Watershed Texas

Another day. Just another storm in Houston. Is this what it has come down to? Every year or so another big storm or two, another few hundreds or maybe tens of thousands of houses flooded?  Are we a little more used to this than we should be? But there is no getting used to it for a great many of us.

We don’t seem to have the same ease of living on the Gulf Coast that we once had. Even small storms moving through seem to put a knot in our stomach. Who will be flooded this time? It is hard to get a good night’s rest when the atmosphere gets a little unstable.

There is a disease that seems to have infected our relationship to the land. A literal dis-ease. A lack of ease is exactly the root of the word “disease” and that meaning   accurately describes where we are in relation to flood “control.”  Maybe we are starting to sense that flood control is more of a fool’s errand than we would like to believe. We’ve built to one standard, the hundred-year flood, only to find out that that standard isn’t good enough anymore. Continue Reading »

Houston has in place a natural flood detention and conveyance system that could handle another Harvey, sitting right here in plain sight. Our bayous, creeks, and streams, and their associated floodplains have carved out, over millennia, a very robust and capacious system. This legacy system did not fail during Harvey. We failed, over the years, because we put so many people in harms way. In fact, over 40% of all FEMA-designated floodplains in Harris County have been developed to one degree or another, with more than 500,000 homes and apartments in these hazardous zones. Few floodplains within the beltway are undeveloped.

[also at Gray Matters]

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A recent talk given to the Houston chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas.