The $35 Million Vote Is the City’s Confession. The 90-Day Notice Clock Is the Real Story.
You are reading this at 2 a.m., or you are reading it at lunch on a break from the dehumidifiers, or you are reading it while a contractor gives you a number you do not believe. Your street flooded. Maybe your garage, maybe your living room, maybe both. The water is gone now, or most of it, and what it left behind is a house that smells like a wet towel and a question you have not been able to answer: Is the city responsible for any of this?
You have probably seen the news by now. On June 17, 2026, the Houston City Council is set to vote on six ordinances totaling $35,837,662.51 for street and drainage projects, including specific work in Westbury and Chateau Forest. Public Works Director Randy Macchi called that amount a “drop in the bucket” on what the city actually needs. Councilwoman Amy Peck said the projects are meant to keep homeowners and businesses from “flooding continuously.” You may have thought, “Good — they’re finally doing something.”
They are. And that vote is good news for the next flood, whenever it comes. But it is also, in a way you may not have realized, an admission about the last one. And the city has imposed a deadline — a 90-day notice deadline, written into the Houston City Charter — that is almost certainly running against you right now and that almost no one has told you about.
That is the first thing we tell you on the phone, and it is the first thing we are going to tell you on this page. The free consultation is exactly that — free, and confidential, and you can reach us 24 hours a day at 1-888-ATTY-911. Before you read another word, if your property has flooded and you have not yet filed a Formal Notice of Claim with the City Secretary, that is what you need to know exists, and that is what we can help you file. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The rest of this page is the longer version — the law, the proof, the playbooks, the plan.
The $35 Million Vote Is Not a Gift. It Is a Recorded Admission.
When a government body votes to spend $35.8 million fixing a thing, it is saying two things at once. The first is forward-looking: we are going to make this better. The second is backward-looking: we know it is not better now, and we have known. In litigation against a municipality, the second sentence is the one that matters.
“That’s actually a drop in the bucket on what needs to be spent.” — Randy Macchi, Public Works Director, City of Houston, June 17, 2026 council agenda.
That quote is now part of the public record. It will appear in the Houston City Council minutes. It will be quotable in a courtroom. The Public Works Director has, on the record, characterized the city’s existing drainage infrastructure as inadequate relative to need. He is not a private citizen with an opinion; he is the head of the department that runs the system. When your lawyer stands up and tells a jury that the city admitted the system is broken, the city cannot pretend the statement was never made.
“These projects will help many homeowners and businesses from flooding continuously.” — Councilwoman Amy Peck, District A, June 17, 2026 council agenda.
Councilwoman Peck’s word — continuously — is even more important than she may have intended. The use of the word acknowledges that flooding in these neighborhoods is not a one-time event. It is recurring. That language directly contradicts any future city argument that the most recent storm was a freak, unforeseeable event. The city has been told, in its own council meeting, that the flooding is continuous in the affected neighborhoods.
This is the legal foundation we build your case on. The city’s strongest defense in any drainage case is “we did not know.” The June 17 vote, on the record, with the director’s own quote, destroys that defense before discovery even begins. The next three sections explain how we turn that public admission into a recovery for you.
Why Westbury and Chateau Forest — And Why the City Has Known for Years
Houston is built on flat coastal-plain terrain. The soil across most of the city is the black, expansive clay that locals call gumbo — it does not absorb water; it sheds it. Every drop of rain that falls on a Houston street has to be carried off in an engineered system: storm sewers that run under the streets, street-level conveyance (gutters, inlets, curb openings), and the bayou system that ultimately carries stormwater to Galveston Bay. The bayous — Buffalo Bayou, Brays Bayou, White Oak Bayou, Sims Bayou, Hunting Bayou, Vince Bayou — are the regional drainage backbone. The storm sewers are the local drainage backbone. When either is undersized relative to the development around it, water stops in the street, then in the yard, then in the house.
