You Are Standing in a Flooded Home Right Now, and the Clock the City Does Not Want You to Know About Started Six Months Ago
If you are reading this in Westbury, Chateau Forest, Meyerland, Bellaire, or anywhere across southwest Houston that has filled with water again — if you have ripped out wet carpet, hauled drywall to the curb, and listened to a National Flood Insurance Program adjuster explain why your claim is ‘still under review’ — there is one fact you need before you read another word.
Under Texas law, if you intend to pursue a claim against the City of Houston for a flooded street, a failed storm sewer, a backed-up drainage system, or any condition of public real property that damaged your home or business, you must serve written notice on the city within six months of the loss. The statute is Section 101.101 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, part of the Texas Tort Claims Act. It is not a suggestion. It is a condition precedent to suit. If you miss it, the courthouse door closes — and no lawyer on earth can reopen it.
That is the single most important date on your calendar. It is also the one the city will not remind you about.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Ralph Manginello has spent 27+ years trying cases in courtrooms, including federal court, and has represented Texas families in mass-tort and catastrophic-injury litigation ranging from refinery disasters to commercial-vehicle wrecks. Lupe Peña is a former insurance-defense attorney who spent years inside a national defense firm in the rooms where claims like yours are priced, denied, and delayed — and now sits on your side of the table, fully fluent in Spanish. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
This page exists because on June 17, 2026, the Houston City Council was scheduled to vote on six ordinances totaling $35,837,662.51 for street and drainage improvements. Public Works Director Randy Macchi called the figure “a drop in the bucket on what needs to be spent.” District A Councilwoman Amy Peck said the projects would help “many homeowners and businesses from flooding continuously.” Those two sentences, captured on the public record at 9 a.m. at Houston City Hall, are the beginning of your case. We are going to show you why — and what to do before the public record forgets you lived through this.
What the June 17, 2026 Vote Actually Means — and What It Does Not
The $35.8 million package is real money, and the projects named — drainage work in Westbury and Chateau Forest among others — are real projects. The meeting was scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. at Houston City Hall on Wednesday, June 17, 2026, with six ordinances on the agenda related to street and drainage work citywide.
Here is what the vote is: forward-looking capital spending. Detention ponds, neighborhood storm-sewer upgrades, the kind of reshaping Council Member Peck described when she said the projects would help homeowners “flooding continuously.”
Here is what the vote is not: retroactive compensation for people whose homes have already taken on water.
The distinction matters because the same news story that brought you here is the same one an insurance adjuster or a city attorney may try to wave in front of you as a reason to wait, settle cheap, or stay quiet. “The city is spending money on drainage, give them time.” That is a real argument, and we understand why it tempts people. It is also, in our experience as trial lawyers, the most expensive sentence a flooded homeowner can hear. The city can fund a $35 million drainage program and still owe your family for the water that destroyed your kitchen last Tuesday — those are two separate things, governed by two separate bodies of law, and you do not have to choose one over the other.
The vote is useful to your case for a different reason: it places the city’s own acknowledgment of chronic, foreseeable flooding on the public record, dated, in the voice of the city’s own Public Works director and a sitting council member. That is not a press release you have to chase down. It is in the council video, the agenda packet, and the meeting minutes — and we move to preserve those records immediately, before the routine retention cycle purges them.
Westbury, Chateau Forest, and the Rest of the Story the City Knows but Tells Quietly
Houston is flat. The water table is high. The bayous that drain the city — Addicks, Barker, Greens, Brays, White Oak, Sims, Hunting — were not engineered to move the volume of rain a 21st-century Gulf Coast storm can deliver, and the storm sewers beneath the residential streets were largely designed for a city half the size of the one sitting on top of them today. Add the impervious cover that comes with every new driveway, parking lot, and strip center, and the result is what southwest Houston residents have experienced repeatedly: the Memorial Day flood of 2015, the Tax Day flood of April 2016, Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, Tropical Storm Imelda in September 2019, and a steady drumbeat of lesser events that do not make the national news but flood the same streets, the same homes, the same lives.
