Right Now, in Houston, the Water Is Rising — and So Is the Clock on Your Rights
The National Hurricane Center has issued its first advisory on Potential Storm One, the system that is expected to become Tropical Storm Arthur within forty-eight hours. The forecast track takes it across the northwestern Gulf and up the Upper Texas Coast, with landfall expected late Wednesday into Thursday somewhere near the Texas–Louisiana line. The Houston metropolitan area sits squarely inside the Tropical Storm Watch envelope. Widespread rainfall of four to eight inches is forecast, with isolated totals up to twelve inches. Wind gusts of thirty to forty miles an hour. Storm surge of one to four feet. The threat the forecasters keep using the words “life-threatening” to describe is not the wind. It is the water — the street flooding, the bayou overtopping, the flash flood that catches a driver on a familiar underpass and turns a commute into a recovery.
If you are reading this in Houston, in Harris County, in Galveston, Brazoria, or Chambers County, the storm is not an abstraction to you. You are watching the radar. You are moving vehicles to higher ground. You are filling bathtubs. You are checking on elderly neighbors. You may be in a shelter, or in a hospital waiting room, or sitting in a car on I-45 watching water rise over the concrete, or you may be standing in a living room where the carpet is floating and the water has reached the second light switch. You may have just lost someone.
Whatever your situation is right now, there are three things you need to hear in the next sixty seconds:
- You have more time to make the big decisions than you think — but the evidence in your case is disappearing on a clock that has nothing to do with the legal deadline. The personal-injury statute of limitations under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.003 gives you two years. But the TranStar traffic camera that recorded the flooded intersection is on a thirty-to-ninety-day rolling overwrite. The 911 audio of the rescue call is being purged. The apartment complex’s maintenance records about the retention pond that backed up into your unit are being cycled out on a routine destruction schedule.
- If any government entity may be at fault — TxDOT, Harris County, the City of Houston, a Municipal Utility District, Galveston County — there is a 60-day notice clock that started the moment you were hurt. Under § 101.101 of the Texas Tort Claims Act, a governmental unit must receive written notice of your claim within sixty days of the incident, or your right to sue that entity is gone. Sixty days. Not two years. Sixty. The day you call us is the day we file that notice.
- Do not give a recorded statement to any insurance company — including your own — before you talk to a lawyer. Texas law gives you that right, and the storm makes the right more important than usual, because the recorded statement is the first move in a playbook we are about to walk you through, step by step.
The rest of this page is the legal and practical truth about what just happened to you, what you do in the next seventy-two hours, who pays when the water takes a life or a home or a business, and how we build the case that holds them accountable. The consultation costs nothing. There is no fee unless we win. We serve Houston families in English and en español. The number at the bottom of this page — 1-888-ATTY-911 — is staffed twenty-four hours a day, every day of the storm.
What the National Hurricane Center Is Forecasting, in Plain Language
The system is currently a tropical low over northeastern Mexico. It is forecast to re-emerge over the northwestern Gulf of Mexico and strengthen as it moves north-northeast, reaching tropical-storm intensity before landfall. The current forecast cone brings the center along the Upper Texas Coast and into the Texas–Louisiana border region late Wednesday into Thursday. The Tropical Storm Watch runs from Sargent, Texas, to Morgan City, Louisiana, and includes Galveston, the Bolivar Peninsula, and the Chambers County coastline.
The rain is the story for Houston. Four to eight inches widespread, with isolated pockets reaching twelve inches. The wind is not catastrophic by hurricane standards — gusts of thirty to forty miles per hour within the watch area — but tropical-storm-force winds combined with saturated soil will down trees and power lines. The storm surge of one to four feet will inundate low-lying coastal roads, and the wave action on top of the surge is the danger for Galveston Island, the Bolivar Peninsula, and the western parts of Chambers County.
What the forecasters will not say on television, but what every Houston family knows in their bones, is that this city floods when it rains. The bayous — Buffalo Bayou, Brays Bayou, White Oak Bayou, Sims Bayou, Halls Bayou, Greens Bayou, Brickhouse Gully — were not designed for what four to eight inches of rain in twelve hours does to a flat coastal plain covered in concrete. The 2001 Tropical Storm Allison dropped nine inches on parts of the city in a few hours and killed more than twenty people. The 2017 Hurricane Harvey dropped more than fifty inches in some neighborhoods. The 2019 Tropical Storm Imelda trapped drivers on Interstate 10 east of the city. The list is long because the geography is what it is: low elevation, expansive impervious cover, aging storm infrastructure, and a drainage system that depends on getting water to the ship channel before it gets to your living room.
That is the legal point, not just the weather point. The drainage system is a system someone built, someone maintains, and someone decided not to enlarge when the census data showed Houston was on its way to becoming the fourth-largest city in the country. The decisions that put your family at risk on a Tuesday in June are decisions that can be named in a lawsuit, with documents that can be demanded, with witnesses that can be deposed, and with verdicts that can be returned against the entities that made them.