Westbury is a southwest Houston neighborhood of single-family homes, mature trees, and small commercial strips. Chateau Forest is in the northwest Houston corridor near U.S. 290, similarly residential, similarly older infrastructure. Both neighborhoods sit in parts of the city where development has added impervious surface — more roofs, more driveways, more paving — for decades, while the storm-sewer system beneath has not been proportionally upgraded. The bayou channels that receive that runoff have not been proportionally deepened or widened. The detention ponds that are supposed to slow stormwater before it enters the bayous have not been proportionally expanded. This is not a secret. The city maintains a Capital Improvement Plan — a list of drainage projects the engineers have identified as needed, ranked by priority. When a neighborhood appears in a $35 million drainage allocation, it is because it was already on the list. The question for your case is not whether the city knew; the question is how long the city knew and what it did — or did not do — with that knowledge while your house was being flooded.
This is the geography your case lives in. We pull the CIP history, the 311 service-request logs, the detention-basin as-built drawings, and the maintenance records. We map the water. We match the city’s prior knowledge to the date of your loss. The Houston of 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2024 — the years of major regional flood events — is part of the timeline. The city has had years of opportunity to act. The June 17 vote is what the city is finally doing about it. The June 17 vote is also, in the language of evidence, a confession about everything the city failed to do before it.
Can You Sue the City of Houston? The Texas Tort Claims Act and the Narrow Door
Texas is a sovereign-immunity state. A city cannot be sued unless the Texas Legislature has opened a door. The door for injury claims against a city is the Texas Tort Claims Act, found in Chapter 101 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code. The TTCA is not a general negligence statute. It is a list of narrow situations in which a city has agreed, in advance, to be sued. The relevant door for a flooding case is the premises-defect door.
Under the TTCA, a city can be liable for a personal injury or death caused by a condition of real property if the condition posed an unreasonable risk of harm and the city had actual or constructive knowledge of the risk. Where the defect is substantial — what the statute calls a special defect — the city does not get to claim it had no notice. A special defect is one of such size or character that it gives reasonable notice of danger on its own. A street that is known to pond two feet deep in a moderate rain is, by any reasonable measure, a special defect. The water is the notice.
For property damage, the same door applies. The TTCA also provides two crucial procedural rules that govern every claim against the city.
- Notice of claim. The Texas Tort Claims Act requires that a person present a claim to the governmental unit within a set time of the incident. The default under state law is 180 days. The City of Houston’s City Charter shortens that to 90 days. Miss the 90-day deadline, and the city will move to dismiss your lawsuit before a jury ever hears it. We explain how to file that notice in the next section.
- Damage caps. The TTCA caps recovery against a city at $250,000 per person and $500,000 per occurrence for bodily injury, and $100,000 per occurrence for property damage. These caps are real, and they are why the inverse-condemnation theory described below is so important.
There is a separate, broader door that does not run through the TTCA at all. It is the constitutional door. The Texas Constitution, Article I, Section 17, provides that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. When a city’s drainage system causes floodwater to invade private property — effectively using that property as part of the city’s stormwater system — Texas law recognizes a cause of action for inverse condemnation. That cause of action is constitutional, not statutory, and the TTCA caps do not necessarily apply to it. We discuss it in detail below, because it is the part of the case that does the heavy lifting when the damage is real and the cap is small.
The 90-Day Notice: The Deadline That Most Homeowners Never Hear About
You have 90 days from the date of the flooding to file a Formal Notice of Claim with the City of Houston. Not 90 days from when the city votes on a drainage project. Not 90 days from when your insurance company closes your claim. Not 90 days from when you finish your repairs. 90 days from the date the water entered your property. If the city can show that you missed that deadline, it can move to dismiss the suit — and a court will usually grant that motion, because the deadline is jurisdictional in practice for many claims.
The notice does not have to be complicated, but it does have to be specific. It must be filed with the City Secretary. It must include the claimant’s name and address, the date and location of the incident, a description of the injuries or property damage, and the amount of compensation being sought. The form is available from the City Secretary’s office. The filing creates a paper record at City Hall that the city cannot pretend it never received.
Here is the practical problem. Most homeowners do not learn about the 90-day deadline until they are well into the second or third month after the flood. They are busy. They are dealing with insurance. They are dealing with contractors. They are worried about mold. They are reading online forums that tell them to wait for the insurance company. By the time they find their way to a lawyer, the calendar has done what calendars do. We see this every month.
