{"id":4540,"date":"2018-01-07T20:26:40","date_gmt":"2018-01-08T02:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/?page_id=4540"},"modified":"2018-01-28T23:17:04","modified_gmt":"2018-01-29T05:17:04","slug":"looking-back-at-2017","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.savebuffalobayou.org\/?page_id=4540","title":{"rendered":"Looking Back at 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

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What Happened in 2017? Some Things We Remember Besides Harvey<\/h3>\n

Permit Issued for Bad Project. Bad Project Is Killed<\/h3>\n

Also Boy Scouts, Bottles, That Big Horrible Flood, and Alligators<\/strong><\/p>\n

With photos!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Jan. 7, 2018<\/p>\n

Updated Jan. 8 with more photos<\/em><\/p>\n

The year 2017 started off for Save Buffalo with our editorial in the Houston Chronicle<\/em><\/a> warning against the folly of believing that cutting down trees and widening and deepening our bayous and streams is the most effective response to flooding. Nobody does that any more. It\u2019s counterproductive, damaging, and costly. The practical focus is on stopping stormwater before it floods a stream. But in Houston developer and engineering interests as well as politicians continue unwisely to call for bigger and more expensive drainage pipes and \u201cimproving\u201d our bayous and waterways at great taxpayer and environmental expense. Widening the floodplain would be a good idea, creating Room for the River, as the Chronicle has reported<\/a> as part of its excellent series in the wake of Harvey. Save Buffalo Bayou has been talking about Room for the River, working with nature<\/a>, for years. That means not building in flood-prone areas and buyouts of buildings in the way, among other things.<\/p>\n

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Aerial photo of Buffalo Bayou flowing towards downtown by Jim Olive on April 7, 2017. The public forest of Memorial Park is on the bottom. Property of River Oaks Country Club is on the opposite bank.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Then in January Terry Hershey died<\/a>, one of Houston\u2019s inspirational environmental leaders, a protector of Buffalo Bayou.<\/p>\n

In April Jim Olive<\/a> went up in the air and took a stunning series of photographs, including the photo above, of Buffalo Bayou flowing past Memorial Park and the Hogg Bird Sanctuary in the middle of Houston. You can see the photos here<\/a>. You might also want to look at our series, A Bend in the River<\/a>, documenting the changes in a bend of the bayou through the seasons.<\/p>\n

Later that month, after a delay of nearly two years following the last public comment period, the Army Corps of Engineers issued a permit<\/a> for the long-delayed Harris County Flood Control District project to strip, dredge, and reroute over a mile of this stretch of the river, a historic nature area and one of the last forested, publicly-accessible stretches of the bayou. We asked and waited impatiently for the Environmental Assessment required by law.<\/p>\n

While we waited an amazing trove of bottles and broken glass from the early twentieth century surfaced on the bank below the high cliff on the eastern edge of Memorial Park<\/a>, an area designated a State Antiquities Landmark. This high bluff and the rest of this historic area would have been destroyed by the flood control district\u2019s \u201crestoration\u201d project. You can thank Save Buffalo Bayou<\/a> that it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

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Broken glass bottles, probably from the trash of the World War I military camp that was once in the area, washed out on the bank of Buffalo Bayou in Memorial Park. Photo May 19, 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

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During that same month of May, Eagle Scout Paul Hung published an inspiring essay in the Houston Chronicle<\/a><\/em> describing his Eagle Scout project benefiting Save Buffalo Bayou. Hung and a group of fellow scouts documented wildlife tracks on the bayou over a period of several months and created a pamphlet for the public to use to identify tracks. (Donate!<\/a> We\u2019ll send you the guide.)<\/p>\n

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Paul Hung and his fellow scouts from Troop 55 headed downstream on Buffalo Bayou to document wildlife tracks.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The Corps Releases the Environmental Impact Statement: It’s All Good! Not<\/h4>\n

And the Corps of Engineers finally released its Environmental Assessment. Which basically reported what the flood control district said, which was that it\u2019s all good, no environmental impact from ripping out all the trees and vegetation, digging up the channel and banks, and shortening and rerouting the bayou. It\u2019ll be better! More natural! It\u2019s what the bayou wants!<\/p>\n

