Editorial: The Flood-Mitigation Treadmill

2/22/2026 – After researching more than 3,000 articles about flooding since Hurricane Harvey, I’ve concluded that we’re on a flood-mitigation treadmill. In other words, we run like crazy and do not get very far. Even worse, we can’t get off the treadmill.

Most of those 3,000 articles can be divided into two groups: things that increase flood risk and things that decrease it. Preventing things that increase flood risk typically costs one-fourth to one-seventh the cost of decreasing risk after a flood.

So, why are we stuck on this endless flood-mitigation treadmill? Why do we prefer expensive, after-the-fact solutions. And why don’t we actively enforce regulations already on the books that proactively reduce flood risk and prevent damage at a far lower cost?

Before we get to the reasons, first we must understand that flood risk is not static. Every little change to the landscape affects it.

Flood-Risk Changing Constantly

Flood-risk changes in barely visible increments, gradually over time. But all of those changes are incremental. And flooding happens infrequently. So, most people don’t wake up to the increased flood risk until it’s too late. At that point, the fixes have astronomical price tags. Two high-level examples:

• Rivers can become clogged with sediment from mining and construction. That reduces their capacity to handle high-water events safely. Dredging can offset that increased risk, but has cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Sometimes, upstream developments don’t sufficiently control their runoff. That makes flood peaks build higher and faster downstream. To offset those increased peaks, we must often widen channels downstream. And that may require buyouts that take decades more.

In general, after people finally recognize the need for mitigation, we must:

• Build the case for fixes
• Estimate their cost
• Compare costs and benefits
• Build political consensus across local, county, state and federal governments
• Get an act of Congress passed and signed by the President
• Win scarce grants
• Get bids
• Mobilize contractors.

And that’s all before we even begin to address the risk created by:

• Someone upstream who decided to game the system for profit
• Regulators who didn’t enforce regulations
• Maintenance deferred for decades or perpetually ignored.

Staggering Costs

The costs can be staggering:

• In Harris County, we passed a $2.5 billion flood bond in 2018. Some estimated the real need at $60 billion. That’s why we spend so much time seeking matching funds at the federal level, such as the hundreds of millions of dollars that Rep. Dan Crenshaw helped secure for dredging.
• The 2024 Texas State Flood Plan showed that six million Texans live in floodplains – about one in five of us. The cost of mitigating their flood risk totals $54.5 billion. But so far, we’ve only allocated $1.4 billion to the job.
• At the Federal level, we spend an average of about $10 billion per year on flooding. But that amount can vary radically when we get hit with massive storms like Harvey or Helene. Harvey caused $125 billion in damages in Harris County alone.

Losing Ground

Between floods, we seem to forget their destructive power. So, we keep building in floodplains and wetlands which just exacerbates the problem. For example:

• The Signorelli Company (a real-estate developer) fought for 10 years all the way to the Texas Supreme Court for the right to build in the East Fork floodplain.
• Ron Holley Development also wants to build homes in the floodplain of the East Fork, not far from Signorelli
• Scarborough is trying to develop thousands of homes on 5,300 acres near the confluence of the San Jacinto West Fork with Spring and Cypress Creeks, one of the worst areas for flooding in the region.
• Colony Ridge didn’t exist 15 years ago and is now 50% larger than Manhattan. Evidence suggests the developer didn’t sufficiently detain runoff. Plus much of the development was built over wetlands.

We also keep dumping more fill in floodplains, floodways, and streams that creates a bathtub effect. There’s simply less room for floodwater.

• In Spring, contractors building a new high school pumped sludge directly into Spring Creek.
• TXDoT contractors are dumping dirt excavated from the FM2100 expansion project into the floodplain of Cedar Bayou near Huffman ISD schools.
• Arrest warrants have been issued for the owner of land near Savelle and Sorters-McClellan Roads for putting massive amounts of fill in the floodplain and floodway of the San Jacinto West Fork. That’s right across the river from the Scarborough property.

Such abuses are typically committed by people who ignore the law to make a buck. Regulators should have prevented such abuses. But they rarely do; that encourages more abuses. And that forces us to deal with correcting them after the fact.

Eight and a half years after Harvey, it seems we are into full-on willful blindness.

Why We Take the Expensive Route

Collectively, we tend to spend on visible crises. That’s easier than root-cause modification.

Crying babies and devastated families deserve our help. But enforcing regulations and fining people on a construction site? That’s politically dangerous.

And that, in a sentence, explains why Americans continue to spend billions each year to fix preventable flooding.We have a systemic tendency to:

1. Respond vigorously to visible crises
2. Underinvest in politically difficult structural reforms
3. Externalize downstream remediation costs while privatizing upstream profits.

Until we grapple with this issue, we will never get off the flood-mitigation treadmill.

Posted by Bob Rehak on 2/24/2026

3101 Days since Harvey

The thoughts expressed in this post represent opinions on matters of public concern and safety. They are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the Anti-SLAPP Statute of the Great State of Texas.