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Kingwood flooding doesn't pass the smell test

76,965 Views | 567 Replies | Last: 5 yr ago by notheranymore
FHKChE07
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The main limiting factors in being able to release from the dams is not the outlet structure, it is the channel downstream of Lake Conroe, the length of time it takes releases from Lake Conroe to be out of the system and not cause more problems than they solve, and the fact that the construction of the dam will literally fail if they draw down to fast. We simply do not have the ability to predict weather that accurately weeks ahead of time to be able to prerelease water and not jeopardize the main function of the dam which is providing drinking water for 3 million people in times of drought by dumping water and then not getting rain.

As txags92 said, sure, we could add another 30 ft of height to Lake Conroe dam for a bajillion dollars in construction costs and condemning all houses of people living in that flood area.

Lake Houston doesn't even really impound that much water from a flood control point of view either. It's total capacity is roughly what Lake Conroe has in Flood capacity.

Sure lots of things could be done to completely reconstruct all of the infrastructure of NE Houston (Roads, Channels, Dams, Lakes) so that the next time we get a biblical amount of rain, the same ~1000 houses? don't flood. It just doesn't make sound financial sense. Blame them for not putting in flood capacity when they built the dams originally, I don't care.

The much saner option is to STOP LETTING PEOPLE BUILD HOUSES IN FLOOD PRONE AREAS! Such a small portion of Kingwood flooded that is makes far more sense to just block those neighborhoods from rebuilding. But I'm sure you wouldn't like that because you live there and instead we should force everyone on the shores of Lake Conroe to have to move so we can turn Lake Conroe in to a flood control lake and protect Kingwood.

Sure, you can have people study things, and see what they say. My favorite is what I have seen today about this recommended underground Buffalo Bayou that would run parallel to 10 from Katy to the ship channel that was proposed in 1996. If you read through the study, they claim it would cost only $350 million (in 1996). But also in the study, they explain that the highest in the 50 years that either of the reservoirs had been was below the 100 year flood. The 100 year flood never happened until 2015 and the reservoirs performed great. How do you think that would play with the electorate? Why did we build this massive underground river that is never used? There are lots of grand plans that engineers can come up with but someone has to make the tough decisions of where infrastructure money goes to. This is the whole reason we are in this mess. In the 30's, Houston was flooded, so we built the reservoirs. In the 50's, we had a drought which is why all of the drinking water reservoirs were built in the State in the 60's and 70's. There is never enough infrastructure money to go around, but what you seem to want would cost orders of magnitudes more than just having those people in the area that flooded walk away from their homes.
aTm2004
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txags92 said:

The two functions are diametrically opposed to one another. It is impossible to maximize the available drinking water supply in case of drought, while simultaneously maintaining a large freeboard to allow for it to be used for flood control. You simply can't do both things. If you invented a teleporter so that released water vanished as soon as it left the Conroe gates and reappeared in the gulf, then yes, given 5-7 days warning of a major flood event (which is beyond our current forecast accuracy), they MIGHT be able to gain a foot or two of freeboard which would have taken less than a day to fill at the rate it was entering the Lake during Harvey. Otherwise anything you release from Conroe is just going to prime the downstream watershed for worse flooding given the limitations of our current forecasting capabilities. And keep in mind that the first time they dump a bunch of drinking water for a rainfall that doesn't materialize that is then followed by a drought, they are going to get sued by everybody whose landscaping died due to water restrictions and everybody whose bass boat center punches a stump.

As I said in my previous post, If you want to use it for flood control, build the dam 30 feet higher and buyout all the current owners living near the lake, and rebuild Highway 105 and several other major roads somewhere else. Otherwise, accept that it isn't for flood control and get better in tune with the types of warnings they use to let you know what is coming. Oh, and buy flood insurance.
So, you didn't read what I wrote. Before you say you did, I want you to realize that what I bolded shows you missed what I said.

Quote:

Lake Houston, IIRC from earlier in the thread, is a spillway dam. Could they possibly make some changes to that in order to do some release prior to a big rain event while maintaining it's intended purpose?
There's a balancing that they have to maintain, but I'm not one who believes that things cannot change while not maintaining the intended purpose. You say it's impossible. I'm sure there are those out there who are smarter than both of us who say it isn't. I think people will be OK with dead grass vs. ripping out their homes and replacing their lives.
ArticPenguin:
I am a middle aged lesbian with two children. In Texas, the GOP would love to claim I am an unfit parent and take my children.

