(Ed.'s Note: this morning the muggy weather (80 degrees with 90 percent humidity) is slowly giving way to an approaching cold front that is forecast to plunge temperatures from a high of 90 degrees to a low of 68 by Wednesday at 7 a.m. and humidity lowered to 79 percent.
That is just fine to our fine-feathered friends who live in our city resacas like the ducks and egrets in the photo sent in by one of our seven readers. To our northern friends, resacas is the local name given to oxbow lakes that were left isolated when the river changed course many years ago before dams upstream prevented the annual spring floods. The resaca system in Brownsville extends north to Los Fresnos and even to San Benito some 16 miles north. San Benito gives its name as "The Resaca City."
A series of levees were built to prevent the floods from razing the town after it was established in 1848, the date when the Mexican-American war ended and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo established the Rio Grande as the boundary between the United States and Mexico. Before that, the disputed northern boundary was the Nueces River some 150 to 160 miles north near Corpus Christi.
Matamoros, on the Mexican side of Brownsville, took a different approach to the resacas, which they called esteros. In the first attempt to colonize the city around 1730, the annual flooding left the standing water which then bred mosquitoes that carried diseases and pestilence such as yellow fever and malaria. This led to abandonment of the first settlement of Nuestra Señora del Refugio de losEsteros Hermosos. As a result, the city square was moved further away from the river and the subsequent settlers went about covering the esteros and using the recovered land for development. Brownsville, on the other hand, was built up to the banks of the Rio Grande and the original levee system was built to prevent the annual flooding.
Except for one single lagoon (La Lagunita) in downtown Matamoros, there are no esteros left there with nowhere for the water to drain. As a result, there are many low-lying areas of Matamoros that chronically flood when there is a strong rain or hurricane. Even with the resacas on the Brownsville side, the city is also prone to flooding since the water is prevented from draining into the river by the levee system.
However, today the remaining resacas are a source of civic pride and are used for drainage and water storage. They are also a prime habitat for birds and other wildlife, including invasive species that are not native to the area such as nutria that feed on plants and small trees that damage the ecosystem.)
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