Houston storm history · May 25 – 26, 2015

Memorial Day Flood

An overnight downpour over southwest Houston that sent Brays Bayou over its banks and flooded thousands of homes in Meyerland and nearby neighborhoods.

Every bayou, hour by hour

0 ft 14 ft 28.9 ft (this storm's peak) no reading Every cell is a real archived USGS reading for that bayou, that hour — nothing is interpolated between gauges. Color scale is calibrated to this storm alone; it is not comparable across different storms. Hover a cell for the exact value.

On the night of Memorial Day, May 25, 2015, a slow-moving line of thunderstorms settled over southwest Harris County and Fort Bend County. Rain totals reached 8 to 10 inches in three to six hours, and about 11 inches fell over Brays Bayou near Beltway 8 in just over six hours. Most of it fell between late evening and the early morning of May 26, while people were asleep.

Brays Bayou took the worst of it. The bayou rose past its banks through Meyerland, Braeswood, Westbury and neighborhoods along North and South Braeswood Boulevard. Water poured into homes that sat close to the channel. The Keegans Bayou and Buffalo Bayou watersheds also flooded, as did freeways and underpasses across the southwest side, where many drivers were trapped.

Thousands of homes flooded, most of them inside the City of Houston. Flood managers later ranked the event among the largest in the county's history for the number of homes affected. Eight people died.

Meyerland became closely tied to the flooding risk along Brays Bayou. Many of the same homes flooded again in the Tax Day Flood a year later and again during Harvey in 2017. That pattern helped speed up Project Brays, a long-running partnership between the Harris County Flood Control District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to widen the bayou, add stormwater detention basins and replace bridges that constricted flow.

The Memorial Day flood showed how quickly an urban bayou can go from normal to dangerous. On the replay, Brays Bayou rises in a matter of hours, much faster than the multi-day build-up of a tropical system.

Sources

← Back to the map