Engineer to retire after career dealing with Texas flooding

HOUSTON (AP) — Shoring up the Houston area's defenses against the scourge, the inevitability, of flooding in a city built on a swamp has been Mike Talbott's "one and only career."

The Houston Chronicle (http://bit.ly/2bl06Rv ) reports as a young engineer, a project manager, the director of operations and, finally, the executive director of the Harris County Flood Control District, he has borne witness to some of the worst flood-related disasters to hit the area in modern history.

He recalls Hurricane Alicia in 1983, when the district's old Main Street office stopped shaking long enough for him and a few other engineers to briefly leave their Radio Shack TRS-80 computers and step out to watch the eye pass overhead; and 2001, when he surveyed the devastation from Tropical Storm Allison from a helicopter that had to refuel twice because the floods were so widespread.

[...] there were the epic floods of 2015 and 2016 when, as the agency's executive director, he fielded countless calls from the press and the public, demanding to know why thousands of Houston homes were underwater.

[...] he also leaves a district without sufficient money to fully address the flooding problem and with federally-sponsored county projects, the largest efforts to expand local drainage, continuing to crawl along, almost 30 years after they were authorized.

The first order of business was to make a digital map of the drainage system — a tall task in the 1980s.

Flood engineers complied that data into a computer model that proved revolutionary for local efforts.

Critics contend that they should be more stringent, that new development should pick up more than its fair share of drainage to relieve vulnerable homeowners and set the region on a promising long-term path.

In the later years of his career, the district revamped its modeling of the drainage system, using high tech airborne radar to precisely survey the region, which in turn, was used to draw up a master plan that could push Houston to its next generation of flood control.

Talbott said the schedules were based on optimistic projections of federal spending rates that never fully materialized, then plummeted when Congress in 2011 banned earmark funding, which had supplied a reliable money stream to the projects.

Local Congressman Al Green said he plans to introduce legislation in 2017 that would return steady funding to the bayou projects and pick up progress.