Here is what we do, and what you can do right now if you are reading this on day 45 and not day 89. The 90-day notice can be filed while the insurance claim is still open. It can be filed before the suit is filed. It can be filed without a lawyer, although we do not recommend that, because the wording matters and a defective notice can be challenged. We file these notices as part of the first week of representation. If you have already passed day 90, the question becomes whether the city can be shown to have had actual notice from some other source — a 311 call, a prior claim, prior litigation, a council member’s public statement — and whether any narrow exception applies. We will tell you honestly whether a late notice can be saved.
You can read more about how our contingency-fee structure works in any kind of injury case on our explainer on contingency fees. The short version: you do not pay us anything to file the 90-day notice. You do not pay us anything to take the case. We are paid only if we recover for you. The consultation is free. We will tell you on the call whether the case is one we can help with.
Inverse Condemnation: The Constitutional Bypass Around the $100,000 Property Damage Cap
The Texas Constitution, Article I, Section 17, is a single sentence with enormous consequences: “No person’s property shall be taken, damaged or destroyed for public use without adequate compensation being made, unless by the consent of such person.” That language — taken, damaged or destroyed — is the foundation of an inverse-condemnation claim. Inverse condemnation is what happens when the government takes or damages your property for a public purpose, but does not file a formal eminent-domain action. The property owner sues the government, instead of the other way around.
Flooding cases are a textbook setting for inverse condemnation. The argument runs like this. The City of Houston operates a regional stormwater system. That system is designed to move rainwater off public streets and into the bayous. When the system is undersized or poorly maintained, the excess water that the system cannot handle has to go somewhere. The water goes into homes. The homes sit in neighborhoods that the city has, by its own admission, decided to fix years after the damage began. The water that invaded the home was, in effect, being routed through the home as part of the city’s stormwater management. The homeowner provided the storage capacity the city failed to provide. The public got the benefit of the drainage. The homeowner bore the cost.
That is the taking. The public use is the city’s stormwater system. The just compensation is the cost to repair, the diminished value of the property, the rental value lost during repairs, the destroyed personal property, and the loss of business income for any commercial claimant. Inverse condemnation is not a negligence claim. You do not have to prove the city was careless. You have to prove the city took or damaged your property for a public purpose. That is a different and, in the right case, more powerful theory.
The single most important practical consequence of pleading inverse condemnation against a city is the damage picture. The TTCA’s $100,000 property cap does not necessarily apply to a constitutional taking claim. The recoverable damages include elements the TTCA does not always reach, and the value of the case is measured by what the property owner actually lost, not by what the cap allows. For homeowners whose damage is severe — whose foundations are compromised, whose electrical systems must be replaced, whose homes have been declared uninhabitable — inverse condemnation is often the only theory that supports a real recovery. For commercial claimants whose inventory and business income have been destroyed, the same principle applies.
Inverse condemnation is not a magic wand. The city will respond that the rainfall was an act of God, that the system was designed to a reasonable standard, that the homeowner should have had flood insurance, and that the appropriate remedy is through the federal flood-insurance program, not the courts. We answer each of those arguments in the next section. The point here is that the constitutional door exists, it is the door we use when the statutory door is too narrow, and it is the door most homeowners never hear about until they talk to a lawyer who litigates these cases.
Three Defenses the City Will Use, and How We Beat Each One
The City of Houston’s defenses in a drainage case follow a predictable pattern. Once you have seen two or three of them, you have seen them all. We walk through the three most common, and the response to each, so you know what you are up against before the city files its first answer.
Defense One: “Act of God.” The city’s position will be that the rainfall was an extraordinary, unforeseeable event — a 100-year storm, a 500-year storm, a storm of biblical proportions — and that no reasonable drainage system could have handled it. The defense has a Latin name, an old common-law pedigree, and one enormous weakness in the post-June-17 record: the city has just told the public, in a council meeting, that the system is broken. The Public Works Director used the phrase “drop in the bucket.” Councilwoman Peck used the word “continuously.” The system that the city is now preparing to spend $35 million fixing is, by the city’s own admission, inadequate. You cannot defend a case by claiming an act of God at the same time you are asking the public to believe the system needs $35 million in repairs. The act-of-God defense requires the city to show that the damage was not reasonably foreseeable. The $35 million vote is the city’s own admission that the damage was foreseeable. The defense is over before it starts.
