The Great 1990 Flood -- Anger, Water Still Running Fast, Deep In U. S. Southwest

DALLAS - With flood waters still raging from the rains of early May, many beleaguered residents along the Southwest's overloaded rivers are looking for someone to blame.

They are targeting the usual suspects: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other governmental agencies that regulate the flow of water along the Trinity, Red and Arkansas rivers.

Corps officials defend their actions but acknowledge the flood victims' frustrations.

``We probably kept a whole lot of other people from being flooded,'' said Ross Atkins, a corps spokesman in Tulsa, Okla. ``With a situation like this, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't.''

Last week, farmers in southern Arkansas angrily condemned the corps in a meeting with Gov. Bill Clinton. Monday, Arkansas Sen. David Pryor asked the General Accounting Office to review corps lake management along the Arkansas and Red rivers.

A Texas legislator, Democratic state Rep. Mark Stiles, criticized the Trinity River Authority (TRA) for spending too little time planning how to avoid such crises.

And in southeast Texas, emotions still are rising along with the raging Trinity River.

With enough water now pouring out of Lake Livingston to equal half the flow of Niagara Falls, Liberty County residents are circulating petitions demanding changes in the river authority's lake management.

Some are threatening to file lawsuits seeking compensation for flooding. River-authority officials acknowledge that a protracted courtroom fight probably is inevitable.

``These people along the river cannot put up with massive flooding every year, and that's what has happened for the last two years. Their lives are at stake,'' said Liberty County Judge Dempsie Henley. ``You can't blame people for being outraged.''

At issue along the flooded rivers is whether better control of lakes that provide recreation, flood control, drinking water and power-generation facilities might have prevented some of the devastation.

Corps officials in Tulsa and river-authority officials defend their management, contending that water surging through the three rivers during the peak of flooding would have doubled without existing flood-control projects.

Officials with the corps' Fort Worth, Texas, district office, which oversees the agency's north Texas lakes, did not return repeated telephone calls.

The region's problems began in March with the first heavy spring rains that rolled into Oklahoma and north Texas.

In Oklahoma, rainstorms raised elevations in most Oklahoma corps lakes to 85 percent of their flood-storage capacity by March 17. By the end of April, steady discharges brought most of the lakes to 5 percent of flood-storage capacity. But it was not enough.

Rainfall caused similar problems in the Trinity River basin.

``We'd had rainfall considerably above normal since the middle of January in the metroplex (Dallas-Fort Worth) area and also on the upper reaches of four forks of the Trinity,'' said John Croslin, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service River Forecasting Center in Fort Worth.

Rain in both states was so heavy that 90 percent of the water was swept directly into streams and lakes along the Arkansas, Trinity and Red river basins, Weather Service hydrologists said. Normally, about half of rainfall evaporates or is absorbed into the ground.

The extraordinary runoff choked streams below the reservoirs at a time when lakes in the river basins were brimming and beginning to flow over spillways.

``The water just couldn't be stopped,'' Croslin said. ``It's the worst case that can happen and it did.''

In the wake of the flooding, victims throughout the region have complained that lakes were not emptied in anticipation of spring rains.

Corps officials say such discharges would have been a gamble that wouldn't have helped.

``When Mother Nature dumps so much on the system, you could have had all empty lakes that would have filled up to overflowing,'' said Atkins, of the corps' office in Tulsa.

Complaints from victims have been loudest near Lake Livingston, where river-authority officials manage the massive 600-billion-gallon reservoir to provide drinking water for the city of Houston. Because the lake has no flood-storage capacity, officials have been forced to release rising levels of flood waters as they entered the lake.

Yesterday afternoon, 94,800 cubic feet of water per second flowed from the lake's gates onto the lower Trinity River.

Weeks before the Trinity began its annual spring rise, Henley said, he and other county officials formally asked the river authority to develop a pre-release program to lower lake levels each time heavy rain falls upstream.

``We're saying an application of common sense would certainly help. There's nothing magic or mysterious about it. Let water out when you know water is coming down,'' he said. ``But the TRA is saying that's not possible.''

Stiles, the Texas legislator, said he again asked the river authority to consider dumping water when the upper Trinity received the heavy rainfall in early May.

TRA officials say that would do more harm than good.

John Jadrosich, TRA spokesman, and other river-authority officials say there is little they can do but sympathize with the estimated 7,000 residents forced to move from isolated subdivisions along the river south of the dam.

``If we knew of something we could do, we would go after it,'' he said.