Flash Floods in Texas

How many times have you heard the television or radio alert, “We are now under a flash flood watch”? While the destructive force of flash flooding is a regular occurrence in the state and has caused a tremendous amount of damage and heartache over the years, no one until now has recorded in a single book the history of flash floods in Texas.

After combing libraries and archives, grilling county historians, trekking to flood sites, and collecting scores of graphic photographs, Jonathan Burnett chose twenty-eight floods from around the state to create this narrative of a century of disastrous events. Beginning with the famous Austin dam break of 1900 and ending with the historic 2002 flooding in the Hill Country, Burnett chronicles the causes and courses of these catastrophic floods as well as their costs in material damage and human lives.

Dramatic photographs of each event enhance the harrowing accounts of danger spawned by nature on a rampage. Together, the stories and the pictures give readers a vivid and lasting image of the power and unpredictability of flash floods in Texas.

“Burnett’s work does add appreciably to our knowledge of high-water events and their impact on the people of Texas. Virtually all of the information about such movements is buried in summary reports written by bureaucrats for specific purposes, or in local newspapers whose readership is greatly restricted. Burnett neatly compiles so much of this information in a form that is readily accessible and digestible. Moreover, his documentation is superlative.”–George W. Bomar, State Meteorologist