In case you didn’t have enough to worry about.
Here’s the deal with what could be a terrible threat to Houston: most of the time, it isn’t. In fact, it’s a 26,000 acre recreational greenspace on Houston’s west side. It lies on both sides of the Katy Freeway at Highway 6.
On one side is the Addicks Reservoir. On the other is the Barker Reservoir. Both have dams, but most of the time there is very little water to be held back by either. So the acreage is used for parks and has miles of paved bike trails.
[…]
Even a moderate rainstorm last month created a pool of water but only right up behind the Barker Reservoir dam. That’s where we met Richard Long who for 35 years has worked at the dam for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
He took us to the top of the dam gates, unlocked the control panel, and flipped a switch.
“This is the gate operating right here,” Long said as an electric motor hoisted the gate upwards inch by inch, allowing the pool of water to slowly drain into Buffalo Bayou.
“We want to get rid of the water as fast as we can so the reservoirs are available for the next rain event,” Long said.
But therein lies the cause for concern: what if that “next rain event” is something really, really big? It’s been on the mind of Jim Blackburn, a Houston environmental attorney.
[…]
Richard Long, the dams’ manager, offers this scenario: “Because of our flat terrain here, we don’t have a valley that the flood would go down. It’ll spread out over a very large area. It won’t be like the horror movies you see where a wall of water is coming down a canyon. It would be very rapidly rising water and cause an extremely large amount of damage and possibly a loss of life.”
The Army Corps estimates that a dam failure could cause flooding from Buffalo Bayou and Downtown all the way over to Brays Bayou and the Medical Center. For years, the Army Corp has been monitoring “seepage” of water underneath the dam gates. Those leaks led to the Corps designating the Addicks and Barker dams “extremely high risk” and among the six most critically in need of repair in the nation.
Isn’t that nice to know? I knew you’d think so. I don’t have anything useful to say here, so I’m just going to embed a Led Zeppelin video:
Let’s hope it never comes to that, shall we? Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go buy some sandbags.
More dam music …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyRKUIm_74E