re: #518 allegro

These are people who live at the edge of Addicks Reservoir who are informed that this can happen when water has to be released from the reservoir to protect the dam integrity. It’s happened before - last year if I’m not mistaken.

Sure sucked the way they’re doing it though. Decision/announcement was made at like 7pm that they are doing it tonight starting at 2am. Just a few hours notice and in the midst of torrential rain. Those folks in the area about to be flooded have precious little notice to get out. Seems a bit more warning, earlier in the day during the storm lull would have been damn friendly of them.

From my reading today those dams have been classified as “catastrophic risk” and priority 1 since 2009, with the knowledge that if the flooding exceeded a certain point the dams would have to release water in order to avoid catastrophic failure. The Corp doubled the amount of water that could be released at that point with little fanfare to alert the homeowners, etc. downstream and downgraded the flood these dams could handle to a 25 year event, instead of a 1000 year event.

Needless to say they did not publicize this to the homeowners like you might think they should.

I have …opinions on how much flood insurance should cover (namely, flood multiple times within a set time period (subject to discussion and reasonable exemption) and no, I don’t think the taxpayers should be on the hook for rebuilding your home anymore) but even I can acknowledge that a lot of the folks being hit by this are ones who really wouldn’t have thought about this risk and didn’t have any real reason to be concerned in their minds.

(I say this as someone who has priced what flood insurance would be for my house here in CA. Yes, you can laugh. For my location it would be close to $600 a year and the only way we would flood is if the dam fails, likely following an earthquake. I sympathize.)