New column on Houston’s suburbs debuts
“Greater Houston” by longtime Chronicle journalist Mike Snyder begins today. The column will explore stories, trends and personalities in Houston’s suburban areas.
NEEDVILLE — She knelt at the water’s edge, her young daughter at her side, and used a pink plastic bucket to dip for perch. The stream was calm where it flowed past her, but at its center it looked like whitewater rapids on some wild river in Idaho or Wyoming.
A low-water crossing, they call this spot. Last week it was a barrier stranding Sherry Melchior, her daughter Kaitlyn and their neighbors in a remote Fort Bend County subdivision known as Tierra Grande.
The floods that pummel the Houston area with disturbing frequency inflict misery in many ways. They ruin homes, furniture and clothing. They submerge roads. They cause mold that makes people sick. They kill.
In Tierra Grande, about 45 miles southwest of downtown Houston, the rising water displays a distinctive type of cruelty. Again and again, floodwaters rush across a low spot in the only road in or out of a chunk of the subdivision, creating a tough choice for the 20 or so families who live there: They can leave, knowing it might be a week or longer before they can get back. Or they can stock up on supplies and wait it out.
Greg Watson’s family split the difference. Watson gathered up some clothes and drove out April 20, just as the first trickles of water began sluicing across the road. He checked into a motel so he could get to his job as a nurse in Rosenberg. His wife and two kids stayed home.
“We’ve been through this so many times,” Watson said last Friday, as he stood watching the rushing waters that separated him from his family. They were fine; his house was fine. But he
was stuck.
He peered at a midstream marker that showed the water’s depth at 3 feet. The river was moving so rapidly that trying to cross, on foot or in a vehicle, would have been beyond foolish.
“It’s gonna be about a week before it comes down,” Watson said then.
‘Each year gets worse’
James R. Wenzel, an aide to Fort Bend County Commissioner Richard Morrison, was more optimistic when I spoke to him at the scene about an hour before Watson showed up. He thought the road would be passable by Monday. (He was right, as it turned out.)
Until the late 1990s, a bridge spanned the low spot, but it kept washing out during floods. The county decided to live without the span; rather than replace it, Wenzel said, officials would reinforce the road bed so that damage to the road could be repaired more quickly, and inexpensively, after the floods pushed through.
The Tierra Grande residents “would have been stranded a lot longer if the bridge and the road had washed out,” Wenzel said.
Watson is convinced that some simple drainage improvements would keep the road open. His home has been cut off eight times, he said, and he’s sick of it.
“It’s a pretty simple fix,” he said. “You don’t have to be an engineer to figure it out.”
Watson’s frustrations are not unique, of course. We’ve heard them from flood victims in Greenspoint angry that rescuers took so long to heed their distress calls. We’ve heard them from Meyerland homeowners who believe pressure from real estate developers is keeping city development regulations weak.
Sherry Melchior, the woman I had seen fishing with the bucket, sent me a text after a friend sent her my number.
“We are all pulling together to make sure everyone is safe and has everything they need,” she wrote. “This happens every year, but each year gets worse!”
In fact, everyone I spoke with seemed to agree that the floods were becoming more frequent — and more severe.
“We had this problem on Memorial Day (last year), but not to this degree,” Wenzel told me as he watched the water rush past.
Possible causes
I mentioned that I had heard a number of perspectives on possible causes: climate change, inadequate drainage, upstream development. Wenzel nodded and said he could “poke holes” in all these theories.
And then he delivered the same, unsatisfying message that people like Greg Watson and Sherry Melchior have heard from public officials for decades. Climate and topography, according to this narrative, make the suffering of flood victims in the Houston area inevitable. And who is responsible for climate and topography?
“You’ve got to talk to one person,” Wenzel said. He pointed up, toward a bright blue sky.