Defense Two: “We had no prior notice.” The city will argue that it did not know about this specific defect at this specific location, and that it cannot be liable for a condition it did not know existed. The defense has a stronger pedigree than the act-of-God defense, and it is the defense the city uses most often in drainage cases. We beat it with records. The 311 service-request logs for your address and the surrounding blocks, going back years, will show a pattern of complaints about street flooding, yard flooding, and water in the home. The Capital Improvement Plan history will show when the city first identified your neighborhood as a drainage priority and how long the project sat unfunded. Prior news coverage will show the city was on notice from media reports. Prior lawsuits or claims by other homeowners will show the city was on notice from its own claims history. The June 17 vote itself shows the city had actual notice of the inadequacy of the system in Westbury and Chateau Forest as of that date — and, more importantly, the city’s own internal documents will show the city had that notice well before. The defense is not “we didn’t know.” The defense is “we knew and we did not fix it in time.” That is a much worse defense for the city, and it is the one we force.
Defense Three: “Discretionary function” or “design immunity.” The city may argue that the decision about how to allocate the drainage budget is a policy decision immune from suit under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 101.056, or that the original design of the storm sewers is protected by design immunity under § 97.003. Both arguments have limits. Discretionary-function immunity protects decisions about whether to fund a project. It does not protect the failure to maintain an existing system that the city has built and operated. Maintenance of storm sewers, clearing of culverts, inspection of detention basins, and the routine operational duties of Houston Public Works are ministerial acts, not policy choices. Design immunity protects the original design of a system from later challenge, but it does not protect ongoing operational failures, and the 15-year clock on design immunity does not run indefinitely. If the design defect was discoverable through reasonable maintenance, or if the city’s own engineers identified a flaw that the city did not address, design immunity does not save them. We have seen this defense raised; we have seen it beaten. The pattern is the same: the city claims it is immune; we show the failure was operational, not policy; we show the design defect was known; we push the case past the immunity motion and into discovery, where the city’s own records do the rest.
There are other defenses — the modified comparative-fault bar at 51%, the suggestion that you should have had flood insurance, the argument that you should have moved your furniture to higher ground — but the three above are the structural ones. Each can be beaten. None of them is a reason not to file the case.
Property Damage: What Your Case Is Really Worth
Property damage cases against the city are usually filed by homeowners whose houses have flooded, by small businesses whose inventory and equipment have been destroyed, and by landlords whose rental properties have been rendered uninhabitable. The damages in a property case include the cost of structural repair, the cost of replacing damaged personal property, the cost of temporary housing during repairs, the rental value lost during repairs, and the diminished value of the property once it is repaired — the so-called flood stigma that depresses the resale value of a home with a flooding history.
Under the Texas Tort Claims Act, property damages are capped at $100,000 per occurrence. That number was set in 1988 and has not been meaningfully adjusted. A single round of foundation repair, electrical replacement, drywall, flooring, and HVAC can easily exceed the cap on its own. The cap is not a measure of the actual damage. The cap is a measure of what the city has agreed to pay under the statutory waiver. When the actual damage exceeds the cap, the inverse-condemnation theory becomes the path forward.
Under inverse condemnation, the recoverable damages include the same elements — repair, replacement, diminution in value, lost rental — measured at their actual dollar value. For a homeowner whose house has been declared uninhabitable and whose foundation has been compromised, that number can reach into the high six figures or beyond. For a small business whose inventory has been destroyed and whose doors have been closed for months, the number can be higher still. The cases with the largest recoveries are the ones where the inverse-condemnation theory is pleaded from day one and supported by the kind of expert work — hydrology, structural engineering, commercial-loss calculation — that we bring to bear.
The honest case-value range for a Houston drainage case, looking at it across the full population of matters, runs from a low of approximately $25,000 for a relatively contained property loss with a straightforward TTCA resolution, to a high of approximately $500,000 for a severe property loss with a strong inverse-condemnation theory and the kind of expert support the case demands. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The point is not the number. The point is that the case has a number, and that the number is recoverable.
Bodily Injury and Wrongful Death: When Street Flooding Kills
When floodwater on a Houston street rises over a curb, it does something else besides enter garages. It becomes a moving hazard to every vehicle on the road. A car moving at 30 miles per hour into a foot of moving water can be pushed off the road. A car stalled in two feet of water becomes a sealed box that fills from the bottom. A pedestrian forced to walk in the street because the sidewalk is under water becomes a target for any vehicle that loses control. An elderly resident who falls while trying to leave a flooded home may spend the next three months in a hospital.
