Climate change, runaway development worsen Houston floods
An Associated Press analysis of government data found that if Harris County, which includes Houston, were a state it would rank in the top five or six in every category of repeat federal flood losses — defined as any property with two or more losses in a 10-year period amounting to at least $1,000 each.
Since 1998, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has paid more than $3 billion in today's dollars for flood losses in metropolitan Houston.
"There's basically very little control of development," said Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.
Since the 1980s, Houston's preferred approach to flood control, besides improving drainage, has been to build thousands of detention ponds, concrete-lined pools that capture stormwater and pipe it out slowly.
[...] developers don't build enough floodwater retention into their projects, and "areas that never flooded before now flood in the smallest event," said Ed Browne, chairmen of the citizens' group Residents Against Flooding .
Memorial City's owner, Metro National, has benefited from more than a decade of infrastructure improvements made by a quasi-governmental authority that the company's own lawyers helped create.
Flooded residents claim the authority failed to honor a 2003 pledge to build stormwater detention ponds on their side of Interstate 10, which the state Department of Transportation subsequently expanded to 26 lanes including frontage.
Jim Jard, a former Metro National president who sat on the Houston Planning Commission for 25 years and is still involved with the company, said "there is no civil engineer that will tell you projects at Metro National caused additional flooding."
Nearly half of the $313,000 that Harris County's top elected official, Judge Ed Emmett, collected in campaign contributions in the first half of 2014 came from engineers, builders, developers and real estate interests.
Rising average temperatures since 1985 have packed 7 percent more moisture into the atmosphere above Houston, while warmer Gulf of Mexico waters collude in the heavier rains.
Since 1986, extreme downpours — the type measured in double-digit inches — have occurred twice as often as in the previous 30 years, the AP weather analysis showed.
The odds are twice as high as they have been in the past.
Since the late 1970s, FEMA has made more flood damage payments in Harris County than in any place outside New Orleans and two other Louisiana parishes also ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Entire blocks of chronically flooded Houston neighborhoods should be acquired for conversion into water-absorbing open spaces, said Roy Wright, FEMA's associate deputy administrator.
Talbott said buyouts will remain part of the strategy, though Mark Loethen of Houston's Public Works Department said the city prefers helping homeowners get federal grants to raise homes above flood levels.