Houston is America’s fourth-largest city, thanks in part to its embrace of unfettered growth. But its swagger got doused during the last week of August, when Hurricane Harvey dropped more than 50 inches of rain, bringing a drenched and debilitated southeast Texas to its knees.
While the wreckage from the storm in Texas and Louisiana was still being assessed in mid-September, preliminary estimates suggest that Harvey could turn out to be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history: $150 billion to $180 billion in damage, according to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
