Hidalgo County’s $20M drainage project to reduce flooding risk for 400,000 residents

MONTE ALTO — Very early one morning in 2018 Joel Rivera, at the time the city of Weslaco’s chief of police, got a call from the city’s fire chief, who said the rain was starting to come down frighteningly hard and that it might be worth going over to the city’s emergency operations center.

Rivera went to work, and for the rest of the day watched the rain come down in sheets, doing what he could to help flood victims. It was “relentless,” he said.

At one point, near the Mid Valley Airport, over 11 inches of rain fell in just three hours.

Creeks ran their banks, roads flooded and the people of Hidalgo County suffered while water with nowhere else to go surged into their communities.

The storm displaced hundreds from their homes, closed roadways, prompted thousands of rescues from flooded vehicles and houses, and damaged public infrastructure to the tune of at least $50 million in Cameron and Willacy County alone, according to the National Weather Service.

At least 20,000 businesses and residences were impacted by the flooding.

That day, while Rivera was leading his department in responding to the flooding, he started getting frantic calls from his wife.

Water was washing into their house too, she told him.

“I will say I was fortunate to have not received as much damage to my home as others. I remember being chest deep in rain over there in the Las Brisas area,” he said. “It was something to see. I mean, some people lost their total house. They lost everything.”

There were other major flooding events before 2018 and there have been more since, but Rivera, now the director of the Hidalgo County Urban County Program, celebrated with other officials Thursday the completion of a major drainage improvement project that will significantly mitigate the impact of future storms.

That project, the main floodwater channel expansion project, expands that channel for about 3 miles from an average width of 150 feet to about 350 to 400 feet in what Hidalgo County describes as a “monumental” improvement. 

Doubling the channel’s width translates to about 2 million cubic yards of additional capacity.

That deluge’s worth of capacity is water that could otherwise be backing up into Hidalgo County residents’ homes and businesses during a major storm.

The county expects the expansion to benefit almost 400,000 residents, about half of them low-to-moderate income residents, many in neighborhoods most vulnerable to severe weather events.

Rivera said the new capacity should give people some peace of mind.

“It’s almost like PTSD. When the clouds come and the sky opens up, everybody starts looking around like ‘Is this the next one?’” he said. “Fortunately because of this $20 million investment, we’ve been able to switch the narrative in that our community is now in a better position to become more resilient. We can’t prevent the rain from coming, but we can most definitely impact how our response is to this.”

Funded by two Texas General Land Office grants awarded in 2015 and 2016, the project cost about $20 million to build.

Other drainage projects funded by a $190 million drainage district bond passed in 2018 will ultimately dump floodwaters into that channel.

Hidalgo County Precinct 1 Commissioner David Fuentes said the expansion represents collaboration between many people and multiple entities on a regional level.

He said the project represents an investment in the Valley’s future well spent.

“Because these things don’t just impact people as they are right now,” he said. “It’s gonna affect all of us…Our future generation, our kids and their children as we move forward. And it is so important.”