How One Houston Suburb Ended Up in a Reservoir - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/us/houston-harvey-flooding-reservoir.html
Three days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in August, rising storm water inside Barker Reservoir inundated a vast majority of the 721 homes in Canyon Gate.
Because Barker is normally a dry, green space, most homeowners in the neighborhood had no clue that their properties were inside an area susceptible to flooding during extreme storms.
In response to major floods that devastated Houston, the United States Army Corps of Engineers built Barker in the 1940s to protect the downtown area.
Barker was designed to hold 19,330 acres of flooded land — almost half the size of Washington, D.C. But the government acquired about 12,000 acres of that footprint and left the rest as private property.
For years, this swath of prairie land remained untouched. But as the Houston area began to grow rapidly in the 1980s, developers started transforming the private land into residential neighborhoods like Canyon Gate, which is a gated community.
“No one wanted to tell the developers that you can’t develop because it’s in a reservoir,” said Charles Irvine, a lead lawyer in a class-action lawsuit against the federal government. “Everyone knew, but nobody wanted to do anything.”
[…]
A Fort Bend County planning map from 1997 warned that Canyon Gate was “_adjacent to the Barker Reservoir” and “subject to extended controlled inundation.”
But few homeowners knew about it, and most, like Ms. Micu, had not acquired flood insurance before Hurricane Harvey because Canyon Gate lies outside the 100-year floodplain — an area that has a one in 100 chance of flooding in a single year.
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