Westbury sits in the southwest, in Council Member Amy Peck’s District A. It is a heavily residential area with a long, documented history of street and structural flooding tied to undersized storm sewers and limited detention. Chateau Forest — also District A, near the Sam Houston Tollway/Beltway 8 corridor — has a comparable record. The Meyerland and Bellaire neighborhoods to the east share the same watershed problems. So do pockets of Fondren Southwest, Gulfton, and Sharpstown.
When Council Member Peck told ABC13 that her constituents have responded positively to spending on drainage to reduce flooding impacts, she was describing a community that has been flooded before — repeatedly — and that expects to be flooded again. That expectation, voiced by a public official on the public record, is the kind of evidence that turns an “Act of God” defense into a “known and foreseeable danger” theory in front of a Harris County jury. The defense lawyers know this. That is part of why they work so hard to keep these cases from getting there.
The Four Things the City Already Knows About Your Street
- The drainage system is undersized. Storm sewers built in the 1960s and 1970s are still expected to handle rainfall that has increased in intensity and frequency.
- The detention is insufficient. Without adequate ponds and channels to hold stormwater before it reaches the bayou, the system surges and backs up.
- Your street has flooded before. 311 complaint logs, service requests, and prior flood reports live inside the city’s own systems. They are producible. We demand them.
- The flooding was foreseeable. That is the City’s own admission in the language Director Macchi and Council Member Peck used on June 17, 2026. Foreseeability is the death of immunity in a premises-liability case.
The Six-Month Deadline That Can Bar Your Case — and the Statute Word for Word
Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 101.101 (a): “A governmental unit is entitled to receive notice of a claim against it under this chapter only as provided by this section.” (b): “A person may not sue a governmental unit under this chapter unless: (1) the person gives written notice of the claim as provided by this section to the responsible governmental unit; and (2) the governmental unit does not request the attorney general to set a hearing on the claim within the period specified by Section 101.102.” (c): “The notice must reasonably describe: (1) the damage or injury claimed; (2) the time and place of the incident; and (3) the incident itself.” (e): “The notice must be given not later than the sixth month after the day that the incident giving rise to the claim occurred.”
Read that last subsection again. Not later than six months. Not “within a reasonable time.” Not “as soon as practicable.” Six months from the day of the incident, in writing, to the responsible governmental unit. For the City of Houston, that notice goes to the city secretary, who logs it and routes it to the city attorney’s office. The form does not have to be the city’s form. The format does not have to be magic. But the content must do three things: describe the damage or injury, describe when and where, and describe the incident. Get any of those three wrong and the city will move to dismiss on notice grounds. Get the date wrong and you are out of court before you ever file.
The statute does not pause for insurance negotiations. It does not pause for the FEMA appeal. It does not pause because you are waiting on a contractor estimate. It does not pause because you trusted an adjuster who told you they would “take care of everything.” Six months is six months. If you are reading this within that window, we move this week.
What Section 101.102 Adds — the 60-Day Waiting Period
Section 101.102 of the Texas Tort Claims Act imposes a second, quieter deadline. After the city receives your § 101.101 notice, you must wait 60 days before you can file suit. That waiting period is the legislature’s gift to the city: time to investigate, time to make an offer, time to prepare. If you file before the 60 days run, the case gets dismissed without prejudice — meaning you can refile, but you have wasted the calendar and signaled your strategy to the defense. We time the notice so the 60 days run while the city’s own investigation is producing records we want anyway.
The Stowers Demand and Pre-Suit Settlement Letter
In Texas, a pre-suit settlement letter — known as a Stowers demand after the 1924 case that created the doctrine — is a written offer that, if unreasonably rejected, exposes the defendant to liability for the plaintiff’s post-offer attorneys’ fees, court costs, and sometimes additional damages. A properly drafted Stowers letter in a Houston flood case does three things: it preserves the § 101.101 notice, it preserves the § 101.102 waiting period, and it creates the record that the city had a chance to settle fairly and chose not to. The jury hears about that later. It matters.
