Another RV Resort Coming Near North End of Woodland Hills Drive

Yet another “RV Resort” is coming to the Kingwood/Porter area. This one will be at the north end of Woodland Hills Drive about a block north of Kingwood Park High School. Plans show parking for 43 RVs on the 4.4 acre property.

The Porter Strong RV Resort, which contains a recreation building, dumpsters, and concrete driveways, will back up to homes along Birchwood Springs Avenue in Woodridge Forest.

The drainage calculations look impressive…until you consider the way they estimated impervious cover.

Access from Porter For Now

Access to the RV resort – at least for now – will be via Needham Road and Collette Lane in Porter. However, plans show a dotted line for an extension of Woodland Hills Drive, which currently stops approximately 300 feet short of the development. It’s not immediately clear whether Montgomery County or the developer plans to extend Woodland Hills north at this time.

Drainage and Detention Plans

Drainage in this area flows south to Bens Branch. Note in the layout above that two 7-foot-deep, dry-bottom, stormwater-detention basins flanked by drainage swales will help intercept stormwater flowing south before it reaches adjoining properties.

FEMA shows no floodplains in the area and USGS shows no wetlands on the site.

The detention basins for the 4.4 acre site will hold 4.4 acre feet of stormwater before they start to overflow. That exceeds Harris County Flood Control District’s minimum recommendation for areas flowing into Harris County.

Moreover, the engineer claims the site only requires 3.4 acre feet in a 100-year storm. That calculation is based on Atlas-14 requirements adopted by Montgomery County.

The engineer indicates that the maximum discharge rate for the ponds, which will be pumped, is about 8 cubic feet per second less than the natural runoff rate for the site. So for everything up to the 100-year storm, runoff going into Bens Branch from this area should be reduced.

All that is good news. Now for the bad news.

The engineer seems to have based all those calculations on 29% impervious cover.

That seems unlikely for this type of project. The number of parking spots per acre is roughly equivalent to the Laurel Springs RV resort which claimed to have 66% impervious cover, but likely has much higher.

Best practices require excluding detention basins from impervious cover calculations. A quick glance at the construction diagram above suggests that concrete will cover much more than a third of the remaining property.

Also, the engineer says it will take 48 hours to drain the ponds after a 100-year rain. The ponds do not appear to empty by gravity, however. They will require pumps, which could present problems in a power outage. Such outages frequently occur in storms strong enough to create floods.

Pictures Taken on 2/1/24 Show Extent of Construction

Currently, the site is being cleared. Construction has not yet started. I took the shots below on 2/1/24. They show the extent of clearing as of last week.

Looking SW at construction site. Woodland Hills and Kingwood Park HS on left. Northpark Rec Area top center. Homes are in Woodridge Forest.

Bens Branch Getting Crowded

I hope contractors build what the plans indicate. Bens Branch has enough flooding problems of its own. The Kingwood Area Drainage Analysis showed that parts of the stream could flood in a two-year rain.

Since that study, several high-density developments have been built nearby in the watershed. They include The Preserve at Woodridge, which apparently understated the amount of impervious cover, and Brooklyn Trails, which was grandfathered under pre-Atlas-14 requirements.

And then there’s the Northpark Drive Expansion Project, which is seeking more room for another detention basin to mitigate its own increases in impervious cover.

For now, the best thing to do is remain vigilant.

Posted by Bob Rehak on Feb. 7, 2024

2353 Days since Hurricane Harvey

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