Errors & Omissions (presented at the 2004 Rice/Fotofest Water Conference)
by Jim Blackburn
I live in a place called Houston. Houston is located on the Texas coastal plain that gently emerges from the Gulf of Mexico – a mud platform ascending slowly from the ocean’s grip, located between Louisiana and Mexico. Rainwater joins with the mud and establishes the base of life on the Texas coast. No rock, no mountains – just mud and water.
We get rain on the Texas coastal plain – bucketfuls of rain. The rain comes in from the Gulf, evaporating with the heat of the summer and powered by the counter-clockwise rotation of low-pressure systems that we name and fear. Allison, Beulah, Carla, Frances, Alicia, Claudette. One pictures these storms like metaphysical cowgirls and now cowboys, unleashing torrents of rain that re-establish the region’s water meadows and saturated prairies and their water loving plant life. Lush, green, alive, literally teeming with life and primal energy. That’s the Upper Texas coast.
The rivers cut through the mud, forming bed and banks that enclose the normal flow. This incised channel – the bed and banks - is insufficient to contain the larger storm flows that spread out into the secondary river channel – the flood plain – as necessary to allow the water to move overland with the force of gravity. But do not be fooled for one second. The essence – the existence - of these waterways is not limited to their bed and banks, although our legal system pretends they are. It is part of the natural cycle that these rivers, creeks and bayous flow over land adjacent to them, often for days if not weeks, leaving behind the sediment that will grow the flood plain forests that provide visual relief within the flat, coastal plain.
Our coastal bays are water fingers, drowned river channels carved when the Gulf was 200 feet lower in elevation. A dynamic - a tension - exists at the interface of mud and water, forming brackish and salt marshes and nurturing living things. Here one finds shrimp and crabs, trout and redfish, and the microscopic plants and animals upon which the whole system relies – abundant with life.
The value of this coastal ecosystem is incredible and has never been appropriately established by our society. These are free goods, a gift of ecological capital to us and to those who come after us. Water is also a free good for the most part. The state does not charge for river water. Our groundwater is free for the taking. We use water. W e abuse water. But we don’t value it correctly.
The settlement called Houston was placed within this geologic and hydrologic energy – amidst an ecological crossroads of astounding diversity and uniqueness. The Houston region was, and continues to be, occupied by all manner of living things. It is prime habitat. And while birds and fish and butterflies and water loving plants historically have done well on the Texas coast, humans have come more recently and have displaced other living things in their path. Our wetlands – those beautiful water meadows that covered large areas of our prairies – are paved over without thought and without remorse in the name of growth. For a while, the federal government’s wetland protection program offered protection, but that has largely disappeared with the recent Supreme Court SWANCC decision limiting the scope of the Clean Water Act.
The tension between growth and natural production is very real in Houston and on the Texas coast. Other states may protect natural habitat such as wetlands but Texas does not. We don’t even give our counties authority to regulate land development relative to wetlands. As a state, our policy is growth regardless of what natural value is lost in the process.
There is also substantial tension between growth and its impacts on our human occupants. Houston was started by real estate developers but the big break did not come until Galveston, the coastal commercial center, was destroyed by a hurricane in 1900. Almost overnight, commerce moved north up the San Jacinto River to the Port of Houston, a river port that was a safer distance from the dangerous storms of the Gulf of Mexico.
The discovery of oil on the Texas coast occurred at about the same time as the Galveston hurricane, setting up the basis for the extensive refinery and petrochemical development that now lines the Houston Ship Channel carved out of the San Jacinto River and Buffalo Bayou. The port location initially aided in the movement of product to market and more recently has allowed the import of oil from around the world as our country’s use of petroleum products expanded beyond our production capacity. Today, the Houston area produces about 2% of the world’s gasoline, 12% of the world’s ethylene and 16% of the world’s propylene, representing one of the largest, if not the largest, petrochemical complex in the world.
This industrial growth was based on water - waterborne commerce and easily available groundwater. Houston was blessed with a huge supply of clean groundwater and the industries and associated urban development put down their straws and started sucking. Soon, the amount of water being removed from the ground far exceeded the ability of the natural system to recharge that water. Over time, the clays within the aquifers dried out and compacted, losing a millimeter of elevation here, another millimeter there. Over the years, the millimeters became centimeters and the centimeters became meters as the land surface began to sink – or is it more antiseptically called – subside. Over the same time period, we also lost the natural springs and seeps that provided clear and cool surface water as water levels declined.
The amount of subsidence that has been experienced throughout the Houston area is incredible. Over ten feet of subsidence has occurred along portions of the Houston Ship Channel. That means that the land surface has lost ten feet of elevation to sea level. That means that houses in the Brownwood subdivision in Baytown sank into Galveston Bay. It also means that over 25,000 acres of wetlands adjacent to the shoreline were lost.