When street flooding leads to a vehicle collision, a wrongful death, or a catastrophic injury, the case against the city is a premises-defect case under the Texas Tort Claims Act. The road itself is the real property. The defect is the inadequate drainage that allowed the road to become a hazard. The bodily-injury cap of $250,000 per person / $500,000 per occurrence applies. The cap is real, and it is the reason these cases are aggressively litigated — the city knows the cap is the ceiling of its statutory exposure, and it will fight to keep the case within it.
For wrongful death, the same caps apply. The recoverable damages include the pecuniary loss to the surviving family members, the loss of companionship and society, the loss of guidance and counsel to surviving children, and the mental anguish suffered by the family. The 2-year statute of limitations under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003 runs from the date of death. There is no inverse-condemnation bypass for wrongful-death damages against a Texas municipality in the same way there can be for property damage, but the underlying liability case is the same. If the city had notice of the defect and failed to address it, the city is liable. The cap limits the recovery, but it does not eliminate it.
If a loved one has died because of a flooded street, you can read more about how we handle wrongful-death cases on our wrongful-death practice page. If a loved one has been injured in a vehicle crash on a flooded road, our car-accident practice page walks through the investigation and proof process. The two cases are structurally similar; the damages are different. Both are built on the same foundation of proving the city’s prior knowledge.
The Evidence That Disappears While You Rebuild
Evidence in a Houston drainage case is the difference between a recovery and a denial. The records that prove the city had notice of the defect are the records the city holds. The high-water marks that prove the depth and extent of the flooding are physical evidence that can be erased by the next contractor or the next rain. The doorbell-camera video that shows the water rising is on a neighbor’s hard drive, and neighbors replace hard drives. The hydrological study that quantifies the runoff is locked in the office of a consulting engineer. None of this is preserved automatically. All of it must be locked down, by request and by litigation, before it disappears.
The preservation letter goes out within 48 hours of the first call. It is addressed to the City Secretary, with copies to the City Attorney’s Office, to Houston Public Works, and to the Harris County Flood Control District where bayou operations are involved. It locks down: the 311 service-request logs for the affected area, going back as far as the city’s retention policy allows; the Capital Improvement Plan history showing when the affected project was first identified, first funded, first deferred; the maintenance records for the storm sewers, inlets, culverts, and detention basins serving the property; the as-built drawings for the original drainage system; the rainfall data from the relevant date and time; the design drawings and inspection reports for any nearby drainage work; and the personnel files of the city engineers responsible for the affected system. The preservation letter also identifies the wreck — your home, your car, your business — and demands that no repair, demolition, or alteration be done without notice to our office.
Alongside the city records, we preserve the physical evidence: high-water marks on walls and fences, photographed with a measuring rod and a timestamp; debris lines; mud lines; the position of furniture and personal property; the condition of the electrical panel and HVAC system; the condition of the foundation. We photograph and video before any cleanup. We interview neighbors while their memories are fresh. We obtain doorbell-camera footage. We pull NOAA Atlas 14 rainfall data for the date and zip code. We pull Harris County Flood Control District rain-gauge readings. We retain a forensic hydrologist to model the runoff, a structural engineer to assess the foundation and the framing, and, where a vehicle is involved, an accident-reconstruction engineer to read the EDR (the vehicle’s black box) before the car is scrapped.
None of this is preserved for us automatically. The city will produce what it is required to produce. The contractor will not wait for our expert before tearing out the drywall. The neighbor will not save the doorbell video for six months. The EDR will not survive the salvage yard. The window for capture is measured in days and weeks, not months. This is the single most important reason to call us early. The consultation is free. The preservation work begins the day you call.
The First Seven Days: A Step-by-Step Action Plan
If your property has just flooded, or has flooded in the last 90 days, here is what to do, in order, over the first seven days. None of this costs you money. All of it preserves your options.
