Engineer’s 1992 flood pool warning ignored
Ex-official expected storm-filled reservoirs to submerge houses
Twenty-five years ago, Fort Bend County’s assistant engineer emerged from a meeting with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He had new information, and he was worried.
Charles Glen Crocker, then 38, had learned that the footprint for Barker Reservoir was bigger than the land owned by the government, placing future homeowners in the Cinco Ranch and Kelliwood subdivisions within what engineers called “flood pools.” The reservoir, dry much of the time, could fill during a major rainstorm and spread into the homes of unsuspecting residents.
His resulting letter, written on July 6, 1992, was a warning to county officials: “… Recent rainfall events and weather conditions have shown that many areas considered relatively safe from rising waters have been flooded.”
The land in the reservoir was sinking, “subsidence” in engineering terms. Houses were being built at a level lower than the water level the dams were designed to hold. A long period of rain could mean trouble in the two massive planned
communities.
Crocker alerted everyone he could think of: the county judge, county commissioners, the Fort Bend County Drainage District and the county’s emergency management coordinator.
He wanted the county to look at the matter more closely. Instead, a special purpose district formed to benefit developers by paying for drainage improvements attacked Crocker. Its letter criticized him for writing the memo, questioned his credentials and said Crocker’s assertion could hold back development in the county.
Crocker describes the period as a “firestorm.” He said the furor was a big factor in his decision to leave his county government post two years later.
The county ignored Crocker’s warning. By 2017, development in the flood pools in Fort Bend and Harris counties would swell to 30,000 homes and businesses.
Last August, as huge pools from Hurricane Harvey flooded more than 9,000 structures upstream of the Addicks and Barker dams, Crocker strode into the second-floor office of his Sugar Land home.
There, in a manila folder, he found the two-page letter he had written so many years ago. He looked at the subject line: “Barker Dam — Possible Flooding of Non-Government Owned Land.”
The Houston Chronicle found the document through a public records request filed late last year with the Willow Fork Drainage District and contacted Crocker to discuss it.
Crocker’s letter was addressed to Roy Cordes, then the Fort Bend County judge, now its county attorney.
“I think the letter was very informative and raised issues about the possibilities with the (reservoir) elevations,” Cordes said in an interview Friday. “He was well-entitled to raise the issue.”
Cordes said he didn’t recall what happened, if anything, after he received the letter. “I can’t cite any specific action based on the letter,” he added.
Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer and planner who has studied the Houston area’s vulnerability to flooding for years, said Crocker’s letter sheds light on what he calls the “flood disease” that has gripped the Houston area for several decades. It’s a development attitude that resulted in magnifying the impact of the rainstorm of the century, he said.
“The flood disease keeps information from being brought forward,” Blackburn said. “It’s about the failure to allow for exchange of ideas, a failure to hear, and a decision to attack those who don’t agree. It’s been going on for a long time. The reaction to Crocker’s letter is a perfect example of the pervasiveness and the insidiousness of the flood disease.” ‘Noteworthy’ flood pools
It would take a while for Crocker to grasp those attitudes. A graduate of Sharpstown High School, Crocker earned a bachelor of science degree in construction management in 1983 from the University of Houston.
Two years later, Fort Bend County officials recruited him away from a construction company to help open the new engineering department. He was hired as the assistant engineer and worked in a two-room hut that was part of the former World War II prisoner of war camp in Rosenberg.
The tasks of the employees, who wore jeans and drove pickup trucks, captured the county’s dramatic transition from rural to suburban, from pulling dead livestock out of ditches so roads didn’t flood to reviewing subdivision maps. All around Crocker, streets were being built and holes dug to put in water and sewer pipes as plans for subdivisions sprouted.
In 1992, Crocker attended a meeting at the Corps of Engineers’ office at the base of Barker Reservoir. The agenda: a discussion about Fort Bend County’s plans to build a park, with the YMCA, with soccer fields on the land within the reservoir.
Crocker said during the meeting, Richard Long, then the Corps’ manager for the Barker and Addicks reservoirs, showed him a piece of paper listing “noteworthy” flood pools. Crocker said he asked Long what it meant. Long replied that when the reservoirs fill, the water exceeds the land that the federal government had bought.
(Citing pending litigation filed against the Corps in response to Harvey flooding, an agency spokesman referred the Chronicle’s request to interview Long to the U.S. Department of Justice, which did not immediately respond.)
It was Crocker’s job to work with the developers of the Cinco Ranch and Kelliwood subdivisions, and the engineering firms they hired. Following the meeting with Long, Crocker said he consulted Fort Bend County Commissioner Alton Pressley, whose precinct included the two subdivisions.
Pressley said Crocker needed to write a letter to the entire county commissioners’ court, then led by Cordes.
