JJxvi said:

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The problem with the dams is that when the government built them, it essentially created this "easement" because when the dams were full, water would be impounded, but they never actually paid anybody for that right or put it officially in the title to the land. The government asserted this right over these properties merely by building the dams. However, the fact that this had happened was ignored by all government agencies. The federal government didnt want to pay to buy or pay for an easement or buy any more property outright, and figured that rice farmers or whoever was back there didnt really care, and the local governments never wanted to care because doing anything that would slow development would harm their future tax revenues from development. So everyone ignored the problem until, finally, the federal government was forced to assert their right to impound water on these properties.

The government needs to pay something. $85,000 might be a reasonable fee for such an easement. If these properties actually flood like only once every thousand years (ie 0.1% annual risk or whatever) then that might actually be pretty close to market value of such an easement? I don't know. Now if what many of us suspect, that flooding is going to happen more and more often, that really might not be enough, but regardless, the maximum amount it could be is the full buyout value of the property. For many of these places $85,000 is probably more than the entire land value of the lot and maybe up to like fully one third of the total market value of the home. Is that fair compensation? It might be. And then when they sell, its clear that the Corp of Engineers has an easement, so the next person just simply buys it for less than they would if it was unencumbered, and they get FEMA flood insurance based on the likelihood that the property will flood just like everyone else does that lives where it could flood, but mostly it doesnt.

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the bolded points to me are the biggest deal in this case. Based on the CoE engineering reports, the decision to not acquire 100% of the property (or at least easement to it) within the impoundment area was a conscious and deliberate choice. They took a calculated risk and were wrong. It happens. So now they pay the court ordered damages. I find the judicial granting of an easement a problem though, because it allowed the government to acquire easements without being required to conduct any good faith negotiations.

The way it should work is that, they took a risk and failed so now they pay the piper for this event in the form of damages for impounding water on property they did not have the rights to do so on. And now that it's known, they either go out and acquire those rights (possibly requiring E.D.) or risk paying damages again the next time they are forced to impound water on the property they don't have rights to. They shouldn't get to skip over having to negotiate easements with the current property holders just by paying damages for this one event that they deliberately left the risks open to.

OnlyForNow said:

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The houses in cinco probably wouldn't have flooded because the water would just have continued downstream. There would have been no barrier to back up water to the west.

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That post is about homes along buffalo bayou downstream that are mad that the spillway gates were opened.

Correct.

Who would have flooded had the dams not been there is tough to say. But before the dams were there downtown flooded regularly. The elevation of Buffalo Bayou in the downtown is 37.8ft. At 610 in the Galleria it is just about 50ft. At the Beltway, which was about the eastern extent of the dam release flooding, it is 70ft. The Heights are at 90ft (near Calvalcade), which explains why that was developed before the dams existed. So in an unblocked channel, I think it is reasonable for the entirety of the downtown to have flooded. If downtown was under 10 feet of water, flooding would have reached the Galleria. But for flooding to have reached those homes affected almost the entirety of the Houston metro area would have had to be under water and downtown with 30ft of flood water. I'm not sure how much volume that is, but the volume of the reservoirs from the top of the dams to the 90ft at the exit is far less. If you were to add that volume to the peak flood level, even not including increased flow from the high head pressure, it's just not enough to flood west of the Beltway.

So no, the homes that did flood because of the dam releases (but not the initial rain event) would not have flooded if the water hadn't been stored and then released at a rate that exceeded the capacity of the channel. Big picture, the economic damage to those homes is far less than wiping out the commercial and industrial districts of Houston.

I didn't flood, so I really don't have economic losses from this. But I was trapped for a few days and that sucked.

HARRIS COUNTY FLOODPLAIN REFERENCE MARKS

Water was released in a capacity that exceeded the capacity of the channel directly from the sky.

You know, at some point, it's just too much damned rain and nobody can do anything to stop flooding.

JJxvi said:

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Water was released in a capacity that exceeded the capacity of the channel directly from the sky.

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This.

I'm no fan of ACE, but they held the water as long as they reasonably could before opening the floodway in an effort to let the bayous go down. The problem was that the bayous were above maximum capacity already and water was continuing to enter the bayou channels via rain and runoff because of the absolutely obscene amount of rain the entire geographic region endured via Harvey.

Sometimes, just sometimes, Mother Nature decides to let us know exactly where we stand in the grand scheme of things and no amount of engineering, finger pointing, etc. is going to change that fact. The Texas coast, in all of our known history, had never experienced a storm like Harvey before. Think about that. Hundreds of hurricanes and even Allison weren't comparable to what Harvey dumped on the entire Texas coast from Rockport heading east. Nothing was close.

In the infamous thread about the conspiracy theory that Conroe deliberately tried to wash Kingwood off the map I remember I did a very rough calc at how much water came down the San Jac, through and over Lake Houston and into Galveston bay alone - if memory serves, if the entirety of the Galveston Bay system was devoid of any water it still would have filled up in something like 8 hours from that one point alone. That didn't include anything coming from the west side of the area into the bay system either.

It would not have mattered how the reservoirs were handled, flooding was going to happen. The volume of water that came through the channels into the Bay is just about unfathomable. At one point the Brazos River was about 10 miles wide due to flooding. Every local river, bayou, creek, ditch, channel, gutter, low point in a pasture, etc. was way out of flood banks and absolutely F'd in that event. All of it.

schmellba99 said:

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In the infamous thread about the conspiracy theory that Conroe deliberately tried to wash Kingwood off the map I remember I did a very rough calc at how much water came down the San Jac, through and over Lake Houston and into Galveston bay alone - if memory serves, if the entirety of the Galveston Bay system was devoid of any water it still would have filled up in something like 8 hours from that one point alone. That didn't include anything coming from the west side of the area into the bay system either.

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I also like to point out that another reason Kingwood flooded is 45 years of development and silt clogging up the river above the 1960 bridge. Plus, the 1960 bridge itself is a huge impediment to water flow. It's basically a dam in the middle of the lake.