Day 1. Photograph and video everything before any cleanup. Use a measuring rod or a tape measure in every shot so the depth is visible. Photograph the high-water marks on walls, fences, and the foundation. Photograph the electrical panel, the HVAC system, the water heater, and any appliances that took on water. Photograph the furniture, the carpet, the drywall, the personal property. Photograph the street, the curb, the storm-sewer inlets, and any standing water outside. Save the photos with timestamps and the original metadata intact. Do not throw anything away yet.
Day 1 or 2. File a 311 service request. Be specific about the address, the date and time, the depth of the water, and the location of the flooding. Save the service-request number. If you have called 311 before about the same issue, save those records too. The 311 log is one of the strongest pieces of evidence of the city’s prior notice. Every call you have made is a data point the city cannot pretend it did not receive.
Day 2 or 3. Get a contractor’s written estimate for the structural repairs. The estimate is evidence of the dollar value of the damage. It is not a contract to do the work. The estimate is documentation, and you can get it without committing to the work.
Day 3 to 5. Call us. The consultation is free. The call is confidential. We will tell you on the call whether we can help, and if we can, we begin the case that day. We will tell you honestly if the case is not one we can help with. You can read more about how we work with clients on Ralph Manginello’s attorney page.
Day 5 to 7. File the Formal Notice of Claim with the City Secretary. We prepare and file this for you. The notice preserves your right to sue and starts the city’s clock to respond. The form is specific; the wording matters; we do not recommend filing it without counsel. But it must be filed within 90 days of the flood, and it is much better filed on day 7 than on day 87.
Day 7 and after. Do not sign any drainage easement agreement, any right-of-entry form, any release of liability, or any document presented to you by a city engineer, a contractor working for the city, or anyone else in connection with the new drainage work. The $35 million in projects on the June 17 agenda will involve easements, access agreements, and construction documents. Some of those documents may include a release of your right to claim past damage. Read everything before you sign anything. When in doubt, call us first.
Throughout the first 90 days, do not give a recorded statement to the city’s insurance adjuster without counsel present. Do not sign any release. Do not let the city onto your property without a written agreement about what they will do there. The same rules apply to your own homeowner’s insurance company — they are not on your side either. For a deeper walk on what not to say to an insurance adjuster, see our guide on recorded statements and adjusters.
How We Build the Case Against the City
Here is how a Houston drainage case is actually built at our firm, from the first call to the demand letter to the courtroom, with the realistic timeline attached.
Weeks one to four. We send the preservation letter to the City Secretary, the City Attorney’s Office, Houston Public Works, and the Harris County Flood Control District. We photograph the high-water marks. We retain a forensic hydrologist. We pull the 311 logs. We pull the CIP history. We file the Formal Notice of Claim.
Months two to four. The city’s insurance adjuster will call. We will be on that call. We do not let our clients give recorded statements without us. We begin the property-damage documentation: contractor estimates, inventory lists, photographs, business-interruption calculations. We obtain the NOAA rainfall data. We identify the design drawings and the maintenance records that will form the spine of the case.
Months four to nine. We file suit if the city has not made a reasonable offer. The petition pleads the TTCA premises-defect cause of action, the inverse-condemnation cause of action, and, where applicable, a wrongful-death or survival cause of action. The city answers. Discovery begins. We take the depositions of the city engineers, the maintenance supervisors, and the 311 records custodian. We take the deposition of the Public Works Director if the case warrants. We exchange expert reports with the city’s engineers. Mediation usually occurs somewhere in this window.
Months nine to eighteen. Most cases resolve in this window, either through mediation or through a pre-trial settlement conference. The cases that do not resolve go to trial. We have tried cases in Harris County courthouses for decades. Ralph Manginello has spent 27 years in courtrooms, including federal court, and has handled cases arising out of major industrial events. Lupe Peña came to the plaintiff side from a national insurance-defense firm and knows, from the inside, how claims handlers and their software value and discount these kinds of losses. You can read more about Lupe on his attorney page.
