Buffalo Bayou - Role of The Watershed

Role of The Watershed

The 103-square-mile (270 km2) Buffalo Bayou watershed is central to the drainage of Houston and Harris County. Lying over relatively impervious soils and very flat topography, the bayou has extensive natural floodplains, as do most Gulf coastal rivers and streams. The gradual urbanization of the watershed, starting with the founding of the city in 1836 and accelerating in the latter half of the twentieth century, placed thousands of people in the natural floodplains. At the same time, changes to the watershed due to urbanization increased the level and intensity of flood events.

Responding to disastrous flood damages due to floods in the 1930s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in association with the Harris County Flood Control District, began numerous projects to reduce Houston’s flooding risks through an extensive program of reservoir construction, removal of stream-bank vegetation, straightening and deepening channels and lining them with concrete.

In the 1960s, Terry Hershey, working with local congressman George Herbert Walker Bush, prevented the federal government from the channelization of Buffalo Bayou inside of Beltway 8. In 1966, Hershey and a number of other homeowners in Houston’s Memorial Villages area formed the Buffalo Bayou Preservation Association, which later widened its mission and became the Bayou Preservation Association. While the quality of water has remained an issue, the bayou was one of the few in the Harris County flood district to retain its natural riparian ecosystem.