Boomtown, Flood Town

HOUSTON — For the third time in eight years, water gushed into Virginia Hammond’s northwest Houston home.

An aerial shot of downtown Houston
during the "Tax Day Flood" in April. 

It was 2 a.m. on April 18. Over the next several hours, her two granddaughters — ages 12 and 15 — perched on tables, scared to put their feet in the dark gray floodwater rising below them. It nearly topped 3 feet.

“They couldn’t get in the beds because the beds were wet. They couldn’t go to the bathroom because the water was over the toilet bowl,” Hammond recalled.

“We were in there, well, trapped.”

The storm that pummeled Hammond’s modest brick home — nicknamed the “Tax Day” flood because it fell on the deadline to file federal income taxes — came just 11 months after another, on Memorial Day 2015, that also crippled the city.

Read the Texas Tribune story - “Boomtown, Flood Town.”

India’s Silicon Valley Is Dying of Thirst. Your City May Be Next

On the outskirts of Bangalore one morning last summer, a sullen young man named Manjunath stood high atop a cocoa-colored 1,850-gallon tanker truck, waiting for its belly to fill with water. The source of the liquid was a bore well, a cylindrical metal shaft puncturing hundreds of feet down into the earth. An electric pump pulled the water up from the depths and into a concrete cistern; from there, a hose snaked across the mud and weeds and plugged into Manjunath’s truck. As the water gushed into the tanker, a muffled sound emerged, like rain on a tin-sheet roof.

 As groundwater wells run dry, the task
 of supplying Bangalore’s residents and
office parks has been taken up by privately
 operated tanker trucks.

Once the tank was full, Manjunath disconnected the hose, climbed down, and settled into the truck’s cab. Then he drove out through a web of newly tarred back streets in the suburb of Whitefield. He passed rows of half-finished buildings, still gray from raw cement, and he honked often so that motorcycles and pedestrians could scurry out of the way. Whitefield’s roadways are almost always coagulated with traffic. Over the past two decades, the area has become home to major outposts of Oracle, Dell, IBM, and GE, as well as countless IT parks—proud, gleaming edifices that Uber drivers here recognize as major landmarks. When people describe Bangalore as India’s Silicon Valley, they’re really talking about White­field. From the altitude of the truck’s cab, though, Whitefield looked somewhat less impressive—smaller and flimsier, even more starved for space than it already was.

Read the Wired story by Samanth Subramanian  - "India’s Silicon Valley Is Dying of Thirst. Your City May Be Next.”