If You Were Injured in This Storm — Your Four Most Likely Scenarios
Storm injuries in Houston fall into four patterns. We handle all four. The legal theory and the defendant map are different in each.
Scenario 1: You Were Driving and the Water Caught You
It happens every storm. A driver — often a commuter, often in a vehicle that has never seen high water — pulls up to a familiar underpass that has standing water. The water is deeper than it looks. The engine stalls. The vehicle floats briefly, then stops, then fills. The driver has seconds to get out. Some make it. Some do not.
The legal question is whether the warning system worked. Did the high-water warning sign activate? Was the barricade in place? Did the pump station that should have kept the underpass clear run? Did the city’s alert system reach your phone? Did TxDOT close the lane in time? These are records that exist, that someone has, and that have a destruction clock. The analysis your case needs is not just a reconstruction of the crash — it is a reconstruction of the chain of decisions that put a flooded roadway in the path of an unsuspecting driver.
Our firm handles these cases across Southeast Texas, from the chronic I-45 high-water locations to the Beltway 8 underpasses to the farm-to-market roads that flood in Brazoria and Chambers counties. The full mechanics of the case — what evidence to preserve, which experts to retain, how the Houston car accident lawyer process actually works — are on the page linked here. What we want you to know in the first paragraph is that the defendant in a flooded-underpass case is usually not a single careless driver. It is a governmental entity that knew, or should have known, that the roadway flooded in past storms, and an insurance carrier that will argue you should not have been out driving in the first place.
Scenario 2: Your Apartment or Rental Home Flooded and You Were Hurt or Your Loved One Died
This is the scenario we fear most, and the one that the post-Harvey litigation in Harris County has taught us to build well. The facts follow a pattern: a tenant in a garden-style apartment complex, a townhome community, or a rental house in a known flood zone; a storm that produces more rain than the on-site retention pond or storm sewer was designed to handle; water that enters the unit, often rapidly, often at night; a tenant who cannot escape, or a child who is asleep, or an elderly relative who cannot get to higher ground.
The legal theory is premises liability with a prior-knowledge backbone. Did the landlord know the property had flooded before? Did the prior tenant file complaints? Did the maintenance logs show a retention pond that had not been cleaned in years, a storm drain that had not been inspected, a pump that had been “on order” for months? In Texas, a landlord’s duty to a tenant is among the most plaintiff-protective in the country when prior knowledge of a dangerous condition can be proved. The evidence of prior knowledge is the case. It is also the evidence that gets destroyed first on the routine document-cycling schedule, which is why the preservation letter must go out the same week you call us.
Our team has handled these cases. If a family member died in a flood inside a residential property, the wrongful-death and survival claims are filed under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code §§ 71.002 and 71.021, and the recoverable damages include the full range of pecuniary loss, loss of companionship, loss of inheritance, and the decedent’s own pre-death pain and suffering. The wrongful-death process is walked step by step on the linked page; what we want you to know here is that the landlord’s insurance is almost never enough, the umbrella coverage is where the real money is, and the discovery fight over what the landlord knew and when is the heart of the case.
Scenario 3: A Commercial Truck, Tanker, or 18-Wheeler Hit You in the Storm
Southeast Texas is one of the heaviest commercial-truck corridors in the country. The I-45 freight lane runs from the Port of Houston north to Dallas and beyond. I-10 carries the cross-country freight from California to Florida. US-59 connects the petrochemical complex on the Houston Ship Channel to the rest of the state. When a tropical-storm watch is in effect, the trucks do not stop. The freight does not stop. The dispatchers do not always tell the drivers to stop.
The federal standard for a commercial driver in severe weather is set out in 49 CFR § 392.14: “Extreme caution in the operation of a commercial motor vehicle shall be exercised when hazardous conditions, such as those caused by snow, ice, sleet, fog, mist, rain, dust, or smoke, adversely affect visibility or traction. Speed shall be reduced when such conditions exist. If conditions become sufficiently dangerous, the operation of the commercial motor vehicle shall be discontinued and shall not be resumed until the commercial motor vehicle can be safely operated.” That is the law. The question on every storm-related commercial-vehicle crash is whether the carrier honored it. The proof is in the dispatch communications, the driver qualification file, the ELD logs, the engine control module data, and the dashcam footage that the carrier is required to keep on a federally-defined clock.
We built the firm’s commercial-truck practice around exactly this work. The same evidence-preservation discipline that runs every trucking case runs the storm-day trucking case: a letter to the carrier on day one demanding preservation of the driver’s logs, the dispatch records, the EDR data, the dashcam, the post-crash drug-and-alcohol testing record. The 49 CFR § 382.303 testing windows do not pause for named storms. If a fatality occurred, the carrier was required to test the driver within hours, and if they did not, federal law required them to write down why — a record that becomes its own line of proof.