What the number looks like at the end. The settlement number or verdict is built from the cost to repair, the rental value lost during repairs, the diminution in property value, the destroyed personal property, and, in personal-injury cases, the medical bills, the lost wages, and the pain and suffering. The inverse-condemnation theory is the engine that drives the number above the TTCA cap where the cap is the limit. In cases where the act-of-God defense has been neutralized and the prior-notice record is strong, the cases resolve for multiples of the cap. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
What It Costs to Hire Us, and Why It Costs Nothing Upfront
You do not pay us anything to take the case. You do not pay us anything to file the 90-day notice. You do not pay us anything to send the preservation letter. You do not pay us anything to hire the hydrologist. You do not pay us anything to take a deposition. You pay us only if we recover for you. Our fee is a percentage of the recovery, agreed in writing before we begin. If we do not recover, you owe us nothing for our time or our expenses. The same structure is explained in plain English on our contingency-fee explainer.
The consultation is free. It is confidential. It happens on the phone, in your kitchen, at the kitchen table with the fans running. You tell us what happened. We tell you what we can do. If we are not the right firm for your case, we will tell you that too. The number to call is 1-888-ATTY-911, twenty-four hours a day. We serve families across Houston, Harris County, and the surrounding region. We serve them in English and in Spanish — Hablamos Español — because the families in the flood plain are not always the families with the easiest access to a lawyer, and we have built this firm to change that.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How long do I have to file a claim against the City of Houston for flooding?
The City of Houston’s City Charter requires a Formal Notice of Claim within 90 days of the date the flooding damaged your property. The state-law default under the Texas Tort Claims Act is 180 days, but the City Charter controls and the 90-day clock is what binds you. The statute of limitations on a personal-injury or wrongful-death case against the city is two years under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003, but the 90-day notice must be filed first. If you are reading this past day 90, call us anyway — there are narrow arguments to extend or to show actual notice, and we can evaluate them on the consultation.
2. Can I sue the City of Houston if my house flooded?
Yes, in most cases. The Texas Tort Claims Act waives sovereign immunity for personal injury and property damage caused by a premises defect, and a street or storm-sewer system that is known to flood is a premises defect. The recovery is subject to a $100,000 cap on property damage under the TTCA, but the inverse-condemnation theory under the Texas Constitution Article I, Section 17 can reach around that cap. We plead both theories in every qualifying case.
3. What is inverse condemnation?
Inverse condemnation is a constitutional claim under Article I, Section 17 of the Texas Constitution, which prohibits the taking or damaging of private property for public use without just compensation. When a city’s drainage system causes floodwater to enter private property, the homeowner is, in effect, providing the stormwater storage the city failed to provide. The city got the benefit of the drainage. The homeowner bore the cost. The constitutional remedy is full compensation measured by the actual loss, not by the TTCA’s statutory cap.
4. Does the $35 million vote help my case?
Yes. The June 17, 2026 vote is a public, on-the-record acknowledgment by the City of Houston that the existing drainage system is inadequate. The Public Works Director’s “drop in the bucket” quote and Councilwoman Amy Peck’s reference to “continuous flooding” are exhibits. They destroy the city’s strongest defense — that it did not know the system was failing. The vote is the city’s own admission, and it is now part of the permanent record of the case.
5. What if I have flood insurance?
Flood insurance is a separate recovery. It does not bar a claim against the city. The general rule in Texas is that insurance proceeds are not subtracted from a tort recovery against a third party; the third party is liable for the full measure of the damage it caused, regardless of what insurance the homeowner carried. Your flood-insurance claim and your inverse-condemnation claim are two different cases, with two different defendants, and the two do not offset each other. We coordinate the two.
6. What if the city says it was an “act of God”?
The act-of-God defense requires the city to show that the damage was not reasonably foreseeable. The $35 million vote is the city’s own admission that the damage was foreseeable. The city’s own Capital Improvement Plan, with Westbury and Chateau Forest on the drainage priority list, is further evidence. The defense is available, but it is not a winning defense on these facts. We have seen it raised; we have seen it beaten. The pattern is the same: the city argues the rain; we show the system.
7. How long does a case like this take?
Most Houston drainage cases resolve in nine to eighteen months from the date of filing. The cases that resolve earliest are the ones where the prior-notice record is strong and the property-damage documentation is clean. The cases that go the longest are the ones where the city contests liability aggressively, where the inverse-condemnation theory is the primary theory, and where the property-damage valuation is high. We will give you a realistic timeline on the consultation, not a sales-pitch timeline.
8. What does it cost to hire a lawyer for a case like this?
Nothing upfront. Our fee is a percentage of the recovery, agreed in writing before we begin. If we do not recover, you owe us nothing for our time or our expenses. The 90-day notice, the preservation letter, the hydrologist, the depositions, the filing fees — all of it is on our side of the ledger until the case resolves. The consultation is free. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
9. What if I missed the 90-day notice deadline?
Call us anyway. There are several arguments that can extend or excuse a late notice, including actual notice to the city from other sources (a 311 log, a prior claim, prior litigation, a council member’s public statement), equitable tolling under narrow circumstances, and the argument that the city’s actual notice substitutes for the formal notice. We will tell you honestly whether a late notice can be saved. If it cannot, we will tell you that too, on the free consultation.
10. Can I sue if my car was damaged or someone died in a flooded street?
Yes. A vehicle crash caused by submerged roadways or hydroplaning on flooded streets is a premises-defect case under the Texas Tort Claims Act. The cap is $250,000 per person for bodily injury. For a wrongful death, the same cap applies, and the recoverable damages include pecuniary loss, loss of companionship, and mental anguish. The 2-year statute of limitations under § 16.003 runs from the date of death. The same 90-day notice rule applies.
11. Can I sue the engineering consultants who designed the original drainage system?
Possibly, in narrow cases. Engineering consultants who designed the original system can be liable for professional negligence, but they are also protected by design immunity under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 97.003. Design immunity has a 15-year clock and applies to the original design, not to later operational failures. Most drainage cases focus on the city as the primary defendant, with engineering consultants as secondary or tertiary defendants where the facts support it. We evaluate the engineering-defendant question on a case-by-case basis.
12. What about the $35 million in new projects — do they help me or hurt me?
They help. The new projects are an admission that the existing system is inadequate. They are also a public-works project that will involve easements, access agreements, and construction documents that may include releases of past claims. We will read every document the city sends you before you sign it. We will tell you which documents are routine and which are traps. The $35 million is your city’s investment in the future; it should not be your city’s escape from the past.
Why Attorney911: The Team You Want on Your Side of the Table
Our firm is built on a single idea. People in a legal emergency deserve someone who picks up now and fights hard. That is the original idea behind the name Attorney911, and it is the way we have practiced since 2001, when Ralph Manginello founded the firm in Houston after nearly a decade in Texas courtrooms. We are a plaintiffs’ firm. We represent people who have been hurt by the carelessness of others, and we represent them on a contingency fee, which means you do not pay us anything unless we recover for you.
Ralph Manginello leads the firm’s trial practice. He has spent more than 27 years in courtrooms, including federal court, and he has built a record of results that totals more than $50 million in recoveries for Texas families since 1998. Before he was a lawyer, he was a journalist — a trained storyteller — and before that, a championship-level point guard, an experience that taught him how to perform under pressure and how to read a room. He has been recognized by the Cheshire Academy Athletic Hall of Fame for his earlier athletic career, and he has been admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas for federal trial practice. He was part of the litigation arising out of the BP Texas City refinery explosion, one of the largest industrial-event cases in the state’s history. He hosts the Attorney 911 Podcast and fronts our firm’s YouTube channel, where we publish plain-English legal education for the families we serve. You can read more about his background on his attorney page.
Lupe Peña is the firm’s insider. Before he joined us, Lupe spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm, in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to value and discount claims exactly like yours. He knows how Colossus-style claims software undervalues injuries. He knows how defense counsel builds the file. He knows the playbook from the inside because he ran it. Now he runs it in reverse, for the people the playbook was built to defeat. Lupe is fully bilingual. He serves our Spanish-speaking clients in their own language, because the families in the flood plain are not always the families with the easiest access to a lawyer, and we have built this firm to change that. You can read more about his background on his attorney page.
Our firm handles the full range of serious-injury and wrongful-death cases — commercial truck wrecks, refinery and industrial events, offshore and maritime injuries, construction accidents, motor-vehicle and motorcycle crashes, brain injuries, and municipal-injury cases like the one on this page. You can see the full practice on our practice areas page, and you can read more about who we are on our homepage. The consultation is free, the call is confidential, and the number is 1-888-ATTY-911. We serve Houston, Harris County, and the surrounding region. We serve families in English and in Spanish — Hablamos Español. There is no fee unless we win.