From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

Bob Garfield is away. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Expectations based on historical precedent have been failing us all year.

They failed again this week as Hurricane Harvey super saturatedsaturated southeast Texas.

As the water rose in Houston and across Harris County,

reporters and meteorologists struggled to describe a deluge of nigh-on to biblical proportions.

He's already calling Harvey unprecedented and beyond anything experienced.

In Harris County alone, a trillion gallons of rain has fallen over four days, which is more than flows over Niagara Falls in two weeks.

I put this in perspective, the National Weather Service today added two new colors to its rainfall

charts, including light pink, which signals 30 inches or more, and 40 inches

have fallen in Dayton, Texans. There is some precedent, however, to the whole country watching

on in horror. Twelve years ago, nearly to the day, we were gripped by another disaster in the

Gulf called Katrina. And like Harvey,

that disaster exposed a flaw in engineering. In New Orleans, it was the levees. In Houston,

it's the city itself. Nina Satija is an investigative reporter and producer for the Texas

Tribune and reveal.

Last year, she co-wrote a piece called Boomtown Flood Town,

about unbridled development in Houston,

and what might happen if a big storm hit a city built on swamp and prairie?

It was a hauntingly prescient piece of reporting.

We can't predict where exactly rain will fall, how much rain will fall, and what rate it will

fall. So all we could say in our piece is that Houston is going to see one of these

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