The Houston-specific overlay: the petrochemical carriers servicing the Ship Channel and the Barbours Cut terminal, the drayage operators running the Port of Houston, and the regional carriers like Groendyke and Quality Distribution that move hazardous materials through the impact zone are a known universe with known federal record numbers. When one of those vehicles is involved in a crash in tropical-storm conditions, we know which door to knock on and which records to demand. The same federal-court reach that has let us pursue out-of-state carriers into Texas courtrooms works the same way against the in-state fleet.
Scenario 4: You Were Electrocuted or Injured by a Downed Power Line or Utility Failure
After Harvey, after Imelda, after every tropical system that knocks trees into power lines, there is a pattern of electrocution and serious-burn injury in flooded neighborhoods. A resident wades through knee-deep water that conceals a downed line. A child touches a metal fence that has become energized. A first responder is injured approaching a submerged vehicle near a utility pole. The legal theory against the utility is grounded in Texas premises-liability and negligence law, with the additional layer of the utility’s own internal safety protocols and the post-storm record of how quickly it de-energized known problem circuits.
CenterPoint Energy and the cooperatives that serve the regions outside Houston have been named defendants in post-Harvey wrongful-death and serious-injury suits involving downed lines in flooded areas. The discovery fight in those cases is over the utility’s storm-hardening program, its vegetation-management cycle, its prioritization of circuits serving known flood zones, and its emergency response time on the night in question. Those records exist. They have a clock. We send the preservation letter the day you call.
Who Can Be Held Liable After a Texas Flooding Accident
The defendant map in a Houston storm case is wider than in almost any other personal-injury scenario. Each category of defendant has a different legal theory, a different insurance tower, and a different discovery playbook.
TxDOT (Texas Department of Transportation). TxDOT owns and maintains the state highways — I-45, I-10, US-59, State Highway 288, the US-290 corridor, the Beltway 8 frontage roads in unincorporated areas. Sovereign immunity is waived under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 101.021 for personal injury caused by a condition of real property if the governmental unit would be liable under Texas law. The two theories that come up most often in flood cases are the “use of tangible property” waiver (a roadway defect that caused the injury) and the premises-defect waiver (a condition of the road that created an unreasonable risk of harm). TxDOT’s “design immunity” defense under § 101.055 is narrower than it used to be, and the 2019 House Bill 2864 reforms strengthened plaintiffs’ access to drainage and maintenance records. The 60-day pre-suit notice required by § 101.101 is the deadline that decides whether TxDOT is even in the case.
Harris County, the City of Houston, and the Municipal Utility Districts. Storm drainage, bayou maintenance, and floodplain management are municipal responsibilities. The Harris County Flood Control District operates the regional bayou system and has faced multiple post-Harvey lawsuits over its operation of the channels, the timing of bayou releases, the maintenance of the detention basins, and the warning system. The City of Houston owns the storm sewers inside the city limits. The MUDs — there are hundreds of them in the Houston region — own the local drainage in their subdivisions, including the retention ponds, the outfalls, and the storm sewers. Each of these entities is a separate defendant, each has its own 60-day notice obligation, and each has its own insurance tower.
Property owners, landlords, and commercial premises. Premises liability for inadequate stormwater management, failure to maintain retention ponds, blocked drainage, and failure to warn tenants or invitees of flooding hazards. Apartment complexes, hotels, shopping centers, and parking lots in the impact zone are high-value targets, particularly where landlords knew of prior flooding and failed to mitigate. The evidence is in the maintenance logs, the tenant complaints, the insurance claim history, and the management company’s internal communications.
Construction and development companies. The post-Harvey litigation produced successful claims against developers who filled wetlands, altered natural drainage, or built in floodways without adequate mitigation. The 2018–2019 Harvey class actions against major Houston-area developers produced meaningful settlements and created litigation templates that remain in active use. If your home or apartment was built in a drainage easement that was filled, or in a floodway that was supposed to remain clear, the developer is in the case.
Commercial motor carriers. When 18-wheeler or tanker accidents occur in storm conditions, the carrier may be liable for failure to cease operations, inadequate driver training on severe-weather protocols, and equipment failures — wipers, tires, brakes — that would not have been issues in dry conditions. The federal standard is ordinary care under the circumstances, and storm conditions elevate that standard. The dispatch communications, the route-planning records, the ELD data, and the EDR downloads are the discovery targets.
Utility companies. Electrocution and downed-power-line claims. CenterPoint Energy and the electric cooperatives have been named defendants in multiple post-Harvey suits involving downed lines in flooded areas. The theory is grounded in the utility’s duty to maintain its system in a reasonably safe condition and to de-energize known hazards in a timely manner.
Insurance carriers (first-party). Bad-faith claims under Texas Insurance Code Chapter 541 (unfair settlement practices) and Chapter 542 (prompt payment of claims). The post-storm insurance-claims surge is one of the most reliable mass-tort pipelines in Texas plaintiff practice. The claims include underpayment of flood losses, denial of business-interruption coverage, refusal to pay code-upgrade costs, and lowballing of total-loss valuations. The 18% statutory penalty plus attorneys’ fees in § 542.058 is the hammer that makes these cases economically viable to pursue.
