The Arroyos of Starr County

Starr County's Arroyos Have Been Flooding Residential Streets for Over Thirty Years

On the evening of September 6, 1993, Yolanda Teran D. Martinez was driving through Roma, Texas, when Arroyo Roma swallowed her car. A thunderstorm had dropped nearly five inches of rain in ninety minutes. The arroyo, dry most of the year, became a current strong enough to carry a Ford LTD off the road and into the water in minutes. Three of her passengers survived because neighbors ran outside and formed a human chain to pull them out of the current. Martinez was 27, from Comales, Tamaulipas. She did not make it. The Rio Grande Herald put it on the front page the following Thursday.

Two years and two months before that night, Starr County commissioners sat in a public meeting and were told, explicitly, that colonias near Roma were being built in flood-prone areas and that residents were getting flooded out every time a major rainstorm hit the county. A group of colonia residents showed up with a petition. Commissioner Armando Peña introduced a motion to impose fines of up to $10,000 on illegal developers selling lots in floodplains. The motion died for lack of support.

In 1991, Commissioner Eloy Garza said the county needed an ordinance prohibiting construction in flood-prone areas. Commissioner Jose Maria Alvarez argued the county lacked authority to impose fines and suggested they simply stop approving preliminary subdivision plats instead. According to a July 11, 1991 article in the Rio Grande Herald, Starr County Attorney Rene Montalvo told commissioners that enforcement of subdivision regulations was largely nonexistent. "They come in here and tell us a story," Montalvo said, "and there is no follow-up." An audience member urged the commission to follow Hidalgo County's example of aggressively pursuing illegal developers. County Judge J.M. Martinez Jr. responded that some rainstorms were acts of God. The colonia residents' spokeswoman told him that at least people elsewhere had someone to turn to for help.

The commission scheduled a work session to discuss it further. Nothing on record indicates the work session produced anything enforceable before 1993.

Starr County Commissioner Precinct 2, which covers Roma and the Arroyo Roma corridor, is currently held by Raul "Roy" Peña III, who has occupied the seat since 2017. The precinct has its own history with the flooding issue. According to the Rio Grande Herald, Commissioner Amando Peña, who represented Precinct 2 in 1991, introduced the failed motion to fine illegal colonia developers building in flood-prone areas near Roma. The seat changed hands several times before Raul "Roy" Peña Jr. won it in 1998, holding it until his death in 2017, when County Judge Eloy Vera appointed his son to finish the term.

This election cycle, Republican challenger Clarissa Gonzalez, a journalist who owns La Pistolera 95.9 FM and a local newspaper, is making drainage and infrastructure failures the centerpiece of her campaign against Peña. A catchy cumbia called "Cuatro Años Más" is on rotation on her radio station. "Cada lluvia es pesadilla, agua adentro, calle río, muebles flotan, casa hundida y el señor Roy en frío." Every rain is a nightmare, water inside, the street a river, furniture floating, the house sunk, and Roy nowhere to be found. The song openly mocks the incumbent over those same failures, bringing what has been a generational governance problem in one of the county's most flood-vulnerable corridors into the middle of a local political race.

This was not a new problem. Colonias in Starr County had been growing since the 1960s, when developers began subdividing agriculturally marginal land into residential lots and selling them on contract-for-deed arrangements to low-income families who often had no legal documentation proving the purchase or the seller's identity. By 1986, between 8,000 and 10,000 residents were living in colonias outside Rio Grande City alone, with another 3,200 scattered across twenty to thirty other colonias countywide. Some of those lots were in floodplains. Some plats were never recