Following the torrential rains of April 17-18 and subsequent flooding of numerous neighborhoods and streets, dozens of residents in the city of Katy assigned blame for the high waters to several residential developments in the city.
Numerous upset residents attended the April 25 Katy City Council meeting to vent their frustrations. One common theme was a belief the new Cane Island residential development was responsible for water flowing into their homes on the west side of Avenue D.
At the time, Katy Mayor Fabol Hughes stressed to residents that those allegations were false and said new residential developments did not cause or make flooding in the city worse.
After months of analyzing the rainfall totals, and examining where floodwaters overflowed the banks of the Cane Island branch of Buffalo Bayou, David Leyendecker, an engineer with Katy, said on Aug. 2 the flooding was not caused by any residential development but rather a highly unusual rain event.
“The flooding had nothing to do with Cane Island or any other development,” Leyendecker said. “We had a 500-year flood; it was just a tremendous amount of rain in a short period of time. None of the developments here caused it.”
Leyendecker said the city adopted the Harris County Flood Control District’s guidelines on stormwater runoff more than 15 years ago. He also noted the manual requires new developments to not create more storm water runoff than the land did previously when no development existed.
“[It requires developers] to detain all the additional [water] flow from your development,” Leyendecker said.
Matt Lawson, vice president of Rise Communities—the developer of Cane Island, said Cane Island, like neighborhoods along Avenue D, also saw flooding during the April 17-18 storm.
“We were getting [rainfall] as much as [other neighborhoods] were,” Lawson said. “This rain event overwhelmed not only this watershed but all the other watersheds [in the region].”
Andy E. Palermo, department manager of hydrology and hydraulics at EHRA Engineering, said the Cane Island detention basins provide approximately 300 acre-feet of detention storage volume, or approximately 98 million gallons. The total cost spent for construction of the detention basins within the Cane Island development was about $13 million, he said.
“We are now discharging 100 [cubic feet per second] less than before the development was built,” Palermo said. “We’re pretty proud of how the infrastructure worked.”
Lawson said officials with Rise Communities are dedicated to being a good neighbor and the developer plans to build many more detention basins in the future.
“We will have a total of 15 to 20 detention ponds when this [development] is all said and done,” Lawson said. “We spent millions and millions of dollars, and we are not going to do something that isn’t safe. We didn’t cause any of the flooding [in Katy].”
In an effort to prevent future flooding issues in the city, officials are planning a 22-acre detention pond along Morton Road, Leyendecker said. Part of the Morton Road widening project includes higher-capacity storm sewers which are expected to help, he said.
In addition, the city recently created a flooding committee to seek solutions to the problems created by the April 17-18 rains, he said.
Anas Garfaoui, planning technician with the city of Katy, said the committee includes several members of the city staff along with three residents from Katy— Bill Callegari, Paul Redmon and Eric Paulsen.
“The goal is to have a hydro study that will quantify the flood event, but we should have the final details to share in about a month or so,” Garfaoui said.