Response when pressed for proof:
I actually have 6 links, and was getting super pissed the more info I looked up...So, look it up yourself, I am not going to fight about something I know to be true, to a person who would just as soon see me in prison or dead.
https://texags.com/forums/16/topics/2948036/replies/51680255
txags92
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I did read it. And you are wrong. Lake Houston already has spillway gates. I am not sure of their operational status and they don't amount to much in terms of flow, but they have them if they want to use them. But Lake Houston is just a small part of the whole watershed that has to drain if they make a big release from Conroe. No matter what you do to Lake Houston, you still are looking at 5-7 days to drain anything you release from Conroe. And to make a big enough dent to have made a difference, you are talking about something like 15-25% of the drinking water for most of the Houston area. What happens the first time they are wrong and we then have a drought? The many people who lose when the water is gone are different from the few people you save by preventing the flooding. So it isn't an either or choice for them.
FHKChE07
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I completely agree about informing yourself. The number of times I was watching the news talk about this or that and they didn't have a grasp on how structures functioned was mindblowing.

But I watched the bayou levels on the bayous I was concerned about for me and my family. I'm not saying you have to do it everyday, but if you didn't know we were in a cataclysmic event last weekend and you should maybe check on the river that runs about 1000 yards from your house, I can't help you. Too many people want someone to hold their hand and tell them that they should do this or do that personally. There are too many people in the region to be able to handle that. Even Jeff said that they spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out a comprehensive list of subdivision names that might be affected by the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs because they were inundated with phone calls after they said "Neighborhoods to the west of the dam areas" in a press conference. This information isn't that hard to understand and the NWS releases forecasts for the rivers when they are likely to go into flood range that give fairly accurate predictions to allow you to make your decisions. For most of these gauges they also have inundation maps that allow you to see what is flooded at each level. All the news outlets would regularly go through the rivers that were going to be going through flood stages and show you the maps that showed the forecasts.

I don't expect people to just sit at home and watch the news non-stop, but if you are going to claim that you weren't informed, you have to provide a method of delivery. The local officials used what I deem to be reasonable means of communication through, TV, Radio, Cell alerts, facebook, etc... You can and have been able to sign up for emergency broadcasts from your local emergency command centers for years now that send texts to your phone.

I get it that you want to blame somebody, but try at least a reasonable argument, not try redesigning infrastructure wholesale.
CDUB98
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Quote:

Lake Houston, IIRC from earlier in the thread, is a spillway dam. Could they possibly make some changes to that in order to do some release prior to a big rain event while maintaining it's intended purpose?


The only meaningful way to change Lake Houston to a flood control would be to also buy out all the houses around the lake, raise roads, build a levee system.

We once again reach the same problem: To increase the water storage freeboard, you must increase the height of the damn, and thus at the same time, condemn the same number of people to moving as those whom you might save, and I use might due to the unknowns of the other flood streams that enter the system.
CDUB98
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Quote:

Too many people want someone to hold their hand and tell them that they should do this or do that personally.
terradactylexpress
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Good God I'm embarrassed that some of the people on here have ag tags
FHKChE07
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So what they do on the Highland lakes in the Hill country is Lake Travis is the Flood control Reservoir for Austin. It protects against the surge of water and has a large capacity. Then after the flooding stops, it slowly releases back down to normal level. Lake Buchanan is the water supply lake a long ways upstream of several other lakes. Essentially, when they need drinking water, they pull from Lake Travis while at the same time releasing from Lake Buchanan to replace the water they took.

However, it is the topography that allows for this to happen. The Colorado river drops several hundred feet in elevation across the lakes and they are very large lakes because there is space. There isn't room to put another dam to hold water in NE Houston or to modify the ones that they have and just flood more places.
FHKChE07
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I'm sorry for embarrassing you, Dino.
schmellba99
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aTm2004 said:

There's a balancing that they have to maintain, but I'm not one who believes that things cannot change while not maintaining the intended purpose. You say it's impossible. I'm sure there are those out there who are smarter than both of us who say it isn't. I think people will be OK with dead grass vs. ripping out their homes and replacing their lives.
Can things change?

