Homeowners whose properties were damaged in 2017 by Hurricane Harvey floodwaters upstream of the Addicks and Barker reservoirs in west Houston can expect compensation after an appeals court panel affirmed this week that the government was liable.
The ruling, handed down by a three-judge panel from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, largely upheld a lower court’s 2019 decision that the extreme flooding constituted a “taking” under federal law.
When the government takes private property for legitimate public use, whether permanently or temporarily — in this case, as an interim storage location for water that was spilling out of the two large reservoirs in 2017 — property owners are entitled to compensation, the court ruled.
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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers controls gated dams at the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, which were built in the 1940s and can hold about 410,000 acre-feet of floodwaters in an emergency.
The reservoirs were constructed to prevent catastrophic flooding along Buffalo Bayou, in the city of Houston and along the industry-heavy Ship Channel. According to court rulings in the flood victims’ case, urban sprawl encroached on the reservoirs over the years, measurably reducing the capacity to mitigate upstream flood damage when the water rises in the reservoirs.
Facing Hurricane Harvey’s extreme rainfall in August 2017 that drenched Houston for days, Army Corps operators had to decide when to open the flood gates and allow water to flow downstream. Harvey caused major flooding for over 10,000 upstream homes and businesses, according to lawyers’ estimates. Properties downstream were also flooded when the Army Corps opened the gates.
Flood victims with properties downstream of the reservoirs are still waiting for a separate lower-court decision after arguments in their trial concluded in early 2025.
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The three judges did deviate from the lower court on how to calculate flood victims’ damages, though, telling the Court of Federal Claims to leave out line items including lost rental income before recalculating the dollar figure owed to six bellwether property owners presented at trial.
The federal judge had initially ruled in 2022 that those six victims should get over $450,000 compensation in total, plus interest. The final decision on their compensation is designed to set the standard for payouts to other upstream litigants.
If all property owners flooded above Addicks and Barker join litigation efforts, the federal government could owe a combined 1.67 billion before interest, according to a 2022 estimate by Charest’s firm.
See here, here, and here for some background. It’s wild to me that we’re still litigating issues from Harvey eight years later, but we are and we’re still not finished. Maybe it’s time for this to be settled. The Trib has more.