HOUSTON — KHOU 11 News Chief Meteorologist David Paul and KHOU 11 News Meteorologist Brooks Garner record a retrospective about the historical and very active 2017 hurricane season.
The transcript follows below:
David: What a historic hurricane season.
Brooks: Harvey, my gosh.
David: And you can trace back the beginnings of Harvey to just this little tropical wave.
Brooks: One which we wrote off as it emerged from Africa because it was sitting in the middle of all that Saharan dust.
David: August the 12th, it emerged and then it beats the dust.
Brooks: It survived!
David: And on August 17th, it became a tropical storm.
Brooks: Briefly lived, I thought the dust won. A couple of days later, the Hurricane Center discontinued advisories as the thing loses all spin.
David: The Hurricane Center had given a final advisory on it... but Dr. Neil Frank always reminds us to never write off even the smallest of storms. And then, on August 23rd, Harvey redeveloped in the Gulf of Mexico.
Brooks: Boom, Harvey became a category four seemingly overnight, for the fastest intensification to that level in recent memory.
David: It made landfall on August 25th. It started flooding Houston on August 26th, and that rainfall, the totals, and the rainfall rate, ten inches fell, in your Pearland neighborhood in an hour and a half!
Brooks: Incredible, this thing submerged half a million cars, three hundred thousand homes, the greatest multi-day rain event in U.S. history.
David: And now, it's part of this hurricane season where we ended up with four storm names being retired.
Brooks: Harvey, Jose...
David: Irma, Maria.
Brooks: Puerto Rico, we can't forget what happened in Puerto Rico.
David: It was just an incredible hurricane season in 2017.
Brooks: With Harvey, it wasn't the wind that got us, it was the rain. That seemed to be the tenor of these tropical systems in this part of Texas.
David: It's another big reminder that.. from the small ones to the big ones, one of the biggest risks is flooding.