The Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for some of the damage in the Houston area following Hurricane Harvey, a federal judge ruled this week, saying the agency’s actions to prevent wider flooding amounted to an unconstitutional taking of property.
The 2017 storm dumped record-setting amounts of rain on Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city, and damaged structures across a wide swath of Southeast Texas.
At the height of the storm, the Army Corps released floodwaters from two reservoirs upstream of Houston, saying it was necessary to protect the dams’ structures. The water swept down Buffalo Bayou, and plaintiffs said it caused flooding in areas that had not seen catastrophic flooding in the past.
After a trial on some of the issues in the case, Senior Judge Loren Smith of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims sided with the downstream property owners, who argued that the dams weren’t at risk of “imminent failure” as defined by Army Corps regulations.
