For decades, individuals and non-profits have fought, cajoled, pleaded, and litigated to protect our region’s bayous, stream corridors, and green-spaces. But in an urban fabric that is growing as fast as the Houston metro area, the pressure on our natural systems is intense, and each local effort and skirmish ends with a compromise that results in an inexorable diminution of the resources we are trying to vouchsafe for future generations.

Courtesy of Bayou Preservation Association.

If simple ignorance of hydrology and hydraulics shaped a public policy that has resulted in so much public harm, what questions should we be asking, what science should we be probing, what engineering should we be exploring to forestall even greater damages to a city grown to double or triple its current population? Instead of fighting myriad small skirmishes with little to show for the effort, what kind of public policy can we shape to avoid loss and tragedy in both natural and human terms?

Just to get the pump primed and to encourage discussion, I would like to suggest that the following recommendations be integrated into our public policy, whether by legislative action, by ordinance, or just by departmental decision.

To better manage our watersheds:

1. Since what happens in our stream corridors and floodplains is absolutely linked to what happens in the streams’ watersheds, both must be managed as a single integral system.
2. Regional watershed management needs to be consolidated into one entity with the responsibility, authority, and funding to properly manage the region’s watersheds (currently there are more than 30 separate entities within Harris County).
3. “System Watershed Capacity,” or the total amount of water the watershed can non-destructively accommodate, is a valuable, publicly owned resource.
4. No project, of any scale, should be allowed to reduce or diminish system capacity.
5. No project impacts should be permitted until after system capacity compensatory mitigation is in place.
6. Calculated and measured time of concentration should be used as a primary test of impact on system capacity (not just floodplain displacement).
7. System storage should be the first priority in watershed management; system conveyance should be the second priority.
8. System planning and design should balance needs for storage, conveyance, habitat, recreation, and aesthetics.

To safely live with our region’s floodplains:

1. Accurately map ALL 100-year flood hazards in urbanized areas (not just along primary streams and bayous).
2. Identify floor elevations in all structures within flood hazard zones.
3. Communicate flood hazard zone information and depth of floor below base flood elevation on all tax bills and property transaction disclosure statements (for properties within a flood hazard zone).
4. Communicate to all property owners, by mailed announcement, any changes to flood hazard maps.
5. Communicate to renters by including flood hazard zone and depth information on monthly utility bills.
6. Set an administrative goal of having 100 percent participation in the Flood Insurance Program for properties in flood hazard zones.

To reduce flood damages:

1. Adequately fund a permanent buy-out program for frequently damaged structures and frequently submerged undeveloped properties that are deepest in the floodplains abutting stream and bayou corridors.
2. Create a compliance-based buy-out program to encourage elevating or rebuilding frequently damaged structures within neighborhoods not adjacent to stream corridors in order to maintain the integrity of the neighborhood fabric.
3. Purchase land and create tributary and neighborhood level detention basins as well as regional main stream detention basins.
4. Continue to pursue federal participation in major projects that will increase system capacity while stressing the need for properly balancing our requirements for storage, conveyance, habitat, recreation, and aesthetics.

Some of these recommendations will require a measure of vision and daring to implement. Others are simple and could be implemented by existing agencies and departments in a short period of time by department heads.

This list could, and should, go on to include consideration of all aspects of watershed management. I have purposely focused on issues related to flooding, because flood damage reduction is the driving force that shapes most of the stormwater infrastructure investment in our cities. It also carries both the greatest threat to our stream corridors and the greatest promise for urban stream corridors, all depending on our public policy.