Three Legal Theories That Actually Work in Houston Drainage Cases
Flood cases against Texas cities are not hopeless. They are technical, they have real caps, and they require a specific kind of proof — but the theories are well-established in Texas law. Here is how each one operates, in plain English, so you understand what you actually have before you commit to a fight.
1. Premises Liability Under § 101.021 (the Waiver of Immunity)
The Texas Tort Claims Act waives sovereign immunity — meaning it gives you the right to sue a governmental unit that would otherwise be untouchable — in limited circumstances. Section 101.021(2) provides that a governmental unit is liable for personal injury or death caused by a condition of real property or tangible personal property if the governmental unit would, were it a private person, be liable under Texas law. That is the premises-liability hook.
A chronically flooded street, a blocked storm sewer, a missing or undersized drainage grate, an inadequate detention pond — these are conditions of real property. Under Texas premises law, a landowner (here, the City of Houston) owes a duty to people on or near the property when the landowner knows or should know of a dangerous condition and fails to take reasonable steps to address it. The case turns on notice: did the city know, and when did it know?
That is why the 311 logs, the prior engineering studies, the budget files, the prior flood complaints, and the council meeting video matter so much. They prove notice. The 311 system alone is years of complaints from your neighbors and you, time-stamped, address-tagged, and producible through the Texas Public Information Act.
2. Inverse Condemnation Under Article I, Section 17 of the Texas Constitution
The Texas Constitution’s Takings Clause says private property shall not be taken for public use without adequate compensation. Texas courts have long recognized that when government action — including a drainage design that physically damages property or substantially impairs its value — amounts to a taking, the property owner is entitled to just compensation even if the government did not intend to take the property. The leading precedent is City of Austin v. Teague, and the doctrine has been applied repeatedly to flooding cases where a city’s drainage choices, road-building, or development approvals caused or worsened damage to private land.
Inverse condemnation is the theory that can pierce some of the damage caps that apply to premises-liability claims against the city. It is not subject to the $250,000 noneconomic damages cap in § 101.023 because it sounds in constitutional taking, not in tort. It is also subject to a different procedural posture — and, importantly, it can be brought directly in district court against the city without the same restrictions. For chronically flooded homeowners whose property values have collapsed because the city has known about and allowed the problem for years, inverse condemnation is often the strongest theory available.
3. Special Defects Under § 101.022
Section 101.022 of the Tort Claims Act imposes heightened duties — and in some circumstances actual-notice-or-repair liability — when a condition of public property poses “an extreme degree of risk.” Raised or sunken pavement, a washed-out culvert, a drainage grate that has collapsed into a sinkhole during a rain event — these are the kinds of conditions Texas courts have treated as special defects. When the city knew or should have known about the condition, and a member of the public is injured as a result, the case does not require the same kind of discretionary-act immunity defense the city usually leans on.
In a flooding case, special-defect theory often applies when a pedestrian, cyclist, or motorist is injured by a sudden, severe roadway failure during or immediately after a rain event — a collapsed grate that swallowed a wheel, a washout that flipped a vehicle, a sinkhole that opened without warning. The proof is the city’s inspection records, the prior complaints, and the engineering standard the city itself adopted in its Infrastructure Design Manual.
Damage Caps, Election of Remedies, and How to Push Past Them
The Texas Tort Claims Act imposes real caps on recovery against governmental units, and the city’s first settlement offer usually reflects them. Here is the honest math.
Section 101.023 caps noneconomic damages (pain, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life) at $250,000 per person, indexed for inflation. Section 101.104 caps total liability against a single governmental unit at $100,000 per occurrence and $300,000 per person. Those numbers are the reason a single homeowner with a flooded kitchen is fighting uphill against a $250K ceiling, and the reason a wrongful-death case against the city alone rarely produces a headline verdict.
