ODESSA, Texas — When it rains, it pours. That's something that the Permian Basin saw over the weekend. That rain led to flooding all over the area, making some wonder if the City of Odessa could do more to prevent future flooding.
However, there is really only so much that the city can do. It's something that would take a lot of time and money to make major changes. This doesn't include how those changes would affect other areas either.
Odessa tends to focus on mitigation efforts once the rain starts, and the city itself is more prone to flooding because of how it's situated.
"When the rains come, they usually come hard, and then other times we get to go for a good while without any rain," Odessa Director of Public Works and Utilities Thomas Kerr said. "Also, our terrain is fairly subtle in terms of drainage or slope and so water will build up a little more before the velocity is really achieved as it’s moving down stream."
One major issue seen in Odessa is that a lot of the floodplains are also neighborhoods.
"Those houses get flooded a lot because they are in those low lying areas," Kerr said. "Under current standards, we would try to restrict that. We would try to make sure that you aren’t either building in those low lying areas or that your elevations were more than secure into being above the floodplain elevations."
Is this something the city can fix? It's a complicated situation.
"They are not really easy to solve from an environmental or engineering perspective," Kerr said. "The volumes of water we're talking about, the vast nature of the area that we're talking about causes it to be very difficult to solve, and since the houses are already in place in those locations, again that makes it difficult to solve."
So there really isn't one perfect solution at the moment.
"We certainly do everything we can to try and help mitigate it," Kerr said. "The city is working to put in more retention, more detention. The country club has worked very hard with us on retention and detention, and we just try to make things better but there’s limitations."