The statement: “Harvey dropped more water on Houston in five days than Niagara Falls does in a year.” – John Kerry, Special Envoy on Climate Change to President Joe Biden.
Kerry made the statement in a Jan. 31 appearance on CNN addressing the Biden administration’s government approach to climate change.
Fact rating: Untrue. By the time Hurricane Harvey disappeared, it had dropped to about 33 billion gallons of water, mainly in Texas, Louisiana and, to a lesser extent, Tennessee and Kentucky. By comparison, about 23.8 billion gallons per year flow over Niagara Falls.
Kerry’s comments are erroneous in limiting Harvey’s rainfall to Houston, and his office acknowledges the erroneous error.
Discussion
It is true that Harvey has produced rainfall levels that have never been recorded in the US in history. According to Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, the amount of rainfall over a period of five days over 10,000 square miles of Texas and Louisiana exceeded the previous record set in 1899 by 62 percent.
PolitiFact is a fact checking project to help you locate facts in politics. Truth O-meter ratings are determined by a panel of three editors. The burden of proof is on the speaker and PolitiFact judges the statements based on the information known at the time the statement was made.
In Harris County alone, which includes most of the city of Houston, the storm dropped an average of 33.7 inches of rainfall across the province’s 1,777 square miles.
A State Department spokesman said Kerry’s comment was based on a 2017 Washington Post article that reported that Harvey had dumped 24.5 billion gallons of water in southeast Texas and southern Louisiana.
By comparison, the article also mentions that 1 trillion gallons of water flows over the Niagara Falls every 15 days, and Kerry’s office used that number to extrapolate the amount of water flowing over the falls in a year.
A trillion gallons fall over Niagara Falls every 15 days. In the course of 365 days, it is about 24.3 billion liters of water, “said James Dewey, spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs.
The calculation of the back of the envelope is correct, and this is in line with official estimates. Niagara Falls State Park estimates that 757,500 gallons flow over the falls every second, which equates to 65.4 billion gallons per day, or 23.8 trillion gallons per year.
In both cases – whether Kerry’s estimate of 24.3 trillion gallons per year over Niagara or State Park’s estimate of 23.8 trillion – both figures are less than the 24.5 trillion gallons of water Harvey unleashed.
However, there is one important detail that Kerry is wrong about.
While it may be true that Harvey dropped more water within a week than flows over Niagara Falls in a year, not all of Harvey’s water fell on Houston or Harris County alone.
After PolitiFact reached out to Kerry’s office about the misrepresentation, a spokesman said the issue had been brought among staff and that Kerry would be more careful with the statistics.
“In a recent interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, Secretary Kerry said Hurricane Harvey ‘dropped more water on Houston in five days than Niagara Falls in a year,'” a spokesman for said a statement. “The statistics that Kerry referred to are for Hurricane Harvey, not only in Houston, but also in southeast Texas and southern Louisiana.”