About this book

High Water at Home is an online book about house water in Wharton County flood country: the City of Wharton, El Campo, East Bernard, Boling, Louise, Glen Flora and the rice-country lots along the lower Colorado and the San Bernard. It follows the water up a house, from the yard to the outlets, then through the cleanup and the dry years between floods.

What it is not

It is a publication, not a plumber. It does no installs or repairs, takes no calls, books no work and has no connection to any Wharton County plumbing firm. When a job belongs to a licensed plumber, electrician, well pump installer, septic installer, the gas utility or the propane supplier, the chapters say so and stop there.

Where the facts come from

Every chapter is built from the pages of the agencies that set the rules or keep the records: the National Weather Service river gauges, FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the CDC and EPA, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension and the Texas Well Owner Network, TCEQ, the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners, the Railroad Commission of Texas, the Texas Attorney General, Wharton County and the City of Wharton, plus makers' own manuals where equipment is concerned. Each chapter ends with notes linking those pages and a short statement of what it rests on and what it could not confirm.

Dates

Rules, maps, insurance terms and project schedules change. Figures in the book carry the date they were checked, and the text was last checked on 11 November 2026. If an agency page now says something different, the agency is right.

Who writes it

The chapters are written and checked by the small team that makes this book; there are no named authors, reviews or testimonials here. A few chapters link to stores run by the same team as this book; the stores page lists them.

Pictures

Most pictures are public-domain and openly licensed photographs, many taken in Wharton County during the April 2016 flood by U.S. government staff. Where no photograph fit, a picture was generated and is labelled as AI-generated. The picture credits list every source.