Texas’ Rio Grande Valley didn’t see last week’s historic storms coming

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EDINBURG — At 2 a.m. Friday, Rick Saldaña was traveling back to Edinburg from Mercedes, a city about 26 miles away, in an area known as the Mid-Valley.

The roads were flooded. The frontage roads that feed into the expressway resembled lakes. Hundreds of cars were abandoned by people unable to drive further.

The rain kept coming. Winds reached about 60 miles per hour and Saldaña could barely see anything.

"It came with a vengeance," he said.

Saldaña is the emergency management coordinator for Hidalgo County. In his office in Edinburg, county workers and staff from the Texas Division of Emergency Management were still just at the beginning of what is expected to be a long road to recovery.

The effects from the rainfall killed at least six people. Four died from drowning in the Valley and in Reynosa, Mexico, and two from a house fire suspected of starting from a lightning strike. Hundreds more required rescue from their flooded homes or vehicles. By Monday, three days after the storm, several neighborhoods still remained underwater.

Assessments of the total damage are still underway, but Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for the four counties of the Valley. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was on the ground Wednesday to make their assessment.

Preliminary reports suggest the damage and recovery totals from the flood would likely exceed $100 million, according to the National Weather Service Brownsville.

"We were predicted to get no more than one to two inches of rain," Saldaña said. "For whatever reason, it shifted. It shifted our way."

Big storms have hit the Rio Grande Valley region in South Texas before. The most recent in Saldaña’s memory was 2018. March and April when the seasons change can be precarious, he said.

"To me, those are scarier because you have no time to plan, versus with a hurricane, they give you ample time to start monitoring," he said. "These come in as surprises, and that's what happened. It surprised all of us."

Saldaña said the county has made significant strides in improving the drainage system since then by widening the drainage canals to expand the amount of water that can flow through them.

But what the area saw last week was a 100-year flood, he said.

"Our drainage system couldn't support it," he said. "It doesn't make a difference if you have the world's best drainage system."

Between March 26 and 28, the Valley received nearly 20 inches of rain, crushing prior daily,

multi-day, and monthly March records in many areas. In a few locations, the amount of rainfall even rivaled the all-time two-day record set by the historic Hurricane Beulah in 1967, according to Barry Goldsmith, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Brownsville.

Meteorologists knew rain was coming. The surprise was where it fell.

Forecasts had the storm over the Coastal Bend toward brush country, Goldsmith said.

"It wasn't until, really, within 12 hours that we were like 'Oh no, it's going toward the Valley now,'"he said.

Even at that point, they didn't know exactly which county or which portion of the Valley was going to get hit.

"It wasn't until the game was underway that we were able to tell people this is going to be really bad in parts of the Valley," he said.

A National Weather Service report on the storm acknowledged that their models were off, noting that even the areas predicted to be the strongest hit by the storm were only expected to receive 7-12 inches.

The report explained that the dynamics of the fast-flowing, high-altitude air currents — that are most typical in the Mid-Atlantic or Northeast regions of the U.S. — led to high-energy, recharging of the atmosphere that caused repeated rounds of rainfall and severe weather.

The heaviest rains fell in Cameron County which sustained the most damage where the Valley International Airport in Harlingen had to close for multiple days due to flooding on the runways. Other reports of severe weather included a tornado that briefly touched down in Hidalgo County.

The devastation extended to farmers as well.

Despite longing for rain to sustain their animals and crops during a prolonged period of drought, the huge volume of rain likely destroyed existing crops.

"Torrential storms produced devastating rainfall totals, causing widespread destruction and posing a severe threat to Valley residents, farmers, and ranchers," Sid Miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner, said in a statement. "In addition to extensive damage to homes, vehicles, and infrastructure, the region is also facing significant agricultural and livestock losses."

Sonny Hinojosa, water advocate with the Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2, said many crops were already up and the flooding likely killed those plants.

"Poor farmers, they're taking a beating," Hinojosa said. "First, they're short on irrigation water and then you get a flood event like this and it drowns whatever crop you have.”

There is a silver lining.

One of the reservoirs that provides water to Valley farmers, the Falcon International Reservoir, received 45,663 acre-feet of water from the rain, growing from 11.2% to 12.8% of its capacity.

It’s just a fraction, Hinojosa said. However, if the U.S. receives half of those gains, it could provide three to four weeks of irrigation water for farmers.

“They rose a bit,” Goldsmith said of the water levels at the Falcon reservoir. “But they're still well below what's needed to help improve the water resource situation that’s facing the Valley.”

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

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