Addicks and Barker Reservoirs are swaths of placid Texas prairie, wetland, and forest straddling I-10 where it hits Highway 6, about 20 miles west of downtown Houston. But that’s not how nature sees them. To nature, those two open spaces are the top of a hydrological basin that drains through the city and into the Houston Ship Channel.
Most of the time the reservoirs don’t reserve any water. But when it rains and rains and rains, they fill up, letting water burble through their gates into Buffalo Bayou and out toward the sea, to control flooding.
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| An aerial photograph of Lake Houston's spillway in on August 29, 2017. |
Today, after five days of rain thanks to Hurricane Harvey, Addicks and Barker Reservoirs are as full as full can be. Houses both upstream and down are sitting in feet of water. Believe it or not, that’s how things are supposed to work. The question is whether Houstonians and the Corps are seeing the edge of the dams’ design envelope. Don't worry, for a moment, about 100-year storms and 500-year storms. Dam builders worry about a different standard: the Probable Maximum Flood.
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