Flooding and drainage

This is the Lake Houston area, so flooding is a fair question for anyone buying or renovating.

The flood zone, street by street

Timberwood is not in one flood zone. It is in three, and which one your house is in depends on where on the street it sits. The share of addressed lots in Zone AE, the mapped high-risk zone where a mortgage lender requires flood insurance:

Those shares are this Record's own count. Every addressed Timberwood lot was checked against FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer, the same data behind the official maps.¹ The rest of the neighborhood falls between the streets above.

Timberwood sits on FIRM panel 48201C0485M, effective June 9, 2014.¹ Ground a couple of miles east, toward the river, is on a different panel, so a panel number found for another address near here does not settle yours.

Two things this does not tell you. A lot can be in a different zone from the pavement in front of it, so the street average is a starting point and never an answer for one address. And a house outside Zone AE can still flood. Nationally, 29 percent of flood insurance claims between 2014 and 2024 came from outside the high-risk areas.² Closer to home, the state insurance department puts it plainer: "More than half of homes flooded by Hurricane Harvey were outside of designated flood zones."³

Look up your own address on the FEMA Flood Map Service Center, which searches by address,⁴ or on the Harris County Flood Education Mapping Tool.⁵

New maps are coming, and they are not law yet. Harris County Flood Control released draft MAAPnext flood maps in February 2026. Draft is not the same as FEMA's formal preliminary stage, and the county says so: "They are not final, not regulatory. Nothing changes right now related to flood insurance requirements or development regulations."⁶ The county's own schedule does not reach an approved map until around 2028.⁶ The drafts would move most of these streets into a higher risk category, which matters for anyone deciding whether to buy flood insurance while it is still optional.

The regional record

During Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, major flooding hit the San Jacinto River from "heavy rainfall, Lake Conroe releases and backwater from Lake Houston", and over 664 homes along the river were damaged.⁷

Lake Conroe reached its highest level on record, 206.24 feet above sea level on August 28, 2017, against a normal pool of 201 feet, and let go its largest release on record, 79,141 cubic feet per second the same day.⁸

The subdivisions the weather service named between Humble and Lake Houston were Northshore, Bellaeu Woods, Riviera, Treasure Cove, the Kings Lake and Kings River communities, Atascocita Shores and West, Ramblewood and Walden, along with US 59, West Lake Houston Parkway, North Houston Avenue, Thelma Road, Hamblen Road and Aqua Vista Drive.⁷

Timberwood does not appear in those lists. That is not the same as saying Timberwood did not flood, and the absence is not treated here as evidence either way.

Permits and flood maps

• The City of Humble requires a permit for floodplain development, fill of any amount, grading and storage, and it warns that "often, a floodplain development permit is required even when a construction permit may not be required".⁹ The rule reaches the 500-year floodplain, not only the 100-year one.⁹ See permits.
• A Letter of Map Amendment is how a wrong flood zone gets corrected on one property. FEMA charges nothing to review a LOMA and normally answers in 60 days, but you have to hire a licensed surveyor or engineer to prepare the elevation certificate first, and that is where the money and the wait go.¹⁰

What neighbors can add

• Which houses took water in Harvey, in the 2015 and 2016 events, or in Imelda
• Which streets hold water in an ordinary hard rain. Everyone who has lived here a few years knows. Nobody buying a house does.
• Which ditches and inlets stop draining and need calling in

Street-level flood history is the hardest thing to find when buying a house in this part of Texas, and it lives entirely in the heads of people already on the street.

See also

• Storms and outages
• Home insurance
• Who to call