Subsidence came from the overuse - the inappropriate use – of groundwater. It is not that we did not know this was happening. We chose to continue using groundwater even though harm was occurring. Texas groundwater law is based on an archaic concept called the rule of capture that allows the landowner to take as much water from the ground as they can capture without regard to the harm that it causes. In Houston, the problem became so severe that in the late 1970s, the Houston area formed a regulatory district to control subsidence. This district stopped groundwater usage and subsidence adjacent to the coast but they not inland from the coast. Because a surface water alternative was not available to support land development and urban growth in the western and northern part of Harris County, the decision was made to continue use of groundwater in those areas even though we knew that harm would result. As a community, Houston would not allow growth to be negatively affected.
From 1978 – the date of the initiation of regulation by the Harris Galveston Subsidence District – to 2000, we have created a new bowl of subsidence centered in the northwest portion of Harris County. In this area, we have lost over five feet of elevation in the last 25 years, with most of the developed western half of the county having experienced over two feet of land subsidence. And while coastal subdivisions are no longer sinking into Galveston Bay, we are still paying a price in drainage and flooding impacts for our misuse of groundwater. I will get back to that issue in a bit.
As the petrochemical complex grew during the post-war years, the volume of wastewater discharge also grew. By the late 1960s, the Houston Ship Channel was one of the worst polluted bodies of water in the United States, with the pollution being authorized by a state agency – the Texas Water Quality Board. The fight over the cleanup of the Houston Ship Channel and Galveston Bay in the early 1970s was vicious, with the new federal agency, the EPA, lined up against the industries, the City of Houston, and the state’s agency, the Texas Water Quality Board (TWQB). In two early enforcement cases, the TWQB intervened on the side of industry, against the EPA. That’s pollution control in Texas.
The Galveston Bay Enforcement Conference of 1971 was actually the first fight to save the bay. At this time, over half of Galveston Bay was closed to shellfishing and the EPA charged that the state was being less than forthright about the rest. The EPA called this conference to put an end to pollution in Galveston Bay, and their bottom line position was that there had to be a limit set on the pounds of waste that could be dumped in the bay. By the end of that year, the federal government had succeeded in setting limits on the discharge of pollutants from industry and the City and Galveston Bay water quality has been much improved ever since.
This is not to say that there is no pollution today. The promise of zero discharge in the Clean Water Act has never been realized. The feds have given up. Today, discharges of toxics from Harris County industries into the ship channel and Galveston Bay are more than 6.8 million pounds, with Galveston County adding over a million pounds per year in 2001. Portions of Galveston Bay are closed to crabbing and oyster harvesting due to dioxin contamination, mainly from paper and vinyl chloride production. In 2002, Patrick Bayou in the heart of the channel was designated as the second estuarine superfund site on the Texas coast.
Given these past and current discharges, it is amazing that we have not lost Galveston Bay productivity. However, the physical form of Galveston Bay and our rainfall patterns helped preserve it until the federal government mandated the cleanup. Galveston Bay is shallow and gets significant amounts of freshwater inflow. It is well flushed and can survive amounts of pollution that might have killed deeper bays.However, that physical form created problems of a different sort. Galveston Bay has an average depth of less than 10 feet. Starting after the Civil War, Houston pushed for construction of a navigation channel to connect Buffalo Bayou, which runs through downtown Houston, with the Port of Galveston and the Gulf of Mexico. A 25-foot deep channel was opened around 1915 and the channel was subsequently expanded to 40 feet deep and 400 feet wide, a cut extending more than 20 miles up the Galveston Bay system. This cut alters the relationship between the Gulf of Mexico and the estuary that is Galveston Bay, an area whose productivity is based on the interaction of fresh and salt water.
In the late 1980s, a major fight erupted over plans by the Port of Houston and the Corps of Engineers to widen and deepen the Houston Ship Channel to the Gulf, plans that would also increase the level of salinity in the bay. Salinity is the enemy of the productivity of Galveston Bay and a coalition of interests formed to oppose this project, including recreational fishermen, commercial fishermen, environmental groups and business people who loved the bay. The fight over the widening and deepening of the channel ended in a compromise on a 45 foot deep channel, but that victory has been short lived.
Today, the Port of Houston Authority is once again posing a major threat to Galveston Bay, this time in the form of a container port at Bayport in the upper portion of Galveston Bay. The Port is proposing to build their docks to a depth of 56 feet even though the current depth of the Houston Ship Channel is only 45 feet. Container ships of the future will require from 45 to 53 feet. By investing over a billion dollars of Harris County taxpayers money in this port that is designed for 56 feet of water, the Port is sure to argue in the future that they must channelize the bay deeper regardless of environmental impact in order to protect the taxpayers investment. The time to debate the impact of this new port on Galveston Bay salinity is now, yet those of us concerned about this issue can get no support from the powers that be to have this issue addressed NOW. Instead, we are told that it will be debated later – after the money has been invested in the site. Rather than foreseeing a problem and thinking ahead, we chose to create a problem for the future, just like with subsidence.