Here is what the city will not tell you in the first conversation: those caps apply to claims under the Tort Claims Act, not to inverse-condemnation claims under the Texas Constitution. They also do not cap your recovery against private defendants — developers, contractors, engineering firms, landlords, or commercial property owners who may share responsibility for the flooding. The strategy of a well-built Houston flood case is to pursue the city under premises liability for what the caps allow, pursue inverse condemnation for what the caps do not, and join every private defendant whose conduct contributed to the loss.
If you were injured — electrocuted by downed power, swept into a flooded storm drain, drowned in a stalled vehicle on a flooded roadway — your medical bills, lost wages, and future care are not capped in the same way that noneconomic damages are, and the wrongful-death and survival statutes under § 71.002 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code apply in fatal cases. Punitive damages are recoverable against private defendants on clear-and-convincing evidence under § 41.003, although they are not recoverable against the governmental unit itself. The math is real, but it is not the whole story.
The Election-of-Remedies Trap
Section 101.106 of the Tort Claims Act requires that if you sue both a governmental unit and an employee of that unit, you must elect which one to take judgment against at the end of the case. This is technical, and getting it wrong can eliminate part of your recovery. We plan the case structure early to keep that election from being a trapdoor.
The First 72 Hours After a Flood — A Checklist You Can Print
What you do in the first three days after the water recedes often determines what your case is worth a year later. This is the sequence we walk every client through.
- Document the damage before you touch anything. Photograph and video every room, every wall, every piece of damaged property, with your phone’s metadata enabled (the date and time stamp and the GPS coordinates if available). Capture the waterline on the walls. Capture the street, the curb, the storm drains, the nearest bayou or channel — whether it was full, whether water was flowing back toward your home. Capture from multiple angles, and have a friend or neighbor capture your property from outside so the chain of custody is unambiguous.
- Do not sign anything from the city’s buyout or relocation program without an attorney. A quick offer from the city or a developer can feel like a lifeline when you have lost everything. It can also be a release that ends your right to pursue inverse condemnation or join private defendants. Read it with us first.
- Do not give a recorded statement to any insurance adjuster. Your homeowners carrier, your flood carrier, the NFIP adjuster, and the city all want a recorded statement, and each will use it against you in a different way. A recorded statement is not required to file a claim, and it is rarely required to keep a claim alive.
- Do not let a contractor demolish or remove anything before it is documented. Even well-meaning contractors will tear out drywall, pull up flooring, and discard soaked furniture before you have proof of what was damaged and how badly. Tell them the property is part of an active insurance claim and that documentation is required before removal. We can put that in writing for you.
- Preserve any physical evidence. A piece of failed drainage grate, a section of collapsed curb, a piece of pavement that washed out — these are evidence. Bag and tag them with the date and the location where they were found.
- File a 311 service request if you have not already. That creates a city record, time-stamped, that the condition was reported.
- Send written notice to the city secretary under § 101.101 within days, not weeks. We draft and serve it. It does not commit you to a lawsuit. It preserves the date.
- Open a claim with every carrier that may owe coverage — homeowners, flood (NFIP or private), auto if a vehicle was damaged, and umbrella if you have one. Each policy is a separate pocket.
- Call us before you call the news. Media coverage is sometimes useful, but it can also be used against you. We will tell you when and how to speak publicly.
“A Drop in the Bucket” — How the City’s Own Words Become Evidence in Your Case
Public Works Director Randy Macchi, on the record the morning of June 17, 2026: “That’s actually a drop in the bucket on what needs to be spent.”
Council Member Amy Peck, on the record the same morning: “These projects will help many homeowners and businesses from flooding continuously.”
