June 14, 2001, 11:26PM

$2.14 billion in damage estimated

Mayor: Storm city's biggest disaster ever

By RACHEL GRAVES and MIKE TOLSON

Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle

The tab racked up by Tropical Storm Allison continued to rise today, topping $2.14 billion in the city of Houston alone.

The total includes $1 billion worth of damage to 27,000 homes, $960 million in damage to at least 526 commercial buildings and $122 million in damaged business inventory, said Jim Robinson, chief appraiser for the Harris County Appraisal District.

Damage to vehicles, the contents of homes and the contents of medical, government and arts buildings have not yet been tabulated. Neither has damage to property in Harris County outside the city limits.

"This is clearly the most expensive, the most devastating disaster we've ever had," Mayor Lee Brown said Wednesday.

Allison first hit Houston on June 5, but the brunt of the storm came last weekend when it killed 21 people and turned neighborhoods into lakes and roads into rivers.

Among other losses, research valued well into the millions was destroyed in Texas Medical Center buildings.

Downtown theaters lost irreplaceable instruments, some of them hundreds of years old. The Houston Symphony's library of musical scores was inundated, as were ballet costumes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Damage to equipment for cellular telephone companies reached $30 million.

Workers are still pumping water out of basements and parking garages in skyscrapers and hospitals, a process that costs about $1 million per building.

The damage values are based on costs for repairs or, in the case of total losses, replacements.

Robinson said he hopes to have a more definitive number for losses within the city of Houston on Friday.

"This is a major catastrophe," said Sandra Ray, spokeswoman for the Southwest Insurance Information Service. "It rivals the hailstorms in the Fort Worth area in 1995 and the Oklahoma City tornadoes."

The estimates put together by insurance catastrophe teams were half a billion dollars in regular insured losses and half a billion covered by flood insurance. Those estimates, Ray said, were preliminary and conservative.

"He may be right," she said of the mayor's figure. "We know our estimate will go up."

Insurance companies expect at least 100,000 claims, with 60 to 70 percent of those involving motor vehicles, Ray said.

Though Brown's assessment of the financial damage likely will prove accurate, Allison has some rivals for the title of worst storm ever in the Houston area. Flooding caused by Tropical Storm Claudette in July 1979 was almost as bad, and its damage estimates topped $1.8 billion.

(All figures have been adjusted for inflation and are in 2001 dollars.)

Claudette was responsible for a U.S. rainfall record. A gauge two miles northeast of Alvin recorded 43 inches over a 24-hour period.

Clear Creek expanded to a width greater than a mile, rising to 9 feet above normal. Approximately 15,000 homes and 17,000 cars were damaged by floodwaters.

Floods from a four-day deluge in October 1994 produced a little over $1 billion in damage. Seventeen people were killed throughout the Houston area and more than 22,000 homes were flooded.

The notorious 1935 flood, which pushed Buffalo Bayou 46 feet above normal and dunked downtown Houston, caused more than $162 million in damage and was arguably worse than Allison in overall impact. The central water plant, for instance, was inoperable for weeks. So dramatic was the storm's effect that local officials soon created the Harris County Flood Control District.

Houston also has been heavily damaged by two major hurricanes. Alicia hit the Gulf Coast hard in 1983, killing 21 people and exacting a $3.5 billion toll on the region. Carla, which struck in 1961, was even more deadly, taking 34 lives in Texas and wreaking $1.8 billion in damage to the Houston area.

-- PHO (owennos@bigfoot.com), June 15, 2001