The most serious Houston water error exists with regard to flooding. It is not that we don’t know that Houston floods. It flooded before we came here and it has been consistently flooding since we arrived. Our streams and bayous flood naturally, yet we have worsened that flooding substantially by covering the land with concrete and digging drainage ditches that increased peak flows 5 to 7 times. We have constructed flood control projects to address very large storms, and then we have allowed new development to increase runoff into our bayous, essentially eliminating the flood control that we constructed. Houston started on Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou and in the Harrisburg area and has spread to the north, west and south. All of our streams and bayous flow back toward the center from which we are expanding. As such, we are expanding outward and dumping excess rainwater back on ourselves. We are literally flooding ourselves with the impact of our growth.
We know these things. Yet we as a community have ignored serious warning signs regarding flooding and drainage for years, again because we did not want to interfere with growth. The net result is that the City of Houston and Harris County rank number three and four in the United States in terms of repetitive flood loss claims. Our community is the poster child for the proposition that laying concrete without appropriate flood mitigation worsens downstream flooding. As early as the 1970s we realized that peak flows on Brays Bayou were increasing dramatically due to the impact of urbanization, yet we refused to address the root cause of this increased flow – the land development pattern.
I once wrote a paper on flooding in Houston for a think tank called the Rice Center where I was writing positively about George Mitchell’s development in the Woodlands and the use of retention and detention ponding in the Wooodlands to prevent downstream flooding. I was asked by a board member – a Houston real estate lawyer – to remove that reference because in Houston we did not and would not require detention ponding because it would interfere with development.
With forethought, we are flooding our established residential areas and our world-class medical center, subsidizing suburban builders and their engineers with downstream flood damage. Only in the last few months has our newly elected Mayor Bill White proposed to address this serious problem with appropriate regulatory controls.
At this point, it is worth noting that there are two pieces to our flooding problem. The first piece is the increase in flows from upstream development. The second is the change in land surface elevation from subsidence that I mentioned earlier. New flood plain maps are now being released that show much larger areas of our community subject to the 100 year flood. These flood plains are larger because they cover areas that have subsided and because the streams carry more runoff from upstream development. It is a disaster, but don’t tell me those huge flood plains are the act of God. They are due to our failure – as humans – as Houstonians - to effectively limit our own activities relative to water.
In the future, Galveston Bay productivity will be threatened by yet another aspect of our growth related to freshwater inflows and the productivity of Galveston Bay. Galveston Bay is an estuary – one of the most productive in the United States. In spite of all the assaults to date, Galveston Bay has managed to survive and thrive. However, it may not be able to survive the loss of freshwater inflows from the Trinity River and the San Jacinto River.
Under Texas law, freshwater inflows to bays and estuaries are not guaranteed. For decades, water that flowed into the bays was considered as wasted water. However, the productivity of the bay is based on the sweetening of the salt water from the Gulf as well as the inflow of nitrogen, phosphorus and silica. This inflow fuels the ecosystem with fixed carbon in the form of phytoplankton. This inflow keeps our bay alive.
Today, that freshwater inflow is threatened as never before. The flow on the Trinity River is fed by wastewater discharge from the Dallas Fort Worth area. It is captured in Lake Livingston to the east, the future water supply source for the City of Houston. As Dallas recycles water, Galveston Bay will lose inflow from the Trinity River. As the City of Houston uses more water from Lake Livingston, Galveston Bay will lose inflow from the Trinity River. As the City of Houston and Houston areas industries reclaim more wastewater, Galveston Bay will lose flow. We could easily look up one day and be facing a major threat to the future productivity of Galveston Bay.
If we were to lose Galveston Bay, it would be a tremendous loss. We would lose a major shrimp, crab and oyster fishery. We would lose a billion dollar recreational resrouce. We would lose something truly important. To date, no one with power or authority has stood up for the proposition that we must set aside water for our bay or else we will lose something of great value. Galveston Bay generates over $700 million in recreational fishing value, not to mention commercial shrimp, oyster and crab fisheries. This is value that would be lost if we destroy Galveston Bay – this is harm associated with the mindless pursuit of growth. This is harm related to water and it is happening right out my back door.
In Houston, we have made intentional decisions in the past regarding our policies related to water that have led to the destruction of both human and natural resources. We decided to withdraw groundwater and allow land subsidence to continue in order to keep growing. We refused to address water quality until forced to address it by the federal government because we did not want to interfere with growth. We have failed to effectively address flooding because we did not want to interfere with growth. And we are unlikely to effectively address freshwater inflows because we are unwilling to interfere with growth.
We are not making these decisions because we are uninformed. We know the impact of these decisions. What we lack is a vision that finds value in the natural capital that surrounds Houston. What we lack is the courage to stand up and fight for the humans who are here rather than the ones that we want to bring here. What we lack here is a willingness to act on information that reveals problems with our current growth patterns. What we lack is the courage to question growth and to question whether certain interests are making money at the expense of the rest of us.
Albert Einstein once stated that “The world we have created today as a result of our thinking thus far has problems that cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.” That quote certainly sums up our situation with regard to water here in Houston and perhaps globally. We must think of water differently. We must think of growth differently. We must create a different value of natural and human capital and incorporate that concept of value into our view of growth if we are to survive as a community and as a civilized society.