Of course they can - with enough time, money, materials and effort anything is theoretically possible.

But the crux of the matter is simply this - the topography of SE Texas is not one that would allow such a change without spending what is literally an unimaginable amount of money over a very long period of time. We don't have the big canyons and valleys and uninhabited land that would make such changes feasible even in somewhat make believe land.

In order to make Conroe both a supply reservoir and a flood control lake you'd have to, using the number in a previous reply, raise the height of the dam by 30 or so feet. In doing so, the dam would loop from about Montgomery to Willis (rough guess) and the area of innundation would roughly encompass a shape from the existing dam to Huntsville to College Station to Navasota and back to Montgomery. And, quite honestly, that is probably not nearly enough area.

So to save the ~1000 homes in Kingwood that were damaged to the flood, you'd make an area that is about 537,000 acres uninhabitable. No clue on the number of houses, property value or population in that area - but it's significantly more than that of the roughly 1000 homes in Kingwood.

To do the same to LH would probably be easily 3x the surface area, or about 1.5 Million acres that would not be suitable for habitation due to being in the innundation zone for the flood control portion of the reservoir and the area would include everything from Dayton to Cleveland to Conroe to Spring and back to the lake. So you'd displace ALL of Kingwood, plus about, what, 2 or so million people, to protect your roughly 1000 houses that would be 100% in the flood zone anyway.

At some point you need to take responsibility as an adult to know what the area around you can do in various conditions, plan ahead, and know where to find the information instead of complaining that you didn't think there was enough alerts alarms and door knocking from people telling you bad things are going to happen. Data is out there, you literally have the entire world at your fingertips via the phone in your hand - the news simply cannot advise each and every person in each and every area of a metroplex with about 7mm or so people in it that is getting hammered across the entirety of the metropolitan area what each and every potential disaster may be.

Could communication be better? Hell, it always can, but given the entirety of the situation and what has been explained to you on this thread, combined with the fact that it wasn't bad to begin with, I'm just not seeing where you can legitimately claim you weren't adequately informed. That's just me though.
terradactylexpress
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FHKChE07 said:

I'm sorry for embarrassing you, Dino.
evestor1
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New Discussion over kingwood (Royal Shores is on the east side...)

https://www.coastalwaterauthority.org/contractor-outreach/luce-bayou-project/about-cwa/what-is-the-luce-bayou-interbasin-transfer-project


What would this have done to the lake if it was already complete?
CDUB98
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Probably not much.

Quote:

The purpose of the Luce Bayou Interbasin Transfer Project (LBITP) is to provide additional surface water supplies to end users that utilize water from Lake Houston. Additional surface water supplies will be transferred from the Trinity River to Lake Houston via the LBITP to meet the increased demand for surface water.
BowSowy
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The circles being run in this thread are making me dizzy
FHKChE07
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It shouldn't really an issue because they would have not been pumping water across to the canal, but I also don't know if they would have gotten enough height in the trinity to over flow into the canal to have additional flow to the East Fork, because I don't that detailed of survey information to form conclusions. Also, I'm starting to not care so much.

The interesting part of it is that the whole reason COH is constructing this is because studies are showing that we will not have enough water in the future to meet demand with the current systems of Lake Houston and Lake Conroe, so that should add more evidence that purposefully draining Lake Conroe is very unlikely to happen not because of lakeside property but because people like water.
CDUB98
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FHKChE07 said:

The interesting part of it is that the whole reason COH is constructing this is because studies are showing that we will not have enough water in the future to meet demand with the current systems of Lake Houston and Lake Conroe, so that should add more evidence that purposefully draining Lake Conroe is very unlikely to happen not because of lakeside property but because people like water.
Finn Maccumhail
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That Luce's Bayou project is interesting, I'm sure they've reviewed it extensively but I wonder how it will impact the health of Trinity, Upper Galveston, and East Bays.

The delivery of fresh water into the system is integral to the health of the bay. One of the reasons they're closing Rollover Pass is that it's made the bays too salty which has combined with other factors to decimate the oyster and seagrass populations and a decline in overall water quality.

