New bayou park's plants handle rains with no trouble

Image credit: Pixabay

We’ve wondered several times on the little blog how Houston’s newest (better than the River Walk!) bayou park fared after the heavy rains of the last week. According to the park’s stewards, everything turned out great:

Dazzled by fireworks, a high-tech lighting system and movies floating by along Buffalo Bayou, thousands of Houstonians enjoyed the June 10 opening celebration of the Sabine to Bagby Promenade.

Nine days later, the new park’s broad, winding trails and lovingly tended vegetation were under water, submerged in a rapidly rising bayou swelled by Monday’s torrential rainfall.

It was an important test of the long-planned, $15 million park. It is the first major project to be completed under a 20-year plan for publicly and privately funded bayou improvements from Shepherd to the Ship Channel turning basin.

The park, designed to withstand periodic flooding, appears to have passed the test convincingly.

“We didn’t lose a single plant,” said Scott Barnes, the conservation director for the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, the nonprofit group overseeing the bayou improvements.

However, heavy rains can cause the new park to be somewhat less beautiful than the River Walk:

After Monday’s flooding, water covered the trails and landscaping, making a damage assessment impossible until the water subsided over the next two days.

Once the park became accessible, Barnes said, it was clear that the main impact was silt and mud covering trails and trash that floated on the water or became tangled in the vegetation.

Plants were flattened by the water’s weight but quickly sprang back, Barnes said. Once crews finish hosing off the silt and collecting trash, all visible evidence of the flood will be gone, he said.

That doesn’t sound as nice as the River Walk to me, but I guess that’s why I contribute to a little blog, and not to the editorial pages of the mighty Hearst daily.


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Kevin Whited is co-founder and publisher of blogHOUSTON. Follow him on twitter: @PubliusTX