Residents question deadly decision
Officials criticized over lack of warning before dam releases
The decision came late at night, when much of the city was already asleep.
With little warning and no evacuation orders, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began releasing water about midnight Aug. 27 from the struggling Barker and Addicks reservoirs, pushing floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey deeper into several west Houston neighborhoods.
Robert Arthur Haines and Cathy Harling Montgomery, both 71, could not escape. They drowned after their Memorial area homes near Buffalo Bayou began to fill up with water after the dam releases began.
“I just want the public to know that the government really screwed up — royally,” said Emile Nassar, a flood survivor who is president of the homeowners association at the condominium complex where Montgomery died. “It’s only when they opened up the dams that the water started coming.”
Corps officials have said they released the water to prevent the reservoirs from overflowing amid heavy rains and runoff in the area. Harris County Flood Control District officials said Friday they did not have data showing how much the releases may have impacted flooding along Buffalo Bayou, but gauges measured more than 5 inches of rain late
Sunday evening near the spot where the two spillways converge.
Questions remain, however, about why evacuations were not ordered for the area and why residents weren’t given a warning to leave before the releases started.
City officials — who could have ordered evacuations — said they were told by the corps that the controlled releases would not cause life-threatening flooding, with only streets expected to be underwater.
Alan Bernstein, a spokesman for Mayor Sylvester Turner, said officials believe they made the right decision at the time in telling people to shelter in place, as the vast majority of flooding deaths occur when people try to move around in floodwaters.
“If you ask people to evacuate into an impenetrable situation, you could be dooming them,” Bernstein said.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett — who also could have ordered evacuations — said the corps told county officials the controlled releases were the safest option because engineers “had no idea where it was going to go” if they let the water spill out around the edges of the rapidly filling reservoirs.
Corps officials declined to comment on the deaths but offered condolences.
“We at the Corps of Engineers offer our deepest sympathies to the friends and family of those who lost their lives during this tragic event,” the agency said in an email. “We are not aware of the circumstances of these deaths and so it would not be appropriate for us to comment on them except to say that all of us regret any loss of life during Harvey.”
“Life safety is paramount,” spokesman Randy Cephus said in the statement.
Angry residents and family, however, said they deserved more notice.
Susan White’s parents, Jim and Judy Poston, had only puddles of water at the curb of their two-story home on Langwood after the first bands of rains came through on Friday and Saturday. By midmorning Monday, the water was waist-high, White said.
“They went to bed dry and woke up to, ‘Oh, my gosh,’ ” she said.
She arranged for volunteers in a boat to pick up them and their elderly neighbors.
“There was no evacuation order until many days after the whole street was vacated by volunteers,” White said.
Some officials acknowledged that more could be done in the future to alert residents.
“I do think we need to have an early warning system for any more releases from the dam,” said District G Councilman Greg Travis, who represents many of the neighborhoods that were flooded along Buffalo Bayou.
‘Shouldn’t have died’
The bodies of Haines, a retired financial planner, and Montgomery, a retiree with multiple sclerosis, were pulled from their still-flooded homes days after the releases began.
Haines had left messages for his son during the night of Aug. 27 saying more than 2 feet of floodwaters had entered his home on Langwood; he was found in 4 feet of water.
On Thursday, a red X — a sign that someone inside had died — was still visible against the chalky-white brick on the one-story home where Haines settled about a decade ago.
Kirby Haines said he last talked with his father around 3 p.m. Aug. 27, the Sunday after the heaviest rains slammed Houston and sent waters rising in Buffalo Bayou.
Kirby Haines said his dad mentioned a problem with his cellphone charger and they agreed to talk later on the home phone. Overnight, however, the elder Haines left two voicemail messages, about a half-hour apart, that his son received the next morning.
The water was rising, he said, and had reached a couple of feet. But Kirby Haines said the messages were informational and the situation did not appear to be life-threatening.
He tried to reach his father all day Monday, however, and couldn’t get through.
“He was supposed to have a caretaker with him,” he said. “There was no one there to save him.”
By Aug. 30, when Robert Haines’ husband, Kyle Fredricks Haines, tried to return home, he was stopped by floodwaters a mile away. A man with a boat took Fredricks Haines’ brother to the house, but they couldn’t get into the flooded home.
At that point, Fredricks Haines reported Robert missing to the Houston Police Department. After repeated attempts, an HPD dive team recovered the body on Sept. 8. Four feet of water was still inside the
home.
“The whole house was submerged and my husband was in the house,” said Fredricks Haines, 34. “He shouldn’t have died that way.” ‘I just heard water’
Five miles away at The Pines condominium complex along Memorial Drive, Montgomery was among hundreds of residents bracing for another deluge that Sunday night.
Nassar, 73, the association president, noticed Sunday evening that a few inches of water had seeped into his first-floor condo at the back of the 264-unit complex.
