Sims Bayou: A more natural approach to flood control

Shanley’s slow-water model

Wendy Natt, Jun 23, 09.

In the 1990s, Houston landscape architect Kevin Shanley designed a plan to improve stormwater drainage along Sims Bayou that would change one of the city’s major waterways from an eyesore into an aesthetic asset and have a lasting influence on the city’s future efforts in flood control along its bayous. The Houston Chronicle recently published a story on Shanley’s Sims Bayou, a project that used the natural properties of fluvial formation to guide the design of a bayou that has both immense drainage capacity and natural beauty.

The Harris County Flood Control District’s original proposal for Sims Bayou proposed the digging of miles of very wide, straight channel and paving it over with impermeable concrete, a design meant to rush rainwater out to sea quickly.

Shanley’s model took a completely different approach that challenged the notion that rapid drainage was essentially better drainage. He wondered what would happen if you allowed the bayou to meander like a river and occasionally widen into large detention areas, where water could be held safely and allowed to drain more slowly. His design also proposed the use of articulated concrete to bolster the sides of the channel, while still allowing vegetation to grow through, thereby creating a much greener bayou landscape.

Shanley pitched his ideas from a new point of view that he hoped would appeal to both the Sims Bayou Coalition - a neighborhood organization wanting to negotiate with the flood control district - and flood-control experts, emphasizing both the potential beauty and efficiency of a system of shallow, meandering rivers to help control Houston’s flooding.

The Chronicle article gives this account of the plan’s reception:

Nervous, he presented his plan to both the neighborhood activists and the flood-control engineers. The neighborhood activists were stunned: Wasn’t Shanley supposed to tell them how to make the project take up less land, not more? Wasn’t he supposed to hide the flood-control ugliness? Not make something even more visible?

But the engineers, to his surprise, were intrigued. And when they ran sophisticated flood-control models on Shanley’s plan, they found that it worked better to control flooding than their original proposal.

That plan became the basic idea behind the enormous Sims Bayou Federal Flood Damage Reduction project, scheduled to be finished in the next few years.

Shanley is now CEO of the SWA Group and has had some connection to many of Houston’s subsequent bayou projects, according to the Chronicle.

Harris County Flood Control District is just finishing up the 31-mile flood mitigation project along Brays Bayou. Project Brays comprises over 70 individual projects and is a cooperative effort of Harris County Flood Control District, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and local organizations/agencies.

(Photo credit: Kevin Shanley)