I know the damning of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers in Georgia which used to feed into the Apalachicola River has caused a severe decline in the health of Apalachicola Bay and St. George Sound, especially regarding their oyster and shrimp populations. Same for the restriction of flows from Okochobee south through the Everglades in impacting both the Glades and Florida Bay/Keys.
schmellba99
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Luce Bayou is a water supply project to keep LH at a minimum level when the NEWTP project is finalized and that plant starts pulling an obscene amount of water out of LH to deliver to western Harris County, Montgomery County and I think some may go into Ft. Bend County (not sure about Ft. Bend). The NEWTP project is a $1.5+ Billion upgrade to the existing plant, and that cost doesn't include the roughly additional billion they are going to spend on the distribution pipelines and booster pump stations. Huge expenditure for COH,which is a main reason most of their other water infrastructure projects are either on hold or flat out not going to be done anytime in the next 5 years.

Luce won't have that much affect on the Trinity, at least that was what I was told when I asked those questions. It's a lot of water that will be pulled, but the Trinity is a wide and deep river and the amount of water is, comparatively speaking, not much at all. I think the pump station will initially be a 400mgd station with capacity for future expansion to 800mgd. It's a good sized pump station, still mad we opted to not bid the damn thing.
FHKChE07
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At 400 mgd, that is only 618 cfs. That is essentially no water in terms of rain or rivers.
Finn Maccumhail
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And 400mgd means what? 400 million gallons per day??

FHKChE07
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Yes. Million gallon per day. CFS is such a deceiving unit. At ~14000 cfs coming out of the reservoirs, that is 215 million barrels / day, or 9 billion gallons / day and that is low compared to a lot of rates that we saw during the storm. Rivers are big, yo.
schmellba99
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FHKChE07 said:

At 400 mgd, that is only 618 cfs. That is essentially no water in terms of rain or rivers.
Yep. In terms of pump stations, it's pretty good sized. But in terms of river flow rates and capacities, it's about a water hose.
FHKChE07
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Well, yeah, it is a pretty large pumping station that could actually be helpful to pump out beltway 8.
MrWonderful
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vansprinkle said:

I was wondering about this myself. Lake Houston doesn't hold much water, but you'd think the dam would have been wide ass open to get water out asap. There isn't much down river, so let it flow.
Lake Houston is a spillway dam I believe, could be wrong but that's what I read. Can't open it up without a wrecking ball
FHKChE07
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It has a couple of small gates, but it has a massive spillway.
txags92
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My understanding is that the Lake Houston gates are used only for maintenance purposes and are kept closed during normal operations and flooding.
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evestor1
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I always thought it had 3 gates....I spent half my childhood climbing all over the earthen dam portion and collecting rocks/whatever. Apparently it only has two gates (they look tiny/worthless also.)


No idea what a "tainter" gate is. Just doesnt sound right!



http://www.twdb.texas.gov/surfacewater/rivers/reservoirs/houston/index.asp
CDUB98
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Quote:

No idea what a "tainter" gate is. Just doesnt sound right!



MUST
RESIST
JOKE
schmellba99
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evestor1 said:

I always thought it had 3 gates....I spent half my childhood climbing all over the earthen dam portion and collecting rocks/whatever. Apparently it only has two gates (they look tiny/worthless also.)


No idea what a "tainter" gate is. Just doesnt sound right!



http://www.twdb.texas.gov/surfacewater/rivers/reservoirs/houston/index.asp
It is a gate that is on an axle at the bottom and pivots down to open and allow water to flow through the opening.
sts7049
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i don't know if "opening up the taints" is a good idea
FHKChE07
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They LISTENED!!! Voluntary home buyout!

https://www.hcfcd.org/our-programs/property-acquisition-program/voluntary-acquisition/voluntary-home-buyout/
aggiemike02
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Survey for interest in ...

"The Flood Control District is currently gauging interest in potential home buyout options for Harris County residents who experienced flooding during Hurricane Harvey. Please know that a home buyout program specific to flooding events associated with Hurricane Harvey has not yet been identified by the Flood Control District. While funding is not currently available, the Flood Control District is actively pursuing the funding necessary to proceed with Harvey-related home buyouts."
Liquid Wrench
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Is this Bag speaking after the 5:45 mark?
https://www.facebook.com/houstonmayor/videos/10155342152452535/
BigPuma
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yeah those guys don't get it.
 
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