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.

Our dis-ease in large part is the result of an unhealthy relationship to our flat coastal plain. We just can’t seem to accept that flooding is part and parcel of life on this very flat and rainy plain. We can’t accept it and so we do all we can to engineer our way out of it.

But what if we accepted our land as it is?  What if, in fact, we embraced this land and all its vulnerabilities?  After all, it flooded on this flat plain long before we got here, long before even the Karankawa got here. There were in fact large floods before we appeared. We know this because our rivers, bayous, and streams cut some pretty good-sized floodplains out of the coastal plain, before we got here. Floodplains that were wide and deep enough to accommodate large floods.  That is how nature accommodates runoff from torrential rainfall. The primeval prairies and forests also worked to attenuate floods, but from time to time, bigger storms dumped more water on the landscape than the prairies and forests could handle.

We refused to accept those floodplains as they were. For us, there was just too much developable land going to waste. We thought that we could outdo Mother Nature. With a little widening or straightening here or some new detention there, it seemed that we could indeed make those floodplains much smaller—and thus provide more land to develop even as we thought we were reducing flooding.  That arrangement has turned out to be a devil’s bargain. Those who bought houses on uplands “reclaimed” from floodplains got the very short end of that bargain.  In the long run, it seems that we are not going to be able to keep up with the amount of flooding that new development pushes downstream, flooding without a doubt exacerbated by what appears to be an emerging  pattern of more frequent large storms.

It is my contention that the natural floodplains carved out long ago by our streams and bayous have enough capacity, in their undeveloped state, to accommodate most if not all of the floods that Mother Nature throws at us. For everywhere else, there is elevation (pier and beam, or just higher on the landscape).

We can do much better at controlling the impacts from flooding than we can control the flooding itself. This realization is the beginning of wisdom for living on the Upper Gulf Coastal Plain of Texas –our home. Our fist task is to restore our floodplains to their full functionality, unfettered by development. Right alongside that task is to restore our prairies and forests to their full functionality.

Controlling impacts means we don’t build in floodplains, and it also means that we add an additional unbuildable buffer onto the existing floodplains. It is not enough of course to prohibit building in floodplains from here on out. We need to rescue those who live there now. These folks are the most “dis-eased” of all. Buyouts at this scale will be the work of a generation or two, but it is not one we can shrink from if we intend to build a resilient city in the future, a future where we are at ease with ourselves and with the land we live on, no matter what Mother Nature throws at us.