About 27 percent of the people who live or work in the San Jacinto River Basin do so inside a floodplain, roughly two and a half times the national figure of about 10 percent, Bob Rehak writes at ReduceFlooding, citing the amended 2023 San Jacinto Regional Flood Plan.
The same plan counts 11 counties, 83 municipalities and 980 other entities with some flood related authority inside the basin, and notes that many of them can plan or build flood projects without having the authority to set or enforce floodplain management standards. Rehak argues that this fragmentation, rather than any single agency’s failure, is why basin wide flood problems go unaddressed.
The post also cites the 2024 State Flood Plan, which reports that 5.2 million Texans live or work in identified 100 year or 500 year flood hazard areas containing 1.66 million buildings, and that one in five Texans live in a known floodplain.
The San Jacinto River Basin is the watershed that drains into Lake Houston, so the plan the post is discussing governs flood policy in Kingwood, Humble, Atascocita, Huffman and Summerwood.
