The Texas-Mexico Border Wall Comes with a Dangerous, Costly Side Effect: Flooding

[Elderberry]

Texas Observer by Naveena Sadasivam August 17, 2018

Shallow Waters

Shallow Waters is a nine-part series on border water and climate change.

Part 2

The Texas-Mexico Border Wall Comes with a Dangerous, Costly Side Effect: Flooding

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has a history of building border infrastructure that exacerbates flooding. Could the same happen with the 33 miles of walls and fences planned for the lower Rio Grande Valley?

n July 27, 2014, monsoon rains hit the sister cities of Nogales, Arizona, in the US, and Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico. As the rain poured down, floodwaters rushed west of the Mariposa Port of Entry, clogging a 60-foot section of the border fence with debris. The bollard-style fence, with posts buried at least 7 feet underground, had been designed to let water pass through, but the intensity of the flooding and the size of the debris, which included tree trunks, toppled it.

For longtime Nogales residents on both sides of the border, the incident felt like déjà vu. Six years earlier, monsoon rains had flooded downtown Nogales, Sonora, a city of about 210,000, trapping merchants in their stores, causing $8 million worth of damage, and drowning two people. That time, too, the culprit was border infrastructure.

In the 1990s, US Border Patrol had built a series of steel walls between the two Nogales towns to deter illegal activity. But traffickers simply began using the drainage tunnels between the towns to get into the United States. The agency then installed grates in the tunnels, but traffickers cut through them. In the escalating arms race, Border Patrol finally constructed a 5-foot-high concrete wall in one of the tunnels. In 2008, monsoon floodwaters built up behind the wall, collapsing the tunnel on the Mexican side.

Until the 2008 floods, the International Boundary Water Commission (IBWC)—the binational agency that carries out the provisions of US-Mexico water treaties—had no idea that Border Patrol had plugged up a tunnel the commission had built to mitigate flooding. Border Patrol refused to take responsibility.

Over the years, border walls and fences have exacerbated flooding in both the US and Mexico. Environmental advocates and local activists in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas now fear their communities will also face increased risk of flooding as a result of new segments of border wall planned for the region. In March, Congress allocated $1.6 billion for border enforcement, including $641 million for border-wall construction in the Valley. Of the 33 miles of fencing and walls planned, the agency expects to build 25 miles of what are called levee walls—12-foot high concrete wall with 18-foot bollards on top—in Hidalgo County, as well as 8 miles of bollard walls in adjacent Starr County.

“The Rio Grande Valley isn’t really a valley, it’s a delta,” says Melinda Melo, an organizer for the No Border Wall Coalition. “There are flooding risks here in the same sort of way as in Nogales.”

More: https://www.texasobserver.org/the-texas-mexico-border-wall-comes-with-a-dangerous-costly-side-effect-flooding/

[XenaLee]

Is there any lame excuse that the left will NOT use to keep America from securing our borders?  Apparently not.  After all... all that border wall money could be, instead, going to house, feed and sustain more and more and more illegals that are future DemocRat voters. 

[Sanguine]

Is there any lame excuse that the left will NOT use to keep America from security our borders?  Apparently not.  After all... all that border wall money could be, instead, going to house, feed and sustain more and more and more illegals that are future DemocRat voters.

Apparently, there is no excuse too lame.

[GrouchoTex]

I was never under the illusion that a wall would be built from San Diego to Brownsville, but there were some out there that were.
The topography from here to there doesn't lend itself to a 1,600 mile long wall.
I'd still want it built were it can be.