Flooded Houston-area homeowners might have been spared ruin but only if they read the fine print
HOUSTON — They sat tucked away in a Fort Bend county clerk's file for the past two decades: 25 words on a public document that could have spared thousands of homeowners from losing everything.If only the homeowners had seen them.
In the finest of fine print, the county warned in 1997: "This subdivision is adjacent to the Barker Reservoir and is subject to extended controlled inundation under the management of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers."
In other words, during a major storm, the corps could choose to flood the subdivision in an effort to protect greater Houston.
Which is exactly what happened during Hurricane Harvey.
Many of the victims knew little or nothing about the risk they faced. They never purchased flood insurance. They had no clue their homes were built within government reservoirs engineered in the 1940s to fill with billions of gallons of water in case of heavy rains. The undeveloped, government-owned land inside the reservoirs had a 1 percent chance of flooding in a given year. But residents' homes just upstream, in the so-called maximum pool of the reservoirs, had a significant chance of being intentionally flooded in the event of a major storm.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/harvey/2017/09/20/flooded-houston-area-homeowners-might-spared-ruin-read-fine-print
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