Sunk Costs: Record flooding along the Brazos has forced people in Richmond to make tough choice
Just before sunset on a Friday in October, Richmond’s historic downtown is lively. Four women sit around a patio table at Joseph’s Coffee and Cigars, sipping lattes and pushing a stroller back and forth to calm a fussy baby. Guitar feedback seeps out from the open door of the Lone Star Saloon as a band warms up for their set, and a well-dressed young couple — he’s in cowboy boots and faded jeans, she’s got heels and a burgundy dress — poses for engagement photos in front of a red brick wall. It’s an idyllic small-town scene, down to the neatly kept lawns and families strolling the sidewalk.
But drive less than a half mile away, turn left off Alternate Highway 90 onto Riveredge Drive, and things start to look different. The first sign is the dried, cracked mud that still coats the road as it slopes down toward the banks of the Brazos River. Then there’s the debris: rotten furniture, broken wood and Sheetrock, tufts of pink insulation and miscellaneous belongings of all kinds, piled in front of almost every home in the Edgewood Trailer Park. On top of an upside-down sofa — its original color undetectable under a layer of mud — sits a children’s toy grocery cart, three bulging trash bags and a stack of romance novels. Several of the 50 or so trailers have red tags hanging from their front doors, marking them as unsafe to enter.
Edgewood flooded gradually in the days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on August 25, as the Brazos bloated with more than 30 inches of rain. Residents watched calmly from lawn chairs as the water crept up inch by inch, swamping their homes in a slow-motion disaster. The same thing happened up and down the Brazos’ winding course toward the Gulf — not just in Richmond, but also in nearby Rosenberg, Simonton, Rosharon and Sugar Land. At least 7,000 homes and buildings flooded across Fort Bend County.
While life goes on as normal in the neighborhoods that escaped flooding, recovery in this part of Richmond is only beginning. Many people here had barely dried up from the previous record flood — in 2016. That year, the Brazos crested at 54 feet; Harvey topped that with 55 feet of flooding. And there was another significant flood in 2015. Indeed, from May 2015 to June 2016, the river saw four of the 10 highest crests ever recorded in Richmond.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/sunk-costs/