The Texas Tort Claims Act and the 60-Day Government Notice Deadline
“Notice must be given within 60 days after the day the loss or injury occurred… The notice must be given in writing… to the head of the governmental unit… and shall state the time, place and circumstances of the loss or injury.” — Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 101.101(a)
If any government entity may be at fault in your case — TxDOT for a flooded highway, Harris County for a bayou release, the City of Houston for a storm sewer, a MUD for a retention pond, Galveston County for a coastal road — the 60-day notice clock under § 101.101 is the single most dangerous deadline in Texas storm litigation. The notice must be in writing. It must go to the right person (the head of the governmental unit, or in some cases the risk-management office). It must state the time, place, and circumstances of the loss. If you miss it, the case against that governmental defendant is over, period — the Texas Supreme Court has treated the notice requirement as jurisdictional in most circumstances.
The trap is that the 60-day clock feels long when you are dealing with the immediate aftermath of a flood. It is not long. It is two months. The first month is consumed with displacement, insurance adjusters, repair estimates, and the medical follow-up. The second month is consumed with the same things, plus the slow realization that no one is going to volunteer to pay you what your losses are actually worth. By the time most families think about a lawyer, the 60 days are nearly gone.
The day you call us, the notice is the first thing we file. Not the second, not after we investigate, not after the insurance company returns your call. The day you call. We have the form. We have the recipient list. We have the language. The notice itself is not the lawsuit — it is the ticket that lets the lawsuit be filed against the government later. Without it, the case does not exist.
The companion deadline is the two-year suit clock under § 101.106. For all other defendants — the landlord, the developer, the commercial carrier, the utility, the insurance carrier — the personal-injury and wrongful-death statute of limitations is two years from the date of injury or death under § 16.003. You have more time against the non-government defendants. You have almost no time against the government defendants. We file both tracks simultaneously.
Evidence Preservation — What We Are Doing in the First Seventy-Two Hours
A storm case is won or lost in the first thirty days. The evidence that proves who knew what and when is being destroyed on overlapping schedules. The TranStar camera footage from a flooded intersection has a thirty-to-ninety-day retention. The 911 audio of the rescue call is purged on a similar cycle. The apartment complex’s maintenance records about the retention pond are destroyed on a routine document-cycling schedule unless someone tells the landlord to stop. The commercial carrier’s ELD data is preserved under federal law for six months, but the dispatch communications — the text messages and emails between the driver and the safety director on the day of the crash — are often retained on shorter internal schedules. The utility’s vegetation-management records for the circuit that dropped the line are cycled out on a quarterly schedule.
Our storm-case protocol is built to move on every clock at once. Here is what the preservation effort looks like in the first seventy-two hours:
Day 1. Preservation letters go out to TxDOT, Harris County, the City of Houston, the relevant MUD, the commercial carrier (if a truck is involved), the apartment or property owner, the utility, and the insurance carrier. The letters cite the specific federal and state authorities that require record preservation — 49 CFR § 379 for the carrier, the Texas Tort Claims Act for the government entities, the litigation-hold doctrine for everyone else. The letters demand specific categories of records: maintenance logs, prior-flood complaints, design drawings, internal communications, dispatch records, EDR/ELD data, dashcam footage, training records, and the post-crash testing records required by 49 CFR § 382.303.
Day 1–2. Texas Public Information Act requests go to the same government entities. The PIA is the public-records statute that gives us access to government documents before they are destroyed in litigation. The response time is usually ten business days, but the request creates a separate preservation obligation independent of the litigation hold.
Day 1–7. Field investigation. We deploy investigators to the impact zone with drones to capture high-water marks, to photograph the still-flooded roadways, to document the warning signs (or their absence), and to identify witnesses before the neighborhood empties out. We pull HCFCD ALERT gauge data for the relevant bayou and the NEXRAD radar overlays from NOAA. We preserve social-media posts — the videos residents posted of the flooding, the dashcam footage, the doorbell cameras — before they are taken down.
Day 7–30. Expert retention. We retain a meteorologist to reconstruct the storm timeline at the specific location, a hydrologist to model the water flow and the drainage-system performance, and an accident-reconstruction engineer for any vehicle cases. For catastrophic-injury and wrongful-death cases, we retain a life-care planner and an economist to project the lifetime cost of the injury.
Day 1–60. The 60-day TCA notice is filed on every potential government defendant. The notice is the ticket that preserves the right to sue later. We do not wait for the investigation to mature before filing it.
The principle is simple. Every piece of evidence that is not preserved by day thirty is an advantage we have given away. The preservation effort is the case. Everything that comes after — discovery, depositions, mediation, trial — is built on the foundation laid in the first seventy-two hours.
