HURRICANE HARVEY PRECAUTIONS: RESACAS HIGH AND DRY

(Ed.'s Note: If you had suddenly dropped out of space, you would think that the city was weathering a drought if you saw the resaca in front of Homer Hanna Early College High School. Paradoxically, just a few hundred miles north, the Texas coastline is receiving record rainfall and widespread flooding as a result of Category 4 Hurricane Harvey making landfall Friday night. That storm is now stalled in south Central Texas and expected to flood a wide area with as much as 40 inches of rain over the next few days.

In the case of the resaca above, city and utility board officials purposely drained the resacas in anticipation of Harvey striking here. As you can tell, these resacas – ancient Rio Grande waterbeds – might have helped ease the city's flooding a bit, but if 40 inches had fallen here, these shallow bodies certainly would not have deterred the rain runoff from flooding the city. Officials, however, erred on the side of caution and drained them before the hurricane's expected landfall.

Now as the 90-100 degree days approach, they might want to expedite their refilling because as local residents know, when the organic matter on the mud resaca bed starts to get cooked by the sun, it doesn't take long for unearthly smells to attack the senses and the flies start to gather to feed on dead aquatic plants and animals.)