New Digs for Buffalo Bayou Brewing Co.; The Problem with Dams; The Bus Stopped Here

Photo of Main Street: Marc Longoria via Swamplot Flickr Pool

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  • Seems to me that the Save Buffalo Bayou folks are taking advantage of the good name of the Katy Prairie Conservancy to make their rhetorical points.

  • RE: Lessons From Hurricane Harvey: Houston’s Struggle Is America’s Tale
    So many errors it is hard to know where to begin to criticize this article. I only bother to comment on it here because I believe misinformation is the actual Harvey culprit. Argue all you want about climate change, paving the prairie, 100-yr floodplains, and none of that changes the fact that livelihoods could have been saved if accurate information was available and distributed efficiently. I very recently bought a home in the infamous “100-yr floodplain” that has never flooded. I was comfortable making this purchase because I had the knowledge and capacity to find factual information and make a judgment concerning risk. This was a very difficult process and I was only successful because I am a professional drainage engineer. The common home-buyer has little or no chance at having the same success in such an endeavor. The opacity and lack of truthful, honest information is the real issue. Yes – we do need to improve our drainage and storm surge infrastructure, and politically that will be a fight that our state legislature has never encountered outside of war times. We will all say we want the CDP – Cadillac Drainage Plan – until someone works up a realistic feasibility study and construction cost estimate to deliver that plan. If I were a politician I would work to acquire better information and enhance public education so that the voting public could make more informed decisions. Right now it is a classic case of the blind leading the blind. Articles like this written by the NYT only reinforces that statement. The writer in this case has no clue what he is talking about, but I have no doubt that those readers with similar preconceived notions will embrace and adopt his message.

  • @Fred – How on earth do you arrive at that conclusion?

  • @ Guillo: you write a long, long post lamenting the NYT article’s “many errors,” and you claim a special but unspecified expertise on drainage, but you never point to a specific error.

  • I am puzzled by the homeowner’s thought to further straighten the bayou. Aren’t the meanders and oxbows functioning as detention, and making a straight shot would mostly reduce capacity? Or just get the water down into other people’s houses faster?

  • The NYT has repeatedly disappointed me on pretty much any subject about which I have a well-developed body of knowledge. It’s scary to think about how I might be directly or indirectly influenced by their reporting on subjects about which I am less well-informed. The very best coverage of Harvey seems to have had local roots, but local journalism has been largely hollowed out over the past decade…and what’s left of it has limited reach or influence.

  • @Guillo: My apologies for being abrupt, but you being a drainage engineer doesn’t mean a lick. Too many of our professional drainage engineers have approved projects that probably should never have been approved. Now, regarding the NYT article, read it for what it is, a cautionary tale with a personal touch. The story reminds us that we’re in this together and that Mother Nature always gets the last laugh.

  • And to add to paddys post, drainage “engineers” have a really bad reputation in Houston, pretty much a step up from cockroach. Or a step down depending on whether it is raining. Whining that everyone else has it wrong without getting it right yourself is getting really old.