The Insurance Company Playbook — Six Plays, and the Counter to Each
Storm cases produce an insurance-claims surge unlike almost any other scenario. The carriers know the volume is coming. They staff up. They deploy the same playbook they use in every mass-loss event, with adjustments for the specific challenges of a flood claim. The playbook has six named plays. We have seen all six. Lupe Peña, our associate attorney, spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before crossing to the plaintiff’s side. He sat in the rooms where these plays were designed. We name them here so that the next adjuster who calls you hears you say “I know that move” and knows you have a lawyer.
Play 1: The “just checking in” call. Within forty-eight hours of the loss, a friendly voice from your own insurance carrier or the at-fault party’s carrier calls to “see how you are doing” and “get a statement” of what happened. The call is recorded. The recording is transcribed. The transcript is used to lock you into a version of events before you have talked to a lawyer, before the medical picture is clear, and before you understand the full scope of your loss. The counter: tell the adjuster you will not give a recorded statement without your lawyer present. Texas law gives you that right. Use it.
Play 2: The quick lowball offer. In the first two weeks, before the water is fully out, before the adjuster has even seen the property, you receive a settlement offer that purports to “resolve” the claim. The number is a fraction of the actual loss. The release is printed on the back. The carrier knows that displaced families are desperate and that money now is worth more than money later. The counter: do not sign anything. The full scope of a flood loss — structural, electrical, mechanical, contents, displacement, business interruption, code-upgrade costs — takes weeks to document. An early release is almost always a bad deal.
Play 3: The preferred-vendor referral. The carrier offers to connect you with a “preferred” contractor, water-removal company, or restoration firm. The firm is in the carrier’s network. The work is done at the carrier’s negotiated rates. The invoices are designed to support the carrier’s valuation, not yours. The counter: you have the right to choose your own contractor. Use it. Get your own estimate, from your own contractor, and submit it. The preferred-vendor path almost always produces an underpayment.
Play 4: The social-media monitoring. After Harvey, after Imelda, after every storm, the carriers and their investigators are monitoring social media for posts about the loss. A family that posts photos of the damage and writes “we are safe” can find those words used against them later to argue the emotional-anguish damages are smaller than claimed. A tenant who posts about staying with relatives can find that used to argue the displacement damages are smaller. The counter: stay off social media about the loss until the case is resolved. Set your accounts to private. Have a family member screen your tags.
Play 5: The pre-existing-condition argument. In injury cases, the carrier will scour your medical history for any prior back, neck, head, or psychological condition and argue that the current complaints are not storm-related. The “eggshell-skull” rule in Texas protects you — the defendant takes the plaintiff as they find them — but the rule is only as good as the medical evidence that connects the new injury to the storm. The counter: see your doctors, follow the treatment plan, document the before-and-after with your own treating physicians, and let the medical record do the work.
Play 6: The Stowers demand and the bad-faith setup. The flip side of the playbook is the bad-faith claim. When the at-fault party’s insurance limits are too small to pay a Harris County verdict — and Harris County verdicts in storm cases regularly exceed policy limits — the carrier has a duty under the Stowers doctrine to settle within limits when the demand is reasonable. A carrier that refuses a reasonable Stowers demand exposes itself to an excess judgment and a bad-faith claim under Texas Insurance Code Chapter 541. The counter: when the case value is high, we make a Stowers demand early, we put the carrier on notice, and we preserve the bad-faith claim as a separate line of recovery.
The full guide to what you should not say to an insurance adjuster is on our educational video library. The guide to handling a denied claim is linked here as well. The deeper point is this: the adjuster is not your adversary because they are a bad person. They are running a system designed to minimize your recovery. Knowing the system is half the fight.
What Your Storm Case May Be Worth — Honest Ranges, Honest Drivers
No two storm cases settle for the same amount because no two cases have the same facts. The honest drivers of value are: the severity of the injury, the strength of the liability proof, the insurance coverage available, the comparative-fault percentage, and the venue. Here are the ranges we see, with the honest framing that the value of any specific case depends on its specific facts. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
Low range — $25,000 to $250,000. Minor property damage, soft-tissue injuries that resolve within a few months, brief displacement, contents loss. The at-fault party’s insurance limits often set the ceiling in this range, which is why first-party coverage and UM/UIM coverage become the real fight.
Mid range — $500,000 to $3,000,000. Serious orthopedic injuries requiring surgery, substantial hydroplane or commercial-vehicle accidents in storm conditions, multi-month displacement with business-interruption losses, long-term psychological injury. The federal minimum coverage for an interstate commercial carrier is $750,000 under 49 CFR § 387, and most carriers carry $1,000,000 or more, which is what makes this range reachable in a trucking case.
High range — $5,000,000 to $25,000,000. Catastrophic injuries — traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, amputation, severe burns, drowning-related anoxic brain injury — and most wrongful-death claims. The lifetime cost of a high-level spinal cord injury runs into the millions of dollars for medical care and lost earning capacity, and a Harris County jury has returned verdicts in this range in post-Harvey cases. The firm’s brain-injury practice is built around exactly this work, from the immediate medical documentation through the life-care planning and the long-arc damages proof.
