This made me think back to when I was a kid. I live in Alvin, Texas and below is a part of an article about a storm we had back in 1979. I remember this to this very day vividly. It was amazing and we had to take a john boat to get down to our shop at the back of our land.
The all-time United States record for rainfall in a 24-hour period was set in Texas in 1979. This broke the record set in 1921 in the flood described on the previous page. The current record holder is Alvin, Texas. Alvin doesn't have any dramatic topography to trigger precipitation. It just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The event was Tropical Storm Claudette. Not the Claudette that made landfall in July 2003, but the one that made landfall in July 1979. The storm moved slowly inland over southeast Texas, causing about $750M in property and crop damage. The highest rainfall total at an official site was a remarkable 40" in 24 hours, but a nearby unofficial site, confirmed by the National Weather Service, recorded 43" in 24 hours.
That's an impressive amount of rain no matter how you look at it. Normally you would have to put a garbage can under the storm gutter of a house to have any hope of filling it up during a rainstorm. But with Claudette the trash can could have been left out in the open and it still would have filled up.
