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	 <p class="kicker"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics">Politics</a> <span>|</span> Analysis</p>  <h1>Putting the massive deluge in Texas into an understandable context</h1>  <p class="byline">By <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/philip-bump/">Philip Bump</a></p>  <p class="date">August 28, 2017 at 5:09 PM</p>  <div class="center pad-bottom"><a href="https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/PK2VTVGGIMZIDAWLC6M7IG3IZQ.jpg"><amp-img class="pad-bottom" height="360" layout="responsive" src="https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/PK2VTVGGIMZIDAWLC6M7IG3IZQ.jpg&amp;w=600" width="540"></amp-img></a><figure class="pb-caption">Interstate 45 is submerged Sunday in Houstaon. Richard Carson/Reuters) </figure></div>  <p class="text">Quite literally, it’s impossible to visualize the scale of the rainfall that Harvey has produced in Texas. We know it’s approaching a record; we know that the practical effects are widespread flooding and damage that we can’t yet measure.</p>  <p class="text">But the volume of rain — measured over the weekend at some <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/27/texas-flood-disaster-harvey-has-unloaded-9-trillion-tons-of-water/?utm_term=.c39cf86b4a39">9 trillion gallons</a> — simply makes no sense, any more than we can understand $9 trillion as being anything more than “a lot.”</p>  <p class="text">In July, when a massive iceberg broke off a shelf in Antarctica, we created a tool that tried to estimate how long it would take to drink all of the water the iceberg contained. We’ve <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/07/12/heres-how-long-it-would-take-you-to-drink-that-iceberg/?utm_term=.de05f7b25a7d">repurposed that tool</a> below, but must offer the caveat that you should not actually drink any (much less all) of the water that’s flooding Texas.</p>  <p class="text">If you drank 20 80-ounce glasses a minute, it would take you 13.7 million years.</p>  <div class="ad-container"><amp-ad data-loading-strategy="prefer-viewability-over-views" data-slot="/701/wpni.amp.politics/blog/politics" height="250" json="{}" type="doubleclick" width="300"></amp-ad></div>  <p class="text">This is a volume equivalent to 7.4 percent of Lake Erie, after all — which you should also not drink, at least without filtering it somehow.</p>  <p class="text">Lake Erie, incidentally, is about 571 feet above sea level, on average. If you started at sea level and created a one-mile square column of Harvey water, it would end up towering over 42,000 feet above your head.</p>  <p class="text">We can do the same calculation from anywhere on Earth.</p>  <p class="text">(That brown block, incidentally, is the size of a football field.)</p>  <p class="text">All of this helps, to some extent. But, generally, it’s simply an incomprehensible amount of water. And the damage it does will also be incomprehensible — at least until the water recedes.</p>  <div class="ad-container"><amp-sticky-ad layout="nodisplay"><amp-ad data-loading-strategy="prefer-viewability-over-views" data-slot="/701/wpni.amp.politics/blog/politics" height="50" json="{}" type="doubleclick" width="320"></amp-ad></amp-sticky-ad></div> 
    
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	 <p class="author">Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Washington Post based in New York.</p> 
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