FLOODING MAY BE NOBODY'S FAULT; GOOD DRAINAGE IS NOT

By Juan Montoya
By now we know that all those piece-meal retaining ponds and drain ditch cleaning efforts to keep the city from flooding during a good rainstorm are not good enough.
The recent Aug. 31 pelting we received here was enough to convince every resident of the city that not the vaunted resacas used to store water, the additional taxing by the overreaching jurisdiction of Drainage District No.1 and the cleaning by Public Works of grates and drains are simply not enough to handle the runoff from our increasingly urbanized city.
For as long as I can remember, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has urged the Cameron County and the City of Brownsville to adopt a drainage scheme that will encompass as large an area as possible to address the chronic flooding after each such "event."
The county and the city have turned a deaf ear to these pleadings. Instead, Drainage District No.1, really an irrigation and not a drainage system, has continued to enlarge and annex more taxable territory. And what do they do? Yeah, they clean ditches and spend some of the taxpayers money on billboards listing the members of the district and the officeholders to take credit for the landscaping on the district's right-of-way over the ditches.
They also spend their time pushing for a water park they say will be a teaching tool for kids and a colling off place for the public, the stench of sewage from the nearby PUB plant notwithstanding. What a water cascade has to do with draining water away from streets and people's homes is beyond most people, however.
Our friend (and Realtor with a capital R) Craig Grove had a letter to the editor in the local daily today where he champions the use of the soon-to-be-abandoned West Rail right-of-way  for a north-sough boulevard with a companion bike and hike trail instead of just a bike trail as others have proposed.
He argues that Brownsville needs another north-south thoroughfare aside from Central Blvd., Expressway 77, Paredes Line Road and State Highway 48. All except one, he said, was impassible during the rainstorm. He may have forgotten about the McDavitt-Old Port Isabel thoroughfare, but why nitpick.
Now, the idea of a boulevard being constructed on that right-of-way has been floating around like flood waters for a long time. There are real estate speculators that will stand to benefit handsomely if the idea comes to fruition. If you rememeber, that railroad grade goes right through Boca Chica Blvd., through neighborhoods, and past the shopping mall off Morrison (where Academy is located). We are not saying Grove is a real estate speculator, just that some people (Realtors with a capital R) would probably benefit indirectly. A mit self-serving, but hey, that's Da biz.
But it's what he just before that that struck us as somewhat self-serving.
"Flooding is nobody's fault."
Of course it is, Craig. For years we have ignored the FEMA admonition to come up with a drainage system that does not rely on the old WPA irrigation ditch scheme that was constructed to bring water into the area, not to drain it out. All of the drainage ditches are funneled to the Brownsville Ship Channel. The city is but a few feet above sea level When you have a storm, the water must wait until the tide goes down before it can flow into the channel.
So even if the new boulevard is constructed on the former railroad right-of-way, it'll still mean that the additional runoff will continue to plague not just it, but all the surrounding real estate.
In the absence of construction of a countywide bona fide drainage system, the next best thing is to design outfalls that follow the natural flow of the watershed toward the river at strategic points along the levee system. That levee system that was constructed to prevent the river from spilling over into the land now act as barriers to runoff making its way to its natural course. The levees, in essence, bottle the waters into a basin.
And Craig, you can build as many boulevards as you want and continue the piece-meal construction of retaining ponds and patching the drainage district. But unless there's an effective drainage scheme in place, it will all be money down the drain.