Extreme high range — $25,000,000 to $100,000,000 and above. Cases involving egregious municipal misconduct, mass-tort class actions, or commercial-carrier gross negligence during a named storm. Punitive damages in Texas are capped under § 41.008 at the greater of $200,000 or two times the economic damages plus non-economic damages up to $750,000, but the underlying compensatory damages in this range, plus the bad-faith exposure against an insurance carrier that failed to settle within limits, are what produce the headline numbers.
The single biggest driver of value is the insurance coverage available. A defendant with a $1,000,000 commercial policy and $5,000,000 in excess umbrella coverage is a different case from a defendant with a $25,000 minimum auto policy. We map the coverage early, before the policy limits are spent, because the coverage map is half the case value.
How We Build a Storm Injury Case — Week One to Resolution
The case is built in phases. Each phase has a deliverable. The phases overlap; the preservation work in week one continues in parallel with the expert work in month two, the discovery in month six, and the mediation in month twelve. The walk below is how we actually run a storm case, from the day a family calls to the day the case resolves.
Week one: preservation and intake. The preservation letters go out on day one. The 60-day TCA notice is filed for any government defendant. The Texas Public Information Act requests are submitted. The field investigator is deployed. The medical records are pulled and the treating physicians are identified. The insurance policies are requested from the carriers. The intake interview with the family is comprehensive — the full story, the full injury picture, the full insurance and employment picture, the full witness list. The protocol is built on the principle that the case is built in the first thirty days or it is not built at all.
Weeks two through four: investigation and expert retention. The meteorologist reconstructs the storm timeline at the specific location — what the forecast said, what the radar showed, what the ALERT gauges recorded, what the tide gauges recorded, what the rainfall totals were at the nearest reporting stations. The hydrologist models the drainage-system performance — did the storm sewer have capacity, did the retention pond function, did the bayou channel convey the flow, did the pump station operate. The accident-reconstruction engineer, in vehicle cases, downloads the EDR and the ECM and the dashcam and analyzes the timing, the speed, the braking, the impact. The life-care planner, in catastrophic-injury cases, projects the lifetime cost of care. The economist discounts the future costs to present value.
Months two through six: lawsuit filing and discovery. The lawsuit is filed once the government-notice clock has run, the insurance picture is clear, and the expert foundation is set. The discovery requests target the maintenance records, the prior-flood complaints, the design drawings, the internal communications, the training records, the dispatch records, and the personnel files of the decision-makers. Depositions are taken of the safety directors, the maintenance supervisors, the dispatchers, the property managers, the government engineers, and the eyewitnesses. The Stowers demand, where applicable, is made during this window, with the supporting evidence package that makes the demand reasonable on its face.
Months six through twelve: expert exchange and mediation. The experts exchange reports. The depositions of the experts are taken. Most Harris County judges order mediation within nine to twelve months of filing. We select mediators with insurance-experience backgrounds — neutrals who understand the Stowers dynamic and the bad-faith exposure — and we prepare the mediation brief with the same evidence discipline we use for trial. The mediation is the settlement window for the well-documented case.
Months twelve through twenty-four: trial preparation and trial. For the case that does not settle, trial preparation is the final phase. The trial notebooks are built, the exhibits are marked, the witness order is set, the voir dire questions are drafted. Harris County voir dire in a storm case focuses on the storm experience that is nearly universal in this region, on insurance attitudes, on governmental-defendant bias (Harris County residents have strong views about city and county drainage), and on punitive-damages willingness. The trial is the leverage that produced the settlement. Building the case as if it will be tried is what produces the result that does not require trial.
The First Seventy-Two Hours — A Practical Roadmap
Storms are chaotic. The first seventy-two hours are when the legal foundation is laid and when the recoverable evidence is most at risk. The roadmap below is what we tell every storm-injury family on the first call.
Hour zero to hour six: medical first. If you or a family member is injured, medical care comes first. The Memorial Hermann Life Flight and the air-medical services that serve the region will transport the most seriously injured to the Level I trauma centers. The medical record that starts in the first hours is the medical record that proves the case later. Do not delay treatment because you think the pain will pass. Do not skip the hospital because the hospital is far. The case begins with the medical record.
Hour six to hour twenty-four: evidence and documentation. Photograph and video everything. The water lines on the walls. The damaged contents. The vehicles. The high-water marks on the buildings, the trees, the fences. The missing or absent barricades and warning signs. The flooded roadways. The location of the downed power lines. Save the videos and photos to a cloud service, not just to your phone. Make a written list of every witness you can identify, with phone numbers. Pull your insurance policies and read them.
Hour twenty-four to hour forty-eight: call the right people, in the right order. First, your own insurance company, to open the claim. Do not give a recorded statement before you have talked to a lawyer. Second, a lawyer. The consultation is free, and there is no fee unless we win. Third, your employer, if you will miss work. Fourth, your landlord, if you rent. Do not sign a release, do not sign a lease-termination agreement, do not sign anything, without your lawyer’s review.
