Spring on the Bayou Bend

Temporary Photo While We Wait for the Pro

April 23, 2021

Well, spring has sprung, and we were getting impatient looking at a bare, wintry photo of that Bend in the Bayou taken in early March. Our devoted and generous photographer Jim Olive, a native Houstonian, has been transplanted as an invasive to the California desert, where he has adapted by taking beautiful photos of local cacti and flora.

Jim is a sought-after commercial photographer, as well as a naturalist who can name virtually every tree and plant in Latin as well as identify bird songs, eggs, and nests, animal scat, tracks, etc. He is also the founder and executive director of the Christmas Bay Foundation as well as the photographer for The Book of Texas Bays, written by environmental attorney and poet Jim Blackburn.

Photographer Jim promises he will be flying through soon. But in the meantime the impatient backup photographer climbed over the fences and followed the well-used dirt path out to the forbidden bank of the bayou in our public Memorial Park. There to document the greenery flowering along one of the last relatively natural, historic stretches of Buffalo Bayou.

So here is the temporary photo until Jim lands here. Taken later in the afternoon, around 6 pm, with the poor excuse that since Jim always shoots the bend just at dawn, why not something different.

See the whole series of that Bend in the River starting in the spring of 2014.

SC

That bend in Buffalo Bayou, taken from the same high bank in Memorial Park, looking downstream with the River Oaks Country Club on the right. Photo by SC on April 21, 2021

Regional Flood Planning Group Has Vacancies, including Environmental Rep

Executive Meeting May 7, Planning Meeting May 13, Public Meeting May 18

April 23, 2021

Updated May 8, 2021

The San Jacinto Region Flood Planning Group is the local committee, one of fifteen river-basin groups in Texas, developing regional flood plans to deliver to the Texas Water Development Board by 2023. The state board in turn is charged by the state legislature with administering the Flood Infrastructure Fund.

There are now fifteen voting positions in the San Jacinto group, known as Region 6, which had its first meeting last October. The group began with twelve voting members. However, in the interim the members voted to create positions for representatives of the Upper Watershed and Coastal Communities as well as an additional Public seat.

The executive committee will consider formal recommendations for the new Coastal Communities and Public positions at its executive committee meeting on May 7 at noon, according to Fatima Berrios, assistant project manager for the group. Nominations for those two positions are closed.

 Nominations for the Upper Watershed category are still open until May 7.

Nominations to Represent Environmental Interests Due May 28

In addition, another seat is now open. Dr. Sarah Bernhardt, who was chosen to represent Environmental Interests with the San Jacinto group, is leaving her position as president and chief executive officer of the Bayou Preservation Association to move to Alaska with her family.

So the state board is also looking for nominations to fill her environmental position with the San Jacinto group.

Nominations for the environmental seat are due by May 28. Here is the notice and nomination form from the Texas Water Development Board.

The full San Jacinto group will also hold a planning meeting on May 13 at 9 a.m.

Update: In addition, the San Jacinto group will hold a virtual public “pre-planning” meeting May 18 from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. to gather public comments on the regional flood plan to be delivered to the Texas Water Development Board.

If you wish to provide written comments prior to or after the meeting, email your comments to SanJacFldPG@eng.hctx.net and include “Region 6 Flood Planning Group: Pre-Planning Meeting” in the subject line of the email.

These virtual meetings are open to the public, which can also deliver comments both before and during the meetings.

Note that this local state-sponsored planning group is different from the Harris County Community Flood Resilience Task Force, a product of the 2019 Harris Thrives resolution and intended as more of an oversight committee for the Harris County Flood Control District.

Killing the Bayou: Shocking Plan to Bulldoze, Reroute Buffalo Bayou

Historic Banks of Memorial Park to Be Radically Altered

Related: When Making Mistakes Is Profitable

Also this Aug. 26 update: Cutting and Scraping, Pounding Sheet Pile

April 6, 2021

The private organization running Houston’s great public Memorial Park on the forested banks of Buffalo Bayou is developing a plan to bulldoze and landscape the ancient high banks, channelize and reroute the bayou, cutting off long-standing meanders in a way that seems to shift a significant amount of public land to private owners.

Ironically, the alleged purpose of the project is in part to reduce the loss of public property, according to Carolyn White, the recently departed conservation director for the Memorial Park Conservancy.