These are admissions against interest. They are made by officials with personal knowledge of the city’s drainage system. They are dated, time-stamped, and preserved in the council video, the agenda packet, the meeting minutes, and the KTRK news story that broke the news. Texas Rule of Evidence 801(e)(2) treats statements by a party-opponent — including its agents and employees speaking on the subject of their employment — as non-hearsay and admissible for the truth of the matter asserted. A city’s own public-works director calling a $35 million drainage package “a drop in the bucket” on the day it is announced is, in a courtroom, a city official conceding that the city’s drainage investment is insufficient. A council member describing her constituents as people who are “flooding continuously” is a city official conceding that the flooding is recurrent, not a one-time surprise.
These statements matter because the city’s standard defense in a flood case is that the rainfall was an Act of God — a one-in-a-thousand-year event no reasonable municipality could have prepared for. Foreseeability is the death of that defense. When the city’s own officials are saying on camera that the flooding is continuous, the infrastructure is underfunded, and the current spending is a fraction of what is needed, the foreseeability record is built. The jury hears the city’s voice. That is something you cannot buy, and it is something we move to preserve immediately.
Evidence Preservation — What Exists, Who Holds It, How Fast It Disappears
The single most expensive mistake in a Houston flood case is letting the evidence die on a routine retention cycle. Here is what we move to preserve and how fast it can be lost.
City of Houston Public Works Maintenance and Complaint Logs
The City of Houston tracks drainage complaints through its 311 system, its Service-Units-Notification (SUN) system, and internal Public Works maintenance logs. These records are producible through a Texas Public Information Act request under Tex. Gov’t Code Ch. 552, but the retention window is short — typically two to three years, with routine purges during system upgrades. A preservation letter to Public Works stops the clock. We send it the day you call.
Harris County Flood Control District Records
HCFCD holds the watershed models, gauge data, detention reports, and channel-capacity studies that an expert hydrologist will use to prove causation between the city’s drainage choices and the damage to your property. These are public records, but older studies are sometimes retired to off-site storage where retrieval becomes expensive and slow. We request them early.
The June 17, 2026 Council Agenda, Ordinances, and Meeting Video
This is the one-time, dated record of what the city said about its drainage system on the morning it approved a $35 million fix. The KTRK news story captures the key quotes. The city council video and the agenda packet capture everything else. We preserve all three: the news broadcast, the city’s own video, and the ordinances as adopted. Routine council videos can be rotated out of public-facing servers during platform upgrades; we move to download and archive them.
Photos, Videos, and Drone Footage
Time- and date-stamped imagery of the flood event and the resulting damage is the single most persuasive demonstrative evidence you can offer a Harris County jury. Metadata is essential — the date, time, and GPS coordinates that defeat any authenticity challenge. Capture as much as you can, as fast as you can, before cleanup, demolition, or regrading destroys the conditions. If you have already cleaned up, we can still work with what you have, and we can sometimes reconstruct the conditions with an expert site visit and drone mapping.
Insurance Communications and Claim Files
Every email, text, recorded statement, adjuster’s note, and estimate becomes part of the record. NFIP claims are governed by their own procedural rules, but the underlying communications are still discoverable in any subsequent litigation. We coordinate the insurance claim and the tort claim so they do not undermine each other, and we send litigation-hold letters to every carrier the day you retain us.
The Insurance Carrier Playbook — and How to Beat It
Whether your loss is covered by an NFIP policy, a private flood policy, your homeowners carrier, or some combination of all three, the carrier on the other end of the claim has a playbook it has run on hundreds — sometimes thousands — of Houston flood cases. Here are the plays. Here is the counter to each.
Play 1: The Quick Lowball
The adjuster calls within 72 hours, sounds sympathetic, and offers a number that is supposed to feel like relief. The number is almost always a fraction of the actual repair cost, often calculated against a stripped-down scope of work that omits code upgrades, mold remediation, alternative housing, and contents. Counter: Do not accept an offer before a licensed contractor has produced a detailed, line-item estimate that complies with current building code. We negotiate against the contractor’s number, not the adjuster’s.
Play 2: The Recorded Statement Trap
The carrier wants a recorded statement early, when you are still upset, still in shock, still unsure exactly what was damaged. The statement is engineered to lock you into a version of events that minimizes the loss. Counter: A recorded statement is not required to keep a claim alive. If you give one, do it only after preparation, with counsel, and never alone in a room with an adjuster who is not on your side.
