Replacement work on the Yale St. bridge over White Oak Bayou now won’t start until the 25th, according to an update from TxDOT. The original planned construction start drifted past in the middle of Monday’s deluge; no changes have been mentioned yet for expected 2018 reopening date.
Meanwhile, TxDOT’s Yoakum office says it’s keeping an eye on US 59 in Wharton County to the southwest of town, though that highway is not closed at the moment according to the agency’s interactive mapping system (pictured above). The map shows areas of road closures, flooding, and construction, with written descriptions for each site clarifying which lanes are affected, by what, and how badly. Zooming in further gives a clearer picture of the extent of some of the closures — below is a view of west Houston, showing the stretch of Hwy. 6 near the Addicks reservoir that could be closed for the next 4 to 6 weeks:Â
Writes Cort McMurray of Monday’s flooding: “
“Every solid thing built in a floodplain displaces water to the surrounding areas and to downstream. Houston just keeps screwing its southeast neighbors.” [movocelot, commenting on 
The US Geologic Survey’s tracking of water collecting at the Addicks reservoir this week shows water levels jumping about 28 feet since yesterday morning, in the preliminary data graphed above. Both Addicks and Barker reservoirs, which function in large part as parkland when not busy storing potentially billion of gallons of floodwater, feed out into Buffalo Bayou near Hwy. 6 at Westheimer Dr. through dam outlets listed as 
“Last night I rode my bike over to an area of Meyerland that I 
“There actually are a few places in Houston that have never flooded and never will, due to strange and highly-localized factors. My house is one of those. I am up above the Hwy. 288 pit between 59 and Brays Bayou. Even during the worst floods, when cars were floating down there, the water would have had to come up another 25 feet, completely filling the pit with God-knows-how-many acre-feet of water, before my street would have been under water. Even then, the water would have had to climb another 5 feet up the hill in my front yard to reach my elevated house. This protection is a combination of close proximity to a huge man-made sink, the elevation of the grade of my lot when my house was constructed, and restrictions upstream that cause flooding in Meyerland but more-controlled flow downstream because of the upstream pinchpoints.” [
