(A joke I heard, which might not be a joke, was that the highest points in Houston are the soaring ramps of highway interchanges.)īixler saw in the Pine Crest development a supercharged version of his domestic battle.

He lost two cars, and, like many people in Houston, he has learned to park up the block, on higher ground. It’s hard to prove these things, but Bixler felt it was obvious: The project had displaced scores of acre-feet (an acre-foot is an acre of water, 1 foot deep), some of which had wound up in his living room. What changed? He pointed to a giant, raised shopping center up the hill. It has now flooded three times, all in the past decade. The house where he and his wife live was built in 1960. “It’s just a question of how much.” Two in three Houstonians believe lax regulations have made the city’s flooding problems worse.ĭean Bixler is one of them.

“Pretty much all the time, development is a piece of it,” he asserted. That doesn’t include Harvey, said watershed scientist and consultant Matthew Berg, who published the data. And White Oak Bayou, over a slightly longer time frame, is up nearly 600 percent. Brickhouse Gully’s peak is up nearly 400 percent. Since records began more than 50 years ago, Buffalo Bayou’s peak flows are up 250 percent. All three of the conduits below Pine Crest-Brickhouse to White Oak to Buffalo, a double-play combination that drains this stretch of northwest Houston-are among the 12 fastest-rising urban waterways in the state of Texas. The flood plains are on the march, creeping inland from surging bayous. The Simons aren’t alone: Homes that once flooded rarely, if ever, are suddenly flooding more. Harvey was their third flood in three years. “They would have committed us to asylum had we stayed,” she said. This wasn’t their children’s main concern. They lost the door frame where they measured the kids. So they left the neighborhood they’d known for decades, where Patti could walk to her job teaching French at the high school, and friends from church could come by and help move the boxes in and out every time the water came in the door. Done putting the couch up on the kitchen counter each time they saw a bad forecast-and too old for it besides. At 75, Patti told me she was done with the routine that had accompanied the years in their house since Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. They waded to a neighbor’s elevated home. Simon last August was the fifth time their ranch house on Brays Bayou had flooded. Rick Wilking/ReutersĪmong the Harvey survivors I met were Patti and R.J.

1, 2017, after she returned to it by canoe for the first time since Harvey floodwaters arrived in Houston. Melissa Ramirez tells Edward Ramirez the status of their flooded home on Sept. The maps Bixler pulled indicated that, according to government-approved estimates, Pine Crest golf course could be expected to sit beneath 2 feet of water during what would be called a 100-year storm. On a map, the flood plain is to the bayous as foliage is to a branching tree. In Houston, the 100-year clings to the bayous, gullies, and ditches that give the city its natural character and duck beneath the roads and lurk behind houses. In most places in the U.S., a flood plain encompasses beach houses and ribbons of properties along fast-rising rivers. What that official designation means is both practical risk to the homeowner and, for anyone with a Federal Housing Administration mortgage, a potentially onerous requirement to buy flood insurance. For the past decade, the entire course had sat in the 100-year flood plain-land, usually near bodies of water, that has been assessed as having a 1 percent chance of flooding every year. Bixler downloaded Federal Emergency Management Agency maps and found something strange.

Houston flood plain