Houston Chronicle By Rebecca Elliott 4/5/2018
Hundreds of Fort Bend County residents sued a local engineering firm Wednesday alleging the company acted negligently in designing a stormwater management system for a community that flooded during Hurricane Harvey.
The lawsuit filed against Costello, Inc. in state district court focuses on work the engineering firm performed for a Fort Bend Levee Improvement District created more than a decade ago.
The firm was founded by former Houston city councilman Steve Costello who now serves as Mayor Sylvester Turner's so-called "flood czar."
The district, known as LID 19, was designed to protect the Riverstone community from inundation from the Brazos River, but roughly a third of the 1,760 homes in the district flooded during Harvey's assault on the region last August.
"The stormwater management system was not designed to handle rainfall amounts that should have been reasonably anticipated," the plaintiffs' attorneys wrote in the complaint. "As a result of defendant Costello's acts and omissions, plaintiffs and their children have been displaced from their homes and have many months and years of costly repairs and rebuilding to come."
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