Before Harvey, Jennifer Parks lived in the Forest Cove Townhomes with her husband, four kids and cat. They absolutely loved the river lifestyle and the friendships they built with neighbors. Harvey was the eighth of seven floods in five years. It destroyed their 4-story townhome, a close knit community and a life they loved despite […]
Instead of exploring one topic in depth, tonight, I’ll summarize a number of topics related to flood mitigation with just a few sentences on each. West Fork Mouth Bar Dredging Mouth bar dredging is going faster than expected. Great Lakes Dredge and Dock has not encountered buried trees in that region of the river as […]
Aeschylus, the ancient Greek playwright coined the phrase, “The first casualty in war is truth.” The same is true of water wars. In an attempt to justify unlimited groundwater pumping from the Jasper aquifer, a headline in a Montgomery County online newspaper trumpeted, “University Of Houston Study Shows No Linkage Between Deep Groundwater Production And […]
Judge Lauren Reeder of the 234th Judicial District Court has set the trial date in the Elm Grove/North Kingwood Forest flooding case for July 13, 2020. Background of Case On May 7th of this year, heavy rains fell on 268 acres that had been clear cut by subsidiaries of Perry Homes (PSWA, Inc. and Figure […]
A CBS 60-Minutes segment last Sunday brought into focus many thoughts I have been struggling to articulate since Hurricane Harvey. The segment featured an interview with a Dutch flood expert named Henk Ovink. Mr. Ovink has some impressive credentials and consults with other countries and cities around the world. At a strategic level, he looks […]
Two new subdivisions, Northpark Woods and Woodridge Village, made me worry about the impact of upstream development on Kingwood and the rest of the Lake Houston area. Could these developments overwhelm the capacity of our drainage ditches? Could they increase our chances of flooding? The consensus among flood professionals: It’s not likely. But they also […]
My post about Conroe escalating the Montgomery County water wars and putting millions of people in the crossfire from subsidence drew a response from Simon Sequeira, president of Quadvest. Sequiera is one of the litigants arguing for unlimited pumping of groundwater. On Facebook, he dismissively said, “Rehak has an elementary understanding of the issues.” Who […]
This morning, more than 22 months after Hurricane Harvey, the Barrington held a grand re-opening ceremony for its 18,000 square foot Manor House. When project manager Lauren Blackburn cut the red tape, residents got their first glimpse of a newly renovated and re-imagined community facility without equal in Kingwood, and perhaps without equal in the […]
An old-West saying proclaimed, “Steal my horse; carry off my wife; but don’t touch my water.” Texans fight over water. Even here in the Gulf Coast area. In fact, in Montgomery County, we have a good, old-fashioned water war erupting. Last week in Conroe, it escalated again, putting millions of residents in surrounding counties at […]
These two images, taken almost two years apart, show one of the most dramatic improvements to West Fork conveyance – the removal of a giant blockage that the Army Corps nicknamed Sand Island. Sand Island mysteriously appeared during Harvey almost overnight and virtually blocked the entire West Fork of the San Jacinto. Today, the blockage […]