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Calm after the storm: the floods in Houston washed away years of work at the city's laboratories. Credit: AP

A week after a tropical storm flooded research facilities in Houston, Texas, many scientists were still locked out of their labs, assessing a disaster that has wiped out years of studies on a variety of diseases.

More than 30,000 research animals — mostly mice and rats — were destroyed, an untold number of reagents obliterated and many investigations wrecked by the record rainfall from tropical storm Allison, which swept in off the Gulf of Mexico in the early morning of 9 June.

The rain flooded basements and knocked out power to research buildings and hospitals on the sprawling Texas Medical Center campus on the city's south side — a vast biomedical complex that attracts nearly $1 billion of grant support each year from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Research facilities at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston were hit hardest by the storm. A week later, Baylor's eight research buildings were operating on a maintenance basis only, with researchers and students working to minimize long-term damage. The main University of Texas research building in Houston remained closed, along with the adjacent Memorial Hermann Hospital.

James Patrick, dean of research at Baylor, said that 30,000 of the institution's 130,000 research rodents have been destroyed. “A large portion of these were genetically modified mice,” says Patrick.

“It is a major setback that reagents are lost,” says Baylor geneticist Huda Zoghbi, “but the significant loss is time — all the work that will have to be repeated. Many of us collaborate with researchers everywhere. The impact of this will be worldwide.”

On the afternoon after the flood, Katherina Walz, a postdoc working in the laboratory of geneticist James Lupski, found that more than two years of chromosomal-engineering experiments were destroyed when her colony of 150 mice drowned. “I just cried,” says Walz, when she learned what happened.

Fortunately, Walz says, she discovered that three female mice — created with a genetic deficiency to mimic the Smith–Magnis mental-retardation disease — survived in another research building. It will take her more than six months to breed sufficient mice for experiments. “I feel like now I want to work more than I did before,” she says.

Federal officials have declared the research region a disaster area, which means that special repair funding will be available. NIH officials are also waiving grant reporting requirements for researchers who have to repeat experiments. The Texan institutions are adding up the damage for insurance firms, with the total expected to run into millions of dollars.

Emergency generators were still providing power at the Baylor facilities a week after the storm, with lab directors concerned that freezers holding specimens and cultures could overheat. Before the generators were brought in, students, postdocs and professors carried tonnes of dry ice up flights of stairs to keep the specimens frozen.