The focus of this initial intervention is a little-known but historic section of the park west of Loop 610 known as the Old Archery Range, a long-neglected and poorly maintained wooded section of the park off Woodway Drive. (Some maps do not even include it as part of Memorial Park.)

A tentative plan promoted by White, who previously worked for the Harris County Flood Control District, proposes to raze and scrape nearly half of it.

Conceptual plans for the Old Archery Range in Memorial Park provided by the Memorial Park Conservancy. Purple shows land area on Buffalo Bayou to be graded and landscaped. Blue are new channels cut through meanders. Green is public parkland transferred to opposite bank of new channel.

In a recent presentation to Save Buffalo Bayou, White described the natural slumping of the high banks as lost property, though it would seem the proposed grading of the banks would result in a similar though far more drastic slope, along with considerable structural damage to the soil through disturbance and compaction by heavy equipment. (p. 14) (Not to mention the crushing loss of aquatic life and habitat.)

The high banks of Buffalo Bayou are prone to slumping (and naturally rebuilding), and there has been considerable loss of trees and widening and shifting of the upper channel in recent years. (Trees normally fall onto the slumped banks and remain there to collect sediment, naturally rebuild and protect the bank, and create habitat.) The first great meander in the archery range, which would be sliced in two by proposals under consideration, appears to have narrowed even in just the last few years.

But the general configuration of the sandstone-lined channel flowing past the park has remained pretty much the same for hundreds of years. (See, for instance, the 1898 survey on pp. 12 and 13 compared to the image above and this 1840 survey further downstream.) See also the footnote below from a letter written in 2014 by landscape architect Janet Wagner, then chair of the Harris County Historical Commission, to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Slumped banks in the Old Archery Range naturally rebuilding with new growth taking hold. Fallen trees also help fortify the bank, protecting against erosion, and collecting sediment. Flat stones are a broken, underlying layer of ancient sandstone typically lining the banks of Buffalo Bayou. Photo April 6, 2021

Rumors Swirling

Rumors had been swirling for over a year about the Conservancy’s interest in “stabilizing” the bayou banks in the Old Archery Range. Once containing nature trails, a 19th century nursery and brickworks, a farmhouse, a Boy Scout camp, and the archery range for which it is named, the 20-25-acre wooded site is the location of the park’s only boat ramp, part of Texas Parks and Wildlife’s 26-mile long Buffalo Bayou paddle trail. The ramp, actually a giant, badly designed, and constantly eroding stormwater outfall, is situated near the early 19th century sandstone ford known as Dutchman’s Crossing, used by settlers heading west. (p. 5)

Cost, Length, Purpose

The Conservancy, together with the Uptown Development Authority, has hired the engineering firm Stantec at a cost of $500,000 to explore plans to “reduce channel erosion” and “improve habitat,” while landscaping and building trails, initially along some 2,700 feet of bank, according to documents provided by Randy Odinet, vice president for Capital Improvement Projects with the Conservancy.

Erosion and deposition are natural functions of living streams, and dynamic streams are healthier, cleaner and more biologically diverse.

Note also as with virtually all meanders in Buffalo Bayou, flow naturally cuts across the meanders in the Old Archery Range during high water. But the Conservancy is contemplating spending a great deal of money to cut artificial channels through the meanders, an idea rejected by the Harris County Flood Control District.

Woods of the Old Archery Range in Memorial Park. Photo April 6, 2021

Wildness Wanted

As a recent study of urban parks found, city residents want and need “wildness” in their parks. We need to be able to observe and interact with nature, to be able to study and learn about our natural history.

Stantec is a national specialist in the lucrative and controversial business of “stabilizing” and “restoring” streams, in particular using “natural channel design,” a pseudo-scientific but widely used methodology developed by Dave Rosgen in the 1990s. Natural channel design was the basis of the flawed Memorial Park Demonstration Project that would have razed the trees and vegetation, dredged, bulldozed and reshaped some 1.25 miles of the bayou past the park further downstream.

The same local Stantec team, headed by Betty Leite, is in charge of a project to “stabilize” the forested banks below the Bayou Bend, Collection and Gardens owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.  We have asked for more information about this project and will have a report soon.

Heavy concrete rubble dumped on the bank of Buffalo Bayou adds weight to bank and contributes to slumping. Photo taken of the bank below the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens on April 6, 2021.

