Floods overwhelm this Fort Worth neighborhood, but the city has no plans for a quick fix

Dane Wicks works at a makeshift desk surrounded by cut up drywall and torn up flooring while he waits for a disaster loan from the Small Business Administration to help him fix his home.

That is what remains after after two storms in August flooded his townhome in Fort Worth’s Linwood neighborhood. The first, on Aug. 17, dumped two inches in an hour. Then came a record nine-inch downpour four days later, flooding 13 homes in a neighborhood that has been plagued by flash floods for years.

The city estimates it could cost as much as $150 million to fix the problem, but it doesn’t have the detailed plans needed to apply for state and federal grants, said city stormwater manager Jennifer Dyke.

Despite the flood risk, the city has approved 77 residential and 12 multifamily permits since 2018 in the neighborhood just west of Montgomery Plaza.

Most of the area’s storm drains haven’t been updated since the 1920s and can’t handle the additional water from new development, city representatives told residents during a September 2022 online meeting.

Templeton Drive, for example, faces an annual risk of two to four feet of flooding from a single storm, according to data from the stormwater department. The street was almost entirely single family lots before a boom in townhome construction started in 2014.

Speaking at an August 2022 city council work session, Dyke told the council that flood risk outside the FEMA floodplain is often created by undersized storm drains and development taking away land used to soak up storm water.

Fort Worth city council member Elizabeth Beck, whose district includes Linwood, said the city has failed residents by not ensuring it had adequate infrastructure before the townhomes were built.

Beck acknowledged the solutions are complex, but said she is pushing city staff to come up with short-term fixes that include staging vacuum trucks ahead of heavy rainstorms.

The city is also taking a more proactive approach to cleaning out the area’s storm drains ahead of major rainstorms to ensure water doesn’t get blocked up.

Dane Steinhagen, a Fort Worth real estate agent who moved into the townhome next door to Wicks days before the Aug. 17 storm, said he was stuck with a $40,000 repair bill.

Instead of offering his neighbor a glass of milk or cup of sugar, Wicks said he had to offer Steinhagan brooms and towels to help him clean up.

A history of flooding

Linwood was one of several neighborhoods hit hard by the 1949 Trinity River flood that killed 10 and left 13,000 Fort Worth residents homeless.

While the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built levees to stem the flow of water from the river, flash flooding has become a problem more recently.

Eva Bonilla, who grew up in Linwood and was five months old during the historic 1949 flood, pointed to a recent boom in development, which she said has decreased land used to soak up rain water and made flash flooding worse.

Representatives for the city were hesitant to attribute all of the problems to increased development during an online meeting in September 2022.

The city hasn’t historically regulated townhomes for their effect on stormwater, Dyke said in a phone interview.

City regulations exempt projects smaller than one acre from having to comply with stormwater regulations, she said.

That could change as early as this spring when the city brings together an advisory panel to look at ways to update those regulations for smaller projects, according to an October 2022 city report.

What the city knew

The city’s of Fort Worth has known about Linwood’s flooding problem since at least 2014.

It conducted a study to look at solutions including adding 10 acres of retention capacity in the Linwood area, and adding a pump station to help move the water into the Trinity River.

The estimated cost of these fixes ranged from $75 million to $150 million, which is roughly 15% of the city’s 2023 operating budget, and 10 times the stormwater department’s annual capital projects budget.

That high price tag prevented the city from moving forward, wrote Linda Sterne, a spokesperson for the city’s stormwater department in an email to the Star-Telegram.

The city conducted a separate floodwater study between 2016 and 2017, which found a combination of old drain pipes and water flowing downhill from the Monticello neighborhood flowing were making the flooding in Linwood worse.

This was part of a larger study to map out the flood risk in areas outside the FEMA floodplain.

What the city’s doing

The city has looked at other options, one of which would be spending around $20 million to improve the storm drain capacity in Crockett Row, which would reduce the amount of flooding on Templeton Drive.

Another proposal would spend roughly $90 million to improve storm drain capacity on Templeton Drive and in the Monticello neighborhood to the west, where water rushes down from the higher elevation across University Drive into Linwood.

The city is hiring a contractor in May to study Linwood’s flooding problems and recommend a possible solution, although that study could take a year or more to complete, Dyke said.

The city is also considering increasing residents’ stormwater utility fees to help raise funds to pay for improvements.

Residents pay between $2.88 to $11.50 per month depending on the size of their homes.

It’s not clear how much the city could raise those rates, but Dyke said her department would be proposing the raise in the 2024 budget discussions later this year.

What the community wants

Wicks and Steinhagen both expressed their frustration at what they saw as a lack of urgency by the city to solve the problem.

Steinhagen said he’s pushing the city to consider creating detention ponds around using Linwood Park and a handful of single family lots to hold floodwater.

Wicks said the city could install back flow valves in the existing storm drains that would push water away from streets like Templeton Drive that can flood with as little as two inches of rain.

Solutions like retention ponds will be considered once a consultant is brought on, Dyke said, however, she emphasized any solution would need to address Linwood’s flooding without moving the problem to another neighborhood.