Shared from the 12/13/2017 Houston Chronicle eEdition

After Harvey, Houston could find some lessons in Tulsa

No building in floodway since 1974, but memories fade

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Courtesy / City of Tulsa

Tulsa hydrologist Bill Robison took heat after erecting this sign in an area, now under development, that flooded in 1986.

A year ago, Tulsa city officials stood not far from the banks of the Arkansas River to commemorate the city’s worst flood, remind residents how far they’d come in the decades since, and remind them how easy it could be to slip into complacency. They dedicated a road sign showing the high-water mark about a foot over their heads.

While Hurricane Harvey marked the third flood in as many years for some Houston homeowners, four decades ago some residents of Tulsa, Okla., 500 miles to the north, had it worse.

After major rains in April, May, June and September of 1974, homes flooded three times in a span of just months. The ordeal set in motion years of reforms that catapulted Tulsa to the forefront of flood prevention in the United States — and showed just how painful getting there can be.

Today, it has one of the top seven scores in the Community Rating System, out of about 1,400 cities and counties that participate in the Federal Emergency Management Agency program. The rating system rewards communities for enacting strict flood plain regulations. At level 2, Tulsa policyholders in the flood plain get a 40 percent discount on federal flood insurance. At level 5, Houstonians in the flood plain get 25 percent off.

Tulsa didn’t get there overnight. It had been ravaged by floods since its founding in the early 1800s. Square in tornado alley, Tulsa sits at the convergence of warm Gulf air and cool northern fronts in the summer. During the sudden storms, it can get nearly half of its annual 40 inches of rain in one hour. In 1974, it had “the year of the floods.”

People assailed City Hall, contending it wasn’t enforcing federal flood insurance requirements. They called for a halt to development, but builders pushed back, claiming unconstitutional takings of property. The decade of conflict that ensued became known locally as the Great Flood Wars. After a 1976 storm, newly elected city commissioners enacted a flood plain building moratorium, hired the city’s first hydrologist, developed comprehensive flood plain management rules and instituted warning systems.

The leaders led

The worst flood in Tulsa history occurred on Memorial Day in 1984. It did about $180 million in damage ($423 million in today’s dollars) and killed 14 people in a metro area of about 700,000 people. Today it has about 987,000.

By daylight, city elected officials had formed the first flood hazard mitigation team to create a new long-term strategy. They began relocating homes and centralized flood plain management into a single government office. And in 1986, they enshrined a stormwater fee as a longterm funding mechanism and barred it from being siphoned off for other purposes. (Houston enacted a dedicated drainage fund in 2011.) It was the beginning of the end of the flood wars.

“At the time, we had Mayor Terry Young, who was all for protecting people,” said Bill Robison, who, as the city’s recently retired chief hydrologist, has been managing storm-water in the city for 20 years. “That’s what it takes. You’ve got to have some key elected official behind it to get something through. I’d think in Houston it would be a good time to do that because right on the heels of a flood, people still feel the pain.”

Robison said that since 1974, Tulsa has built nothing in a floodway, the corridors where floodwaters flow after major storms. In the wider flood plain, no structure built to standards enacted in 1991 has ever flooded.

In parts of Harris County outside of Houston, about 1,500 homes that met 100-year flood plain standards were inundated after Harvey, said John Blount, the county engineer. City damage assessments are ongoing, but it’s likely that thousands more such homes in Houston flooded, based on FEMA models. More than 148,000 homes in the city, in and out of the flood plain, took on water, the city estimates.

A lesson lost?

But even in Tulsa, the lessons get lost.

In 1986, Hurricane Paine tracked out of the Pacific, northeast across Mexico and stalled over Tulsa, creating a storm the city could expect once in 350 years. It filled Tulsa’s Keystone Reservoir to capacity, forcing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to release water at 310,000 cubic feet per second — about four times the rate at which the San Jacinto River Authority released water from the Lake Con-roe Dam during Harvey, and roughly four times the rate of Niagara Falls. In the city, a levee failed. Flooding inflicted $142 million in damage to Tulsa County, in 2017 dollars.

Along the river in southeast Tulsa, empty prairie sat under 7 feet of water.

Blissful ignorance

Recently, developers went to work in that area.

Hundreds of homes upward of $1 million each are filling the prairie, unprotected by levees and outside the mapped 100-year flood plain, which means sellers don’t disclose that the homes aren’t elevated above the 1986 flood level. It is a blissful ignorance: Because Tulsa has such a high community rating from FEMA, residents in that area get 10 percent off their insurance, to boot.

When the Corps built the Keystone Dam upstream of Tulsa in 1964, it predicted a release like the one in 1986 would happen every 25 years. It’s been 31 since the last one.

The tony new subdivisions downstream of town are Robison’s biggest “pet peeves” these days; he knows the city’s flood control strategy has been largely untested since 1986. So on the flood’s 30th anniversary last year, he teamed up with the Corps and the National Weather Service and had the street sign put in at the entrance to the neighborhoods, with the glaring words “HIGH WATER MARK” showing that, 1,000 feet from the riverbank, the water was over a person’s head. A local TV station did a flood anniversary story, showing aerial video of the neighborhoods’ then-vacant land submerged 30 years ago, and interviewing homeowners who had no clue about the dangers.

The phones in the storm-water management office rang off the hook.

“What do you mean it was inundated?” residents asked Robison. “Look at this map,” he’d say. “It was 4 feet deep at your house.”

A developer stormed into the city’s traffic engineering office, yelling about the sign and arguing that the area would never flood again. He said he’d never be able to sell houses and lots with that sign out there. He went off on that district’s council representative, Phil Lakin. Lakin fired off a lengthy email to then-Mayor Dewey Bartlett, who just hours earlier at the signpost ceremony had spoken about the importance of flood risk awareness and preparing for the next one.

The mayor called traffic engineering.

The sign had gone up at 9 a.m. on a Monday. By Tuesday at 3 p.m., it was back in Robison’s office.

It was still there Nov. 22, the day he retired. mark.collette@chron.com twitter.com/ChronMC

“That’s what it takes. You’ve got to have some key elected official behind it to get something through. I’d think in Houston it would be a good time to do that because right on the heels of a flood, people still feel the pain.”

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