“Burdensome Regulations”

 If you want to start assigning blame, start here:

On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.

Why the hell were children EVER allowed to bed down in a floodplain? Because it had never flooded before? Wrong answer. Why hadn’t the city, or the county, or the state, or the Feds, done anything about that?

Start there.

When Harvey dumped  50” of rain on Houston, some of the worst flooding, and deaths, occurred after the rain stopped. That flooding occurred because the 1930’s flood control project once far beyond the Houston city limits, is now well within it, and surrounded by developed land that in the ‘40’s was prairie. It held water out of the bayou, then drained to it when the flood threat was gone. It is well away from the bayou, so it drained over open prairie. Which prairie is now traversed by I-10 and development from the reservoir to the bayou, with development along the bayou to the Gulf. That bayou drained the rainfall for the entire time of the storm. After the storm, the reservoir gates were opened (lest the reservoir collapse from the record amount of water held), and the water flooded neighborhoods from the reservoir to the Gulf, including streets that were closed for days after.  The worst damage of Harvey was done by that development in the floodplain.

No one has ever really investigated why that happened, or what to do about it, mostly because the cost of clearing that floodplain would be astronomical. The City of Austin bought up houses on Shoal Creek to clear some of the floodplain after the Memorial Day flood in the’80’s. No one proposed that for Houston, in part because some of the most expensive real estate in the city is along the bayou, residential as well as commercial. That real estate was flooded by the release; but there was, and has been, no attempt at mass relocation.

The camps on the Guadalupe don’t have to close; unless they don’t have higher ground to relocate to. Better warnings would be good. Evacuation plans would be good. But given the power, speed, and danger of flash flooding, not being in the flood plain, is the only real security. There are plenty of levels of government who could have foreseen that.

Why they didn’t, and what they do now, are the real governmental issues.