Play 3: The Coverage Gap Exploitation
Was it flood or was it surface water? Was it wind-driven rain or was it rising water? Was it a sewer backup or was it a flood? The line between covered and excluded can be the entire value of the case, and carriers will spend aggressively to argue you across it. Counter: An expert hydrologist can usually reconstruct the mechanism of the damage and place it inside coverage. We coordinate that expert early.
Play 4: The Mold and Pre-Existing Condition Attack
If you developed a respiratory illness, a mold exposure, or any chronic condition after the flood, the carrier will argue it was pre-existing, unrelated, or aggravated by your own delay in mitigation. Counter: Medical records from before the flood, prompt documentation of post-flood symptoms, and an occupational-medicine or environmental-medicine expert are the standard responses. We work with the right specialist on every case.
Play 5: The Buyout Pressure
When the damage is severe enough that repair costs approach the value of the home, the carrier or the city may push for a total-loss buyout at a discounted number. Counter: A buyout ends your right to sue for the full loss. It also ends your right to pursue inverse condemnation. We evaluate the long-term math before any release is signed, and we can almost always get more than the first offer.
Play 6: The Slow-Walk
The carrier stops returning calls. The estimate is “still in review.” The check is “in the mail.” Counter: Litigation hold letters and pre-suit demands are designed to break the slow-walk. Under Texas insurance law, including the Prompt Payment of Claims Act in Tex. Ins. Code Ch. 542, an unreasonable delay can carry its own penalties. We do not let the calendar run in the carrier’s favor.
How We Build a Houston Flood Case — The Proof Story, Step by Step
Here is how a serious Houston flood case actually moves, week by week, the way we run them at our firm.
Week One: Lock the Door on the Evidence
The day you retain us, we send litigation-hold letters to the City of Houston Department of Public Works, the Harris County Flood Control District, the Texas Department of Transportation where relevant, and every insurance carrier with a possible interest. We open a Texas Public Information Act sweep that targets the city’s 311 logs, the SUN complaint records, the maintenance and inspection history for the storm sewers serving your street, and any prior engineering studies or drainage complaints for the area. We also preserve the June 17, 2026 council video and agenda packet.
Week Two to Four: Document the Property and Engage Experts
Drone and on-site photography with metadata. A licensed professional engineer specializing in hydrology and hydraulics inspects the property, the street, the storm sewers, and the receiving channel. A meteorologist reconstructs the rainfall event. A cost-to-cure valuation expert puts a number against the repair scope that the adjusters cannot ignore. Where personal injury is involved, a life-care planner and economist project the medical and wage-loss future. Where mold or waterborne illness is alleged, an environmental-medicine specialist enters the picture.
Month One to Three: Serve the Tort Claims Notice and Open Negotiation
We draft and serve the § 101.101 notice on the city secretary, with a Stowers demand attached. The 60-day post-notice waiting period under § 101.102 begins. During that period, the city investigates. So do we. We exchange documents with the city’s adjusters, schedule the 30(b)(6) depositions of Public Works and HCFCD personnel, and prepare the inverse-condemnation theory in parallel.
Discovery: Build the Record
Written discovery targets the budget files for the projects approved June 17, 2026; the prior five years of drainage complaints at the affected address and within a half-mile; the engineering studies for any nearby street or drainage work; the inspection records for the storm sewers serving the property; and the personnel files of the District A engineering lead and any supervisor with knowledge of prior flooding at the location. We depose under Rule 199.2(b)(6) where individual testimony will not suffice.
Mediation and Resolution
Most Houston flood cases resolve before trial. A strong PIA record, a properly preserved notice, an expert report that pins causation to the city’s drainage choices, and a Stowers demand that the city chose not to accept — that combination produces settlements that respect the true value of the case. When it does not, we try the case to a Harris County jury that has lived through Harvey, the Tax Day flood, Memorial Day, and Imelda, and that knows exactly what a flooded street looks like.
