It’s official: Harvey biggest, baddest hurricane ever

We told you so. The National Hurricane Center’s official report on Hurricane Harvey, released Thursday, five months later, mostly confirms what those who lived through the storm already knew: Harvey was the worst rainstorm ever to hit the U.S.

The wonky government document — 76 pages of graphs, charts and meteorological analysis — repeated the word “catastrophic” seven times, and it was not short on superlatives.

It declared the August hurricane “the most significant tropical cyclone rainfall event in United States history.”

A “prolific tornado producer.”

Rainfall that was “truly overwhelming, literally and figuratively.”

“The second-most costly hurricane in U.S. history.”

“The deadliest hurricane to hit Texas since 1919.”

“Unprecedented.”

The in-depth meteorological review, a sort of scorecard tallying the storm’s total impact, makes clear that Harvey’s rainfall — a 1-in-1,000-year event — is unlike anything ever recorded in the U.S.

Eric Blake, the National Hurricane Center scientist who authored the report, posted a series of Tweets, laden with exclamation points, trying to put the findings in context.

“It’s a once in a lifetime event for so many people,” Blake told the Associated Press. “I think the flooding in the Houston metropolitan area is really unparalleled.”

Harvey didn’t just break the previous U.S. record for rainfall, set at 52 inches in Hawaii nearly 60 years ago, Blake wrote. The storm broke that record at seven different stations across southeast Texas. And, he added, 11 other stations recorded rainfall totals that broke the previous U.S. mainland record of 48 inches.

Isolated rainfall amounts were likely even more extreme in places, Blake wrote, levels so high that flood gauges could not capture them. Radar estimated isolated rainfall totals “as high as 65-70 inches in southeastern Texas.”

“It is unlikely the United States has ever seen such a sizable area of excessive tropical cyclone rainfall totals as it did from Harvey,” the report said.

The hurricane center estimates Harvey’s damage at between $90 billion and $160 billion with a midpoint of $125 billion. The storm killed at least 68 people, the report concluded, but attributed another 35 deaths to indirect causes, “such as electrocution, motor-vehicle crashes and isolation from necessary medical services.”

By one estimate, the storm dumped more than 33 trillion gallons of water over Texas and the southern United States.