Crocker’s letter, dated July 6, 1992, said the Barker Dam was “designed/and or modified” to contain 8.7 more feet of water than the land the federal government had purchased. That meant meant that the land where the subdivisions were being built would be part of the reservoir during times of heavy rain.
“This 8.7 feet of water translates into the flooding of approximately 4,679 acres of land, not under jurisdiction of the Corps of Engineers,” Crocker wrote.
Crocker added that the “unofficial report” from the Corps found that if four more inches of rain had fallen in the storms of March 1992, “there would have been floodwaters inside of residences located in developments adjacent to the Reservoir.”
He concluded that Fort Bend County officials and developers should work with the Corps on the issue. “Certainly additional data and studies will be required to determine the actual existence of/or extent of any problem with encroachment on privately held land,” Crocker wrote.
But Ron Drachenberg, who was Crocker’s boss as Fort Bend county engineer and now is retired, said last week that the county didn’t have any options.
“We didn’t have a way of stopping development because it wasn’t our property,” he said. “It wasn’t governmental land. It was private land.”
The Chronicle sent copies of Crocker’s letter and the responses to Fort Bend County Judge Robert Hebert; to the sole current commissioner who was on the panel at that time, Grady Prestage; and to the commissioner whose precinct includes Cinco Ranch and Kelliwood, Andy Meyers.
Hebert said in a written statement: “The letters reflect the pressure applied to the County in 1992 to keep quiet about their concerns about the reservoir. While we received more than the 4” the letters discuss from Harvey in 2017, it is now obvious to all that the Corps will allow the reservoir to overflow onto homes behind it to protect downstream property. I will not comment further as I was a private citizen at the time and was completely unaware of this issue.”
Prestage declined comment. Meyers didn’t return messages seeking comment. Bad for business
In 1985, the state created a special purpose district called the Willow Fork Drainage District. The focus was development, specifically to sell bonds to reimburse developers for drainage improvements and then levy property taxes to repay the money borrowed — with interest.
Crocker’s letter soon came to the attention of the district’s engineering firm, Turner Collie & Braden.
Michael B. Hunn, director of the engineering firm’s land development division, responded to Crocker’s correspondence in a four-page letter in November 1992.
He began by noting that concern had been expressed that Crocker’s letter “could unnecessarily adversely impact sales of land in the high quality residential neighborhoods currently being developed in Fort Bend County.”
He said Turner Collie & Braden had interpreted Crocker’s letter as inferring that the “properties immediately upstream of Barker Reservoir are in imminent danger of being flooded and that the level of protection from flooding is not as secure as anticipated.”
Hunn wrote that the “properties within the Willow Fork Drainage District are well protected from individual storm events and/ or ponding levels in Barker Reservoir that have a 1 percent or greater chance of occurring.” This meant that the subdivisions were safe from 100-year floods, he wrote.
Hunn could not be reached for comment. A Turner Collie & Braden engineer who was copied on Hunn’s letter didn’t return messages seeking comment.
George Nilsson, president of the Willow Fork Drainage District board of directors, also took aim at Crocker’s letter in a response sent to Cordes, the county’s top official.
“Mr. Crocker’s conclusions were made without the benefit of adequate research, independent verification or proper scientific methodology,” he wrote.
The drainage district, according to Nilsson, was surprised that Fort Bend County would allow someone “who is not a registered professional engineer” to use county letterhead to “make such baseless, unfounded and potentially damaging assertions.” The Chronicle gave Nilsson copies of Crocker’s letter, his rebuttal, and Turner Collie & Braden’s response. He said he was too ill to discuss them.
In a recent interview, Crocker said he intentionally did not pursue a professional engineering license from the state.
Having known engineers who worked for counties and cities before who were asked to put their seal on things that weren’t quite copacetic, I just dropped my pursuit of getting a PE,” he said. Sad to be vindicated
Crocker said the responses to his letter were among the reasons why he left his job in 1994. He said the commissioners’ court had meetings about what he wrote, but he was not allowed to attend.
In retrospect, Crocker said he was “young and naïve” and thought he was raising a technical issue that Fort Bend County needed to examine. He said he was not thinking that Turner Collie & Braden worked for the drainage district, some municipal utility districts in Cinco Ranch, and as a result, “there might be some political fallout.”
After leaving his county job in 1994, Crocker worked for four utility billing, development and engineering firms and later moved to the Middle East to work on development projects. He returned to Houston in 2015 and now is a land development construction manager for Cobb, Fendley & Associates, a Houston engineering firm.
When Harvey struck, Crocker said news accounts of floodwaters backing up behind the Barker Dam reminded him that he had written the letter in 1992. He said he hoped that what he had written about subdivisions being threatened by the flood pool would not come true.
“But then it did,” he said. “I feel vindicated — but in a bad way. For me to be vindicated, millions of dollars in damage was done to people’s houses.’’