Why Our Firm — and Why Now
Ralph Manginello has spent 27+ years trying cases in Texas courtrooms, including federal court, with a record of representing Texas families in mass-tort and catastrophic-injury litigation. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, and he explains a case the way a sharp friend would across the kitchen table. He has stood in front of juries against corporate defendants the size of mountains, including in the BP Texas City refinery-explosion litigation, and he has built a firm on the principle that a person in a legal emergency deserves someone who picks up the phone.
Lupe Peña grew up in Sugar Land with family roots tying to the King Ranch. He graduated from St. Mary’s University with a degree in international business and earned his law degree at South Texas College of Law Houston. Then he spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and the software they use decide how to deny, delay, and devalue claims like yours. He knows the playbook because he ran it. Now he runs it in reverse for the people on the other side of the table. He is fully fluent in Spanish, and our firm serves Houston’s Spanish-speaking families completely in the language they pray in. Hablamos Español.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The Texas Tort Claims Act’s six-month deadline does not wait for results, and neither should you. If your home or business has flooded in a Houston street or in a neighborhood where the city’s drainage failed, the date the clock started running is the day the water entered your property. The date the clock stops being your friend is six months later. If you are inside that window, the consultation is free, there is no fee unless we win, and we will tell you on the first call whether we are the right firm for your case.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. Reach us online through our case-evaluation form. Read about our practice areas at attorney911.com/law-practice-areas. If your loss involved a death in a flooded vehicle or storm drain, our wrongful-death practice carries the experience those cases demand. If you are living with mold illness, PTSD, or a brain injury from a flood-related event, our brain-injury team understands the long arc of those losses. For the insurance-coordination side of any flood claim, our insurance-claim practice handles the carrier end. And for what to do in the first hours after any major loss, our guide on what to do after an accident is a useful starting point — and our plain-language breakdown of how contingency fees work answers the question every family asks before they sign anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
I was flooded in Westbury last week. How long do I have to sue the City of Houston?
Six months from the day of the flood to serve written notice under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 101.101. That is a hard deadline. The two-year personal-injury statute of limitations under § 16.003 runs separately, but the § 101.101 notice comes first, and missing it forfeits your ability to sue the city regardless of what the two-year clock does. If the loss involved a death, the wrongful-death statute under § 16.003(b) is also two years from the date of death, with its own procedural requirements.
What does the Texas Tort Claims Act actually do?
It is the narrow window through which Texas allows lawsuits against governmental units like the City of Houston. The Act waives sovereign immunity in limited circumstances — including injuries caused by a condition of real property under § 101.021 and certain “special defects” under § 101.022 — and it imposes damage caps under § 101.023 ($250,000 noneconomic) and § 101.104 ($100,000 per occurrence / $300,000 per person total). It is the only path to a premises-liability claim against the city. It is not the only path against private defendants, and it is not the path for inverse-condemnation claims, which sound in the Texas Constitution.
What is inverse condemnation and how is it different from a tort claim?
Inverse condemnation is a constitutional claim under Article I, Section 17 of the Texas Constitution. It asks the court to treat government action that damages private property — including chronic flooding caused by inadequate drainage — as a taking for which just compensation is owed. Unlike a Tort Claims Act claim, inverse condemnation is not subject to the $250,000 noneconomic cap and can be brought directly in district court. For chronically flooded homeowners whose property values have collapsed because of a foreseeable, government-caused drainage failure, it is often the strongest theory in the case.
The city is spending $35 million on drainage. Doesn’t that help my case?
It helps prove foreseeability. The fact that the city is investing in drainage now is evidence that the problem was known and persistent — which strengthens your claim that the flooding was foreseeable and the city’s response was inadequate. The $35 million in capital spending is not, however, retroactive compensation for losses already suffered. Those are two separate things, and you do not have to choose one over the other.
