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Camp Mystic’s leader got a ‘life threatening’ flood alert. They evacuated an hour later.
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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I'm published in watershed analysis - specifically stormwater discharge. I work in a municipal development office in Texas and specialize in drainage plans.
That's simply not accurate.
You generally can't build in the 100-year floodplain. What happened here, from a drainage engineering standpoint, is a combination of 3 factors:
Many of the buildings in question were built prior to the flood plain being defined in that location, and existing non-conforming structures are generally allowed to remain.
New buildings were built a few years back, but out of the 100-year floodplain. Part of that was a floodplain map revision. These can be obtained through FEMA if an engineer provides an analysis showing either that mitigation techniques will change the floodplain area or that the flood maps are incorrect. Many flood plain maps are decades old, and the actual flood areas are different for a variety of reasons.
Unfortunately, there are also engineers who will stamp whatever you put in front of them if you pay them, and there are in fact engineers who specialize in saying "yes" and providing bad analysis to get around drainage, detention, and floodplain requirements. Lots of them are foreign-based, which is why most Texas jurisdictions have started requiring engineers licensed in Texas so we can go after their credentials when their bad engineering leads to failure. The reality is FEMA doesn't have the resources to double-check the analysis of every project, and they must rely on the engineer's stamp as evidence that best practices have been used.
This is super helpful, thanks for the explanation.
Is there any sort of regularly scheduled review to try and catch construction projects that may now be in floodplains that weren't designated as such when constructed?
To what end?
We can't just kick people out of their existing homes or shut down businesses because the maps changed around them. We allow existing structures to remain, but if they're wiped out in a flood we don't allow them to be rebuilt.
The tricky part is when you get outside of cities into counties, where there's generally no permits required for building structures. It's the utilities and subdivision improvements that get attention because they require government involvement.
And strictly speaking, development in the floodplain is prohibited by FEMA, not the county. So the county will tell you "no" if you ask, but they aren't actively hunting for it.
In cities with code enforcement and building permits in a smaller area of land it's a little easier, but even then in my tiny city it's hard to find everything that gets done illegally. It's usually spotted when the neighbors complain, or if our inspectors happen to see it while looking at a neighbor's property.
Just last week we found someone that had filled in a detention pond, scraped all the trees out of the back of their lot (trees provide erosion control and friction to slow down and spread water), and added about 1500 square feet of concrete (speeds up water flow and reduces amount absorbed into ground) when the neighbor asked our arborist to identify which trees needed to come down for fire safety.
Im not sure building is completely forbidden. I was looking into propery and you could build on it if the structure was elevated which of course costs way more money, but it was possible.
There's some nuance on whether it's floodplain or floodway.
It gets technical, but the easy answer is that floodplain us where the waters will rise, while floodway is the path along which water is intended to travel. Lots of the time, the floodplain and the floodway are the same thing, but not always.
Development in the floodplain can sometimes be achieved through a floodplain development permit with a no-rise certification (there will be no net rise of water level in event of a flood caused by the development in the floodplain)
Development in the floodway is generally a hard no, because the floodway is where you want the water to go, and you want water flowing fast in the floodway to clear space for the water coming in behind it. Putting structures on stilts increases friction and slows water down, causing it to back up more upstream.