Here we go again.
After spending millions of dollars on streets and drainage, what happens after we get a good downpour?
Yup. The usual flooding and washing away of the improvements (and patchwork) performed over the last five or six months and the cycle begins anew.
A former mayor used to say that Boca Chica Blvd. at Four Corners always flooded when a large dog took a pee. Well, looks like Fido had to relieve himself again today.
Retaining ponds and clean ditches and gutters are just stopgaps in a system that really isn’t working. In fact, it has never worked.
Recall that a month prior to the last city commission election, the then-city commissioners and city manager Charlie Cabler “found” $1 million to patch up potholes in streets and several commissioners then running listed all those “improvements" in their campaign ads (Yes, we mean you Rick Longoria and Carlos Cisneros)?
Guess what happened to those improvements after this week’s downpours? Merely drive down our main strips and see the “patched” blackholes start to suck in our bucks again. Once again we’ll pour a few millions down the drain in patchwork and repairs until the next rains come, then again, the cycle starts anew.
In the meantime, we’ll continue ruining our cars, living in what looks like a shelled-out city and handing over our hard-earned bucks to tire and car repair shops to fix our tires, replace our cracked windshields, and replace our shocks.
Sometime down the road we’re going to realize that unless we undertake a comprehensive system-wide drainage project that covers the entire city – and not just piecemeal strategies – this vicious cycle will continue to be repeated time after time ad infinitum.
Man has altered the natural flow of water in this watershed toward the river with dams upriver and a levee system that effectively prevents the water from following its natural course to the waterway. We need a series of outfalls along the river to divert the water while we gather the necessary political courage to propose the most logical solution to our flooding.
Until then, be prepared to continue pouring money down the drain and suffer the consequences of ignoring the obvious.
1 comment:
The Rio Grande is not the natural watershed for the county, the Arroyo is. The banks of the Rio Grande have been naturally built up over the centuries by the (former) anual flood waters so that they are now higher then the surrounding land. Consequently, water drains away from the Rio Grande. This is a natural process and it would be this way if man was not here.
Post a Comment