Hour forty-eight to hour seventy-two: get off social media. Set your accounts to private. Have a family member screen your tags. Do not post about the loss, the damage, the injuries, or the recovery. The insurance carrier and its investigators are already monitoring. The post you make today is the exhibit they use against you in eighteen months.
The full guide to what to do after a serious accident is on our educational video library. The deeper point is that the seventy-two hours are when the case is built or lost. The decisions you make in those three days are the decisions that determine what the case is worth two years from now.
Why This Firm — Ralph Manginello, Lupe Peña, and the Way We Work
Our firm was founded on a single idea: when a family is in a legal emergency, they deserve someone who picks up the phone right now. That idea is what built Attorney911. It is what brings us to storm cases in Houston at two in the morning.
Ralph Manginello has spent twenty-seven years in courtrooms, including federal court, fighting for Texas families. He is a South Texas College of Law Houston graduate, licensed by the State Bar of Texas since 1998, and admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, and a championship point guard before that — starting point guard on the 1989 New England Prep School championship team at Cheshire Academy, and a 2021 inductee into the Cheshire Academy Athletic Hall of Fame. He has been part of major mass-tort litigation, including the BP Texas City refinery explosion litigation, and he has recovered more than fifty million dollars for Texas families over the course of his career. Ralph explains like a storyteller and fights like a competitor who hates losing.
Lupe Peña is a former insurance-defense attorney. He spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm, in the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue claims exactly like yours. He is a third-generation Texan with family roots tying to the King Ranch. He grew up in Sugar Land, where he lives with his family. He graduated from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and from South Texas College of Law Houston. Since crossing to the plaintiff’s side, he has used the playbook he learned in those rooms to fight the same carriers for the families they used to deny. Lupe serves our families fully in Spanish, and we say that with pride.
The way we work is straightforward. The consultation is free. There is no fee unless we win. The intake line is staffed twenty-four hours a day, every day, at 1-888-ATTY-911. The preservation letters go out the day you hire us. The 60-day TCA notice is filed the same day. The experts are retained within the first thirty days. The case is built as if it will be tried, because the cases that are built that way are the cases that settle for what they are worth. The cases that are not built that way are the cases that settle for what the insurance company is willing to pay. We are not in the business of accepting what the insurance company is willing to pay.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The $50M+ figure is the firm’s total recovered since 1998. The BP Texas City litigation is part of the firm’s pedigree. Every case is its own case, built on its own facts, and the only thing we can promise you is the work.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do I have to file a storm-injury lawsuit in Texas?
The general statute of limitations for personal injury and wrongful death in Texas is two years from the date of injury or death, under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.003. For wrongful-death cases, the clock starts on the date of death, not the date of the underlying incident. If a government entity is a potential defendant — TxDOT, Harris County, the City of Houston, a MUD, Galveston County, the State of Texas — there is a separate 60-day pre-suit notice requirement under § 101.101 of the Texas Tort Claims Act. The 60-day notice is the deadline that decides whether the government is even in the case, and it is the deadline most families miss. The day you call us, the notice is filed.
What if I was partly at fault for driving into the flooded road?
Texas follows a modified comparative-fault rule at the 51% bar, under § 33.001. If you are 50% or less at fault, you recover your damages reduced by your percentage of fault. If you are 51% or more at fault, you recover nothing. The defendant will almost certainly argue you should not have been driving in the conditions, and that argument goes to the percentage of fault assigned to you, not to whether you can bring the case. A driver who is 20% at fault on a $1,000,000 case still recovers $800,000. The percentage fight is the fight, and the percentage fight is won on the evidence of what the warning system did, what the barricades showed, and what a reasonable driver in those conditions would have known.
What if my apartment flooded and I was hurt, but I do not have renter’s insurance?
You may still have a case. The landlord’s insurance, the landlord’s premises liability, and the property owner’s excess coverage are all potential sources of recovery. In a serious-injury or wrongful-death case, the apartment’s commercial general liability policy and the management company’s umbrella policy are often the policies that pay. The evidence we need is the prior-flood history, the maintenance logs, the tenant complaints, and the design of the drainage system. The day you call us, we send the preservation letter to the landlord and the management company before the routine document destruction cycle eliminates that evidence.
Can I sue the government after a flood injury in Texas?
Yes, under the Texas Tort Claims Act, but with strict conditions. Sovereign immunity is waived under § 101.021 for personal injury caused by a condition of real property, including a roadway defect or a premises defect. You must serve written notice on the governmental unit within 60 days of the incident under § 101.101, and the lawsuit must be filed within two years under § 101.106. The notice must state the time, place, and circumstances of the loss. The most common government defendants in a Houston flood case are TxDOT (for state highways), Harris County (for the bayous and the detention basins), the City of Houston (for city storm sewers), and the MUDs (for local drainage). Each is a separate defendant, each has its own 60-day notice, and each has its own insurance tower.
What is the value of a wrongful-death case in a Houston flood?