I already gave the insurance adjuster a recorded statement. Is my case over?
No. A recorded statement is one piece of evidence. It is rarely outcome-determinative on its own, and it can often be explained, contextualized, or limited in the litigation that follows. The bigger mistakes — accepting a lowball offer, signing a release, demolishing the property before documentation, or missing the § 101.101 deadline — are far more difficult to undo. Bring us the statement, and we will assess what it actually says.
What if I was partly at fault for the damage?
Texas follows a modified comparative-fault rule under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 33.001. If your percentage of fault is 50% or less, your recovery is reduced by that percentage but not eliminated. If your percentage of fault is 51% or more, you recover nothing. Comparative fault is a fight the defense will press in every flood case — arguing, for example, that you should have purchased flood insurance, elevated your equipment, or moved your vehicles to higher ground. We build the record that anticipates that argument and minimizes its weight.
How long does a Houston flood case take?
Most resolve in 12 to 24 months. The § 101.101 notice and the § 101.102 60-day waiting period push the earliest filing out about eight months from the date of loss. Discovery typically runs another six to twelve months. Mediation resolves a substantial share of cases before trial. Trials in Harris County civil district court can take another six to twelve months from setting to verdict. Cases with catastrophic injury, wrongful death, or complex multi-defendant structures run longer.
What does it cost to hire your firm?
Contingency. You pay no attorney fee unless we recover for you. The consultation is free. There is no fee unless we win. Costs of litigation — filing fees, expert deposits, deposition transcripts — are advanced by the firm and recovered out of any settlement or verdict. If we do not recover, you do not owe us an attorney fee. The structure is the same one we use for our 18-wheeler, brain-injury, and wrongful-death clients, and it exists for one reason: a person who has just been flooded cannot also afford to pay a lawyer by the hour.
Can you handle a wrongful-death flooding case?
Yes. When a person drowns in a flooded vehicle, a flooded storm drain, or a flooded structure, the survival claim under § 71.002 belongs to the estate, and the wrongful-death claim belongs to the family members identified in the statute. We have pursued wrongful-death cases arising from industrial incidents, refinery events, and commercial-vehicle wrecks, and we coordinate with the right hydrology, accident-reconstruction, and forensic experts to build the liability case against the city, the county, and any private defendant whose conduct contributed to the loss. The damage caps under the Tort Claims Act apply against the city, which is one reason joining private defendants is often essential in a fatal flooding case.
What if the flood was caused by an upstream developer?
Texas law recognizes that private developers and engineering firms can be liable for contributing to increased impervious cover, inadequate on-site detention, or alteration of natural drainage patterns that exacerbate downstream flooding. Those claims are pursued in parallel with the municipal claim and are not subject to the Tort Claims Act caps. They are pursued in the same case, in the same court, against the same jury. The strategic question is sequencing — who do we name first, what discovery do we run first, and how do we position the case for the strongest settlement posture — and we answer it case by case.
What if my flood happened during a named storm — Harvey, Imelda, a tropical depression?
Named-storm cases often have their own procedural history, including multidistrict litigation (MDL) consolidation in state or federal court. The Harvey MDL, the Tax Day flood litigation, and other mass-flood proceedings have produced their own orders, deadlines, and bellwether schedules. If your case falls inside an MDL, the deadlines can be different from the standard § 101.101 six-month notice — sometimes shorter, sometimes longer, depending on the court’s pretrial orders. We evaluate that question on the first call and tailor the strategy to the specific docket your case may sit in.
If your home or business has taken on water in Westbury, Chateau Forest, Meyerland, Bellaire, or anywhere across the Houston region where a street, storm sewer, or drainage choice by the City of Houston or Harris County Flood Control District caused or contributed to the loss, the consultation is free, there is no fee unless we win, and the Texas Tort Claims Act’s six-month clock is already running. Reach us at 1-888-ATTY-911, through our case-evaluation form, or by reading more about how we approach these cases on our practice-areas page. Hablamos Español. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.