Photo: Example of Harvey Repairs: General channel erosion repairs and sheet pile replacement on Horsepen Creek, HCFCD Unit U106-00-00
Drainage Network Repairs After Harvey
Hurricane Harvey resulted in extensive and unprecedented damage to Harris County’s drainage infrastructure. As part of a countywide post-Harvey assessment, more than 1,200 individual damage sites were verified and prioritized. This included sinkholes, bank erosion, failed concrete, collapsed outfall pipes and other damage. In the weeks and months immediately following the storm, the Harris County Flood Control District completed approximately $5.4 million in post-Harvey emergency repairs (listed below), using available funding.
In addition to those immediate priority repairs, plus previously planned and executed repairs from earlier storms, the Flood Control District has used local funds to leverage requests for more than $84 million in grants for Harvey storm repairs from the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency. While the focus is on areas that qualify for federal disaster funding, other areas requiring maintenance repairs have been added to the projects in some cases, and will be constructed using available local funding alone.
The Flood Control District considers a number of factors in prioritizing drainage infrastructure repair projects, including whether the damage poses an immediate and severe threat to residential or commercial areas, or to public infrastructure such as utilities or schools. Repairs such as sinkholes and slope failures, failed outfall pipes and concrete voids also are prioritized according to severity.