The honest answer is that the value depends on the specific facts — the age and earning capacity of the decedent, the relationship of the survivors, the strength of the liability proof, the insurance coverage available, and the county where the case is filed. Harris County juries have returned verdicts in Harvey-related cases ranging from the high six figures to the nine figures. Damages recoverable under Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 71.002 include pecuniary loss, loss of inheritance, loss of services, loss of care and counsel, and loss of companionship. Survival damages under § 71.021 can include the decedent’s own pre-death pain and suffering. Texas does not cap general non-economic damages. Punitive damages are available for gross negligence, malice, or fraud, capped at the greater of $200,000 or two times economic damages plus non-economic up to $750,000 under § 41.008. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
What if a commercial truck hit me during the storm?
The carrier is in the case. Federal law under 49 CFR § 392.14 requires the driver to exercise extreme caution in hazardous conditions and to discontinue operation if conditions become sufficiently dangerous. If the carrier kept the truck running through a tropical-storm watch without proper protocols, the dispatch communications, the ELD data, the EDR data, and the dashcam footage will show it. The federal minimum insurance for an interstate commercial carrier is $750,000 under 49 CFR § 387, and most carriers carry $1,000,000 or more. The case is built on the same evidence-preservation discipline we use in every commercial-truck case. The first call to our firm is the call that starts the preservation clock.
What should I do with the insurance adjuster who keeps calling?
Tell the adjuster you will not give a recorded statement without your lawyer present. Texas law gives you that right. Do not sign any documents. Do not accept any settlement offer. Do not give the adjuster access to your medical records, your social media, or your employer’s records. Document every call — date, time, name, what was said. The playbook the adjuster is running is the playbook we have spent this page describing. Our guide to what not to say to an insurance adjuster is on our educational video library, and the full walk-through of a first-party claim denial is on the page linked from there.
How much does it cost to hire a storm-injury lawyer?
The consultation is free. There is no fee unless we win. We work on a contingency fee, which means our fee is a percentage of the recovery we obtain for you. If we do not recover for you, you owe us nothing for our time. The costs of the case — the filing fees, the expert fees, the deposition costs, the records retrieval fees — are advanced by the firm and reimbursed out of the recovery. The contingency-fee structure is what makes it possible for a family that has just been flooded, or has just lost a loved one, to hire the same lawyers the insurance carriers hire. The full explanation of how contingency fees work is on our educational video.
What is the difference between a wrongful-death claim and a survival action in Texas?
Under Texas law, a wrongful-death claim under § 71.002 is brought for the benefit of the surviving spouse, children, and parents of the decedent, and recovers the losses the survivors suffered because of the death — pecuniary loss, loss of inheritance, loss of services, loss of care and counsel, and loss of companionship. A survival action under § 71.021 is brought by the estate of the decedent and recovers the losses the decedent himself suffered — the medical bills, the lost wages, and the pain and suffering the decedent endured between the injury and the death. The two claims are brought together but are conceptually distinct, and the damages do not overlap. In a flood death, the survival claim captures the terror and pain of the drowning or the electrocution, and the wrongful-death claim captures the lifetime loss to the family. Both are part of the case we build.
I do not speak English well. Can you help me?
Yes. Lupe Peña serves our families fully in Spanish, and our intake team is bilingual. The consultation, the preservation letters, the medical-records requests, the depositions, the mediations, and the trial are all available in Spanish. Our firm is built to serve the bilingual community of Southeast Texas, and we are proud of that. Hablamos Español.
What if the insurance company has already denied my claim?
A denial is the beginning of the fight, not the end. Texas Insurance Code Chapter 541 prohibits unfair settlement practices, and Chapter 542 imposes prompt-payment requirements with an 18% statutory penalty plus attorneys’ fees for unreasonable delay. The carrier’s denial file — the adjuster’s notes, the engineering reports, the internal communications — is a discoverable record, and it almost always shows the carrier denied the claim without conducting the investigation the law requires. Our guide to handling a denied claim is on our educational video. The deeper point is that the denial is itself evidence, and the denial is what the bad-faith claim is built on.
Call Us Before You Call Them — 1-888-ATTY-911
If you or a family member has been injured in this storm, if a loved one has died, if your home or business has been destroyed, if a commercial vehicle has hit you, if a power line has come down — the call you make in the next twenty-four hours is the call that decides the case. The 60-day government-notice clock is already running. The TranStar camera footage is already cycling. The apartment maintenance records are already being destroyed. The insurance adjuster is already on the way.
Our intake line is staffed twenty-four hours a day, every day, by people who will pick up the phone, who will listen, and who will start the preservation work before the sun comes up. The consultation is free. There is no fee unless we win. We serve Houston and Southeast Texas in English and en español.
The number is 1-888-ATTY-911. We will be here when you call.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The information on this page is legal information, not legal advice for a specific case. Contacting the firm through this page or by telephone does not create an attorney-client relationship. An attorney-client relationship is created only by a signed engagement letter from the firm.