Flood history / Texas / ZIP 77042
ZIP 77042
Harris County, TX
Property owners in ZIP 77042 have been paid $108.6M on 1,356 National Flood Insurance Program claims between 1978 and 2024 — an average of $80K a claim, across 46 separate years in which someone here filed and was paid.
The heaviest year
2017 is the heaviest year on file: 522 paid claims, 38.5% of the ZIP's total. That one year accounts for more than a quarter of the ZIP's entire record. The largest named event in the record is Hurricane Harvey, with 508 claims.
552 of those claims — 40.7% — were filed since 2017. This is not a historical record — most of it is recent.
Where the claims sat on the map
Of the 1,335 claims here that record a rated flood zone, 1,093 — 81.9% — were on properties rated outside the mapped high-risk area, in a B, C or X zone. Most of the paid flooding in this ZIP happened to properties the maps did not treat as high risk. Flood insurance is not required outside the high-risk zone, and most properties there do not carry it — so these counts come from the minority who did.
The water near this ZIP
The closest gauges publishing official flood thresholds are Buffalo Bayou at West Belt Drive (1.5 mi), Buffalo Bayou at Piney Point Village (2.3 mi) and Brays Bayou at Gessner Drive (5.1 mi). A gauge describes one point on one river — it will not see street drainage, sewer backup, storm surge or flash flooding.
Read current gauge conditions for 77042 →
What this does not say
These are paid National Flood Insurance Program claims, nothing more. They count insured properties whose owners filed and were paid, so they are a floor on how often this ZIP has flooded — never a measure of how likely it is to flood next. Uninsured flooding leaves no trace here at all.
The figures are aggregates published by FEMA. No individual claim, address or policyholder appears on this page or in the data behind it. Nothing here is a forecast, a warning, or advice about insurance.