So our super smart geologists went to work out in the field and documented the fact that Flood Control\u2019s Memorial Park Demonstration Project was premised on a basic mistake, a faulty analysis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Geologist Bill Heins, a member of Save Buffalo Bayou’s advisory board, at work in the field investigating slumping with his late beloved dog. This photograph was taken in the then-Memorial Park project area. Riffles in the water show the hard clay outcrop across entire stream bed, says Heins. River Oaks Country Club property on the right.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Basically, at the urging of the Bayou Preservation Association (BPA), Flood Control came up with a very expensive “solution” before conducting an analysis of the \u201cproblem.”\u00a0 (The “solution” also happened to benefit members of the BPA board at the time.) The subsequent faulty analysis to back up this pre-selected solution was provided at taxpayer expense by a very compliant engineering consultant (who was represented on the board of the BPA by the manager for the project).<\/p>\n

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Slumping again of the south bank of Buffalo Bayou in Buffalo Bayou Park after Harvey. Photo Dec. 10, 2017, by SC<\/p><\/div>\n

Slumping Is Vertical Collapse of\u00a0 Stream Banks. It’s What Happens on Buffalo Bayou<\/h4>\n

What the analysis ignored is that what we have primarily on Buffalo Bayou and elsewhere is slumping of the banks<\/a>. Our banks slide down vertically. The face rotates away. The Flood Control \u201crestoration\u201d plan said this wasn\u2019t happening. But it is. (Property owners on the bayou, private and public, may have realized this, especially after Harvey.) There is really not much one can do about vertical bank collapse (slumping) except stay back and out of the way, stop landscaping, stop watering, control runoff, etc. Riprap (concrete rubble) is not going to fix it, and the weight may even cause more of a problem.<\/p>\n

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Slumping of the denuded bank of the River Oaks Country Club golf course where riprap was installed in 2015. Bank face slid down anyway. Photo 10.28.17<\/p><\/div>\n

We took our findings and made our case to the elected county official in charge, a very smart man whose name starts with \u201cCactus\u201d and ends in Cagle. He listened. (Also the project cost had doubled — from $6 million to $12 million at least, not including maintenance.)<\/p>\n

The Memorial Park Demonstration Project is dead. Though no Flood Control project is truly ever dead, just shoved to the back of the shelf. See below.<\/p>\n

And then came Harvey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We had warned about the problem with the dams on Buffalo Bayou<\/a> in the spring of 2016, after the April Tax Day floods. The Chronicle also published<\/a><\/em> our report.<\/p>\n

And now it had happened. In November of 2017 we published a new report, The Problem with Dams<\/a>, describing how construction of dams can create a false sense of security and greater flood risk. In the coming year, we promise more analysis of plans for a new dam on Cypress Creek, the Third Reservoir.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, distraught homeowners upstream on Buffalo Bayou below the dams were blaming trees (and the Corps of Engineers) for flooding their homes during Harvey, and politicians, engineers, and developer associations have turned up the volume on calls to remove the \u201ckinks\u201d and \u201cbottlenecks\u201d in the meandering, unchannelized bayou from Beltway 8 to Shepherd Drive, the beautiful stretch of the bayou that Terry Hershey and others fought to protect. Upstream of Beltway 8, the bayou had been stripped and straightened by the Corps in the 1940s. That straightened stretch immediately below the dams is now called Terry Hershey Park, and after Harvey, in a bid to do something quickly, the flood control district pulled off the shelf an old, controversial plan<\/a> to raze trees in Terry Hershey Park and create basins for siphoning off flow from the bayou AFTER it was already in the stream. This made no scientific sense, but it cost less and it was a plan ready to go.<\/p>\n

Save Buffalo Bayou spoke against that<\/a>. And here in the Guardian<\/a> also.<\/p>\n

On a trip down Buffalo Bayou after Harvey, we found the gates to the public boat launch in Memorial Park at Woodway inexplicably closed. We discussed this with the Memorial Park Conservancy, and the gates were opened. On our paddle we saw newly revealed sandstone formations, an abundance of mussel shells in the newly deposited gravel and sand bars, a lot of sediment, lots of fallen trees, and a lot of slumping of the banks.\u00a0 The small tributary stream flowing out of the Hogg Bird Sanctuary was blocked with sediment and debris.<\/p>\n

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