-largest city faces a serious flooding problem.

The problem persists despite billions of dollars in investment and years of flood-control projects. And the challenge could get worse as climate change makes storms stronger and brings more intense rainfall to a flat, low-lying and sprawling metropolitan area.

“When it comes to our streets, it’s important to remember that our primary drainage mechanism in this city is our streets,” Randy Macchi, Houston’s public works operations director, said at a news conference this week. “For better or worse, that’s the reality of the situation.”

The fact that Beryl’s flooding wasn’t particularly notable shows how ongoing the problem is, said Ben Hirsch, co-director of West Street Recovery, a disaster recovery and environmental justice organization that works in five ZIP codes in northeast Houston.

“I think if this storm had happened in any other part of the United States, people would describe it as a flood disaster,” Hirsch said Wednesday. “There’s a kind of numbness that sets in; people get used to it. But at the same time, they kind of suffer from it.”

The Biden administration on Wednesday finalized a policy aimed at ensuring that taxpayer-funded projects such as bridges, schools and other public buildings take into account not only past flooding, but also worsening flooding that could occur in the future.

The goal, officials said, is to make the country’s infrastructure more resilient in an era of climate change and avoid the cycle of repeated flooding and rebuilding that has occurred in the past.

“Climate change has exacerbated flood risks across the country, particularly as they relate to sea level rise,” Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell said in announcing the new policy.

But in Houston, flooding problems are not new and are partly the result of decisions made over generations.

“Even before the growth, we’ve always lived in a swamp. People who came before us knew we needed to build this flood control infrastructure, and we don’t have anywhere near the infrastructure that we need,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the executive director of the jurisdiction that includes Houston, told The Washington Post this week. “This is another kick in the butt to get everybody to really make this a priority.”

As Beryl blew, local authorities conducted 56 rescues of people caught in the high water, acting Houston Police Chief Larry Satterwhite told reporters Tuesday.

Russell Richardson, a 54-year-old Houston Police Department employee, died after his vehicle was caught in fast-moving floodwaters Monday on Houston Avenue near Interstate 45 as he was driving to work, authorities said.

Flooding is the region’s No. 1 disaster, according to the Harris County Flood Control District, created by the Texas Legislature in 1937. Despite what the agency calls a “$4 billion network of in-ground flood damage reduction infrastructure,” Houston faces enormous flood risks, some of which were exposed once again by Beryl.

There are many reasons why Houston is so prone to flooding. One is its terrain: it is relatively flat and has a slow flow rate, making it difficult to drain the massive amounts of water that can fall during hurricanes, tropical storms, and other heavy rains.

These are the types of events that are expected to become more intense and more frequent in a warmer world, in which warming air carries more moisture.

There is still no more devastating example of flooding in Houston than Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which dumped between 30 and 40 inches of rain and flooded an estimated 154,170 homes in Harris County, the majority of them outside the 100-year flood plain.

But when Harvey hit, it was the third time in three years that rainfall exceeded a level that, based on historical climate models, could be expected once every 500 years.

There was major flooding on Memorial Day and Halloween in 2015, as well as Tax Day and Memorial Day in 2016. Further flooding occurred on Independence Day in 2018 and in September 2019, when Tropical Storm Imelda made landfall in Houston.

Beryl’s rainfall was less than some of those storms, but the hurricane still dumped about a foot of water across much of the region. And it came after a wave of more severe storms: In May, heavy rains flooded homes and required rescues of about 400 people. Weeks later, a devastating windstorm known as a derecho hit Houston.

Repeated flooding, along with the influence of sea level rise, means water tables are higher and the ground is often more saturated, said Richard Rood, professor emeritus of climate and space science and engineering at the University of Michigan.

“You get to a point where you have nowhere to put the water,” Rood said.

There’s also the issue of rampant development. A 2020 study by Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research found that the Houston metropolitan area’s ecological footprint increased by 63% between 1997 and 2017, during which time nearly 187,000 football fields of impervious surfaces such as concrete and asphalt were added to the area.

“Impervious surfaces don’t absorb heavy rainfall in the same way that natural landscapes do, let alone how elevation changes and diverted waterways reshape watersheds,” the researchers wrote. “Without nature’s supersponges, water can flow unimpeded.”

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, Harris County voters overwhelmingly passed a $2.5 billion bond measure to fund numerous flood control projects around Houston.

The bonds have funded drainage systems and water retention basins as well as projects to improve natural flood prevention, including planting vegetation along bayou banks and trees throughout the city. Houston has even taken the initiative to buy out some residents of flood-prone homes, transforming these vulnerable lots into open space.

These works have helped alleviate flooding in some of the most notorious locations, but even officials acknowledge that it is virtually impossible to prevent all flooding in a slowly draining landscape and in an area that can experience massive amounts of rainfall.

There is talk and study of building huge tunnels to carry floodwaters, adding a third flood-control reservoir on the prairie west of Houston, or digging Buffalo Bayou deeper and wider to safely drain more water from existing reservoirs. But these projects are complicated, expensive, and controversial.

Even Beryl’s relatively brief flooding, which caused less damage than many past storms, led the Houston Chronicle this week to publish an editorial arguing that addressing the city’s long-term water challenges and other priorities will require even more investment — and perhaps additional taxes.

Under the headline “Beryl reminds us we can’t have good drainage without paying,” the newspaper wrote that although voters have approved a “safe deposit box” for drainage funding in the past, rising costs and other factors mean more will be needed.

“When our bayous overflow, when ditches and gutters overflow and what shouldn’t be a view of the water from our living room windows suddenly is,” the newspaper wrote, “the mayor should seize the opportunity to take the lead and prepare voters to approve tax increases to build the infrastructure we need to withstand bigger, stronger and more frequent storms.”

Only then will the city be better prepared for what lies ahead, the newspaper argues.

“The best use of taxpayers’ money and our own money is not to clean up and restore, but to prevent damage. This money is not spent in gusts of wind, but consistently, over decades, even during periods of good weather.”

Molly Hennessy-Fiske contributed to this report.