Bayou Bend, just downstream from Memorial Park, is the former home of the late Ima Hogg, who donated the large home and garden, along with the 15.5-acre woods of the Hogg Bird Sanctuary on the opposite bank. Hogg and her family arranged for the City of Houston to purchase at cost the more than 1,500 acres that became Memorial Park in 1924. Hogg intended for the park to remain as natural as possible.

Unfortunately years of poor management practice at Bayou Bend, including planting short-rooted monkey grass and other exotics on the bank, paving the top of the bank and building on it, irrigating the bank and draining stormwater directly onto it, have contributed to bank collapse.

Left for Dead

Harris County Flood Control District uses its own version of “natural stable channel design” as an excuse to strip and channelize streams all over the county. The district’s “natural stable channel design” project in Buffalo Bayou Park downstream of the Shepherd Bridge has resulted in endless repairs and a once vibrant stream now lined with concrete chunks like a dead drainage ditch.

This initial project in the Old Archery Range is no doubt only the beginning of an effort to bulldoze and landscape the historic banks of Buffalo Bayou in Memorial Park. Soon there will be no life remaining in the bayou. With the massive crime perpetrated on the bayou by the River Oaks Country Club opposite the park, the Houston Parks Board’s recent pointless project downstream of the Hogg Bird Sanctuary, the museum’s planned work at Bayou Bend, and the vast amount of the bayou now lined with concrete rubble by Harris County Flood Control and countless private projects, there will soon be little left of our living bayou.

Footnote:

On August 4, 2014, landscape architect Janet Wagner wrote the following about Buffalo Bayou to the National Trust for Historic Preservation:

The alignment of Buffalo Bayou, fronting along the Hogg Bird Sanctuary and upstream along Memorial Park, exhibits a historic land formation documented in 1840 Harris County Surveyor George H. Bringhurst.  He traveled several days along the north side of Buffalo Bayou (now Memorial Park) beginning at Shepherd Drive to beyond Dutchman’s Crossing (near Woodway Bridge).  Bringhurst’s survey mapping along the bayou ridge matches the current alignment of Buffalo Bayou meanders, giving rise that the present bayou bank pattern is well over 175 years old.  The alluvial nature of the old Archery Range dates the Range alignment to 12,000 years.  A canoe trip down Buffalo Bayou or visit to Memorial Park reveals a step back in time that is outstanding for stream preservation, education and reverence to historic vistas.  

SC

Marked pine in Old Archery Range. April 6, 2021

Community Flood Resilience Task Force Membership Finalized

Replaces Old Harris County Flood Control Task Force

Also: New State Flood Group to Meet Thursday, April 8

April 5, 2021

The initial five members of Harris County’s new Community Flood Resilience Task Force have now selected the remaining twelve members of the task force. The new task force replaces the outdated Harris County Flood Control Task Force, founded nearly fifty years ago in the wake of discontent over flood control practices and plans to channelize Buffalo Bayou.

The first five members of the new task force were appointed by Harris County Commissioners’ Court last fall. The county describes the task force as a “multidisciplinary, community-driven body that Commissioners Court established to ensure Harris County develops and implements equitable flood resilience planning and projects that take into account community needs and priorities.”

Here are the current members of the task force. Here are the bylaws.

The task force, which is not subject to the Open Meetings Act, is to hold meetings at least every other month or at least six times a year.

However, the first official meeting of the task force will be in May and will be open to the public, according to Vanessa Toro, senior policy advisor to County Judge Lina Hidalgo. Toro will be joined in supporting the task force by Lance Gilliam, who previously worked with Commissioner Rodney Ellis on flood control, disaster recovery, housing, and community development policy.

Part of the mission of the task force is to advise the County’s Infrastructure Resilience Team and Commissioners Court on equitable resilience planning efforts and flood resilience projects, wrote Toro in a recent email announcing the new members of the task force.

Here is how you can sign up to join the mailing list for the task force.

San Jacinto Regional Flood Planning Group Meeting

The newly formed San Jacinto Regional Flood Planning Group will have its online monthly meeting on April 8 at 9 a.m. Known as Region 6, the group, a project of the Texas Water Development Board, is still in the process of acquiring members.

Here is information about the meeting agenda and how to join.

Harris County Flood Control District Executive Director Russ Poppe is the chair of the San Jacinto group.

SC