DALLAS _ Two decades ago, Harris County planners predicted with chilling accuracy just how devastating a storm like Hurricane Harvey would be to the Houston area. Far lesser storms, they determined, could wreck a large swath of the city and its western suburbs.
In a report dated May 1996, engineers for the Harris County Flood Control District concluded the area's reservoir system was severely insufficient and imperiled thousands of properties. The report's authors proposed a $400 million fix: constructing a massive underground conduit that would carry water out of the reservoirs and into the Houston Ship Channel more quickly.
Had the report's recommendations been heeded, the catastrophic flooding that struck Houston last week might have been greatly diminished, sparing thousands of homes from floodwaters.
Instead, the report got filed away and was all but forgotten. Government leaders ignored its advice.
Today, the report reads like a prophecy of the flooding that swamped west Houston and surrounding areas. Its authors knew which neighborhoods would flood and why, and in which places the flooding would be especially damaging because the water could pool for weeks.
"The primary flood threat facing the citizens of west Harris County and west Houston comes from the inability to drain the Addicks and Barker reservoirs in an efficient manner," the report said.
When built in the 1940s, the area's reservoir system was adequate, the report said. But because of changes made to the system, and given the pace of urban development 50 years later, "the project's original design parameters and assumptions are severely outdated and invalid."
In addition to the report's main proposal of a conduit, its authors raised other alternatives, such as digging the reservoirs deeper, buying out properties at risk and creating new regulations on development.
And then there was a final, stark alternative: "Do nothing and accept risk of flooding."
Asked Monday about the report, Harris County flood control officials said they could not immediately locate a copy and were unfamiliar with the details.
"What I recall is, and I haven't read the report since back then, was that it was going to be very difficult to do physically," said Steve Fitzgerald, the flood control district's longtime chief engineer.
But Harris County's flood control director at the time the report was created, Arthur Storey, said Monday that he remembered the proposal well.
"This, what we have before us, is a massive engineering and governmental failure. I'm both angry about it and embarrassed about it," said Storey, who after his time as flood control director went on to lead the county's public infrastructure department. He retired in 2015 at 78 years old.
"My embarrassment is that I knew enough that this was going to happen," he said, referring to the destruction Harvey inflicted on west Harris County. "And I was not smart enough, bold enough to fight the system, the politics, and stop it."