After sweeping the water out the door, he went to bed about 9 p.m. He had a flashlight handy because the power was out.
Nassar was awakened from a deep sleep about 2 a.m. Monday.
“I just heard gurgle, gurgle, gurgle. I just heard water,” he said.
He turned on the flashlight and looked about the room.
“Oh my God, I’ve got over a foot of water in the condo,” he recalled.
Water was rising into other condos, too, including the lower-level unit in the middle of the complex near Memorial City Mall where Montgomery lived alone.
Montgomery’s family members could not be reached for comment, but her father, Thomas Jefferson Harling, worked closely with legendary Houston Mayor Roy Hofheinz in the 1950s. Harling later worked as a special education teacher in Galveston, according to his obituary.
Mongtomery’s body was found Sept. 7 inside her flooddamaged residence. On Friday, while other units had been cleared, her unit remained full of furniture, with a large television in place and black mold coating the drywall.
The first public warning from the corps about the releases came at 2 p.m. Aug. 27, after a night of torrential rains across the Houston area. Capacity at both reservoirs was shrinking rapidly.
“These structures continue to perform as they were designed to do, which is to protect against flooding in downtown Houston and the Houston Ship Channel,” Col. Lars Zetterstrom, the Galveston District commander for the corps, said at the time.
The corps is responsible for the dams and reservoirs, which are designed to reduce flood risks downstream.
Initially, the corps planned to stagger the controlled releases, with the first set for 2 a.m. Aug. 28 from Addicks and 11 a.m. that day for Barker. Then, in a surprise move about 11 p.m. that Sunday, the corps announced the releases would begin from both reservoirs at midnight, hours earlier than expected. The change was prompted by heavier-than-expected rainfall and runoff into the basins, they said.
The releases started relatively small, at 1,600 cubic feet per second from the dams combined, but increased to the expected 8,000 cubic feet per second released. The next day, the releases increased even more to 13,300 cubic feet per second from the two reservoirs by Wednesday, and were expected to increase further.
Days later, on Sept. 1, Turner issued a voluntary evacuation of the flooded residential areas downstream, followed by a mandatory evacuation order on Sept. 2. Those orders — aimed at people trying to remain in their homes — were issued because the city could not guarantee rescues could be conducted safely, Bernstein said. Lawsuits filed
Corps officials said engineers worked closely with the city, county and Texas Department of Public Safety to “provide data regarding the dams and reservoirs to help them make informed decisions for the communities they support.”
The corps on Friday referred further questions to the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined to comment.
Nine federal lawsuits, and one state suit, have been filed in the past two weeks seeking compensation from the government for property lost or damaged by the decision to release water downstream. The federal cases have been brought in a specialized U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., which eventually could handle hundreds of so-called “takings” cases for lost property.
The federal lawsuits assert that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the Addicks and Barker dams knowing the releases would flood homes and businesses.
“It’s the largest flood event resulting from a direct decision of a government arguably in our lifetimes,” said Justin Hodge, who teaches about imminent domain at University of Houston Law Center and is representing clients in two of the federal cases. “Certainly, it is the largest flood event caused by a decision of the government in our lifetime and in the city of Houston.”
No lawsuits apparently have yet been filed over wrongful deaths believed to have been caused by the dam releases. Looking ahead
As cleanup continues across the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, local officials now are looking for ways to improve the response the next time Houston endures catastrophic flooding.
Travis, the district’s City Council member, said public officials should develop an emergency system like the Amber Alert to notify residents that releases are imminent.
“We should have an alert that goes off to warn people,” Travis said.
Both Emmett and Turner are pushing for upgraded dams and possibly more than two, which would diffuse the floodwaters downstream.
“The city has learned that all options should be considered to expand the capacity of the reservoir system to avoid water releases that are unilaterally scheduled by the (Army Corps of Engineers),” Bernstein said in a statement.
If officials had known of the potential flooding to homes, they could have positioned rescue teams in the area. But shelter-inplace likely still would have been the message from city officials, he said.
Residents, however, said they want a stronger warning next time.
Hank Bussa, 71, a semi-retired orthodontist who lives a few houses away from Haines’ home on Langwood and a block from the Addicks spillway, noticed water near his front door about 10 p.m. that Sunday but said it seemed to be receding. A little after midnight, it began coming inside.
“There was water coming in my front door,” he said. “I turned around and looked across my family room and there was water coming in my back door. There was water coming into the utility room. The water was coming in from all directions. And it came in fast. We had maybe another 30 minutes and we were wading around downstairs trying to pick up chairs and whatever we could.”
Bussa said they tried to salvage their belongings but lost his grandparents’ valuable antique furniture.
“We got no warning,” he said. “I could have saved more stuff if I had had a little time.”
He and his wife, Cathy, finally waded out of the house the next day when rescuers arrived by boat.