Updates from the West Houston Reservoirs Still Holding Back Roughly 60 Billion Gallons of Water

Barker Clodine Rd. in Barker Reservoir, Houston, 77084

A reader caught the view above during a lunchtime bike ride into the Barker reservoir yesterday. The shot shows the nearly submerged stop signs on the currently-closed road barricade where Barker Clodine Rd. merges into the hike-and-bike trail system running throughout much of the reservoir (which stretches between I-10 and the Westpark Tollway just west of Hwy. 6). The Corps of Engineers has been releasing water from both Barker dam and its sister reservoir Addicks across I-10 since Thursday — but the level behind the dams continued to rise for a few days as additional water drained into the basins from the surrounding watersheds, faster than that water could be safely released downstream into Buffalo Bayou.

Both Barker and Addicks reservoirs’ levels finally began dropping on Saturday — though both started filling again briefly on Sunday as water from later-in-the-week storms trickled east from the surrounding watersheds. Below is an up-to-date look at Barker reservoir’s change in storage since the Tax Day flood, per USGS measurements:

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barker-storage-4-27

And here’s the storage volume over the same timeframe in the Addicks reservoir:

addicks-res-storage-4-27

Along the Addicks reservoir’s western fringe, neighborhoods in the Bear Creek Village subdivision were still seeing water over the weekends:

Bear Creek Village Subdivision, Houston, 77084

Bear Creek Village Subdivision, Houston, 77084

Bear Creek Village Subdivision, Houston, 77084

Bear Creek Village Subdivision, Houston, 77084

Images: Joe Bielamowicz (top photo), Ben Hill (bottom photos), USGS (water elevation charts)

Addicks and Barker

One Comment

  • So the new unit of measurement for H2O abundance is gallons, like milk and gasoline, rather than acre feet? Hmm…. sure makes for big numbers. Why not go to quarts, or to liters to be more metric? Or centi- and mililiters to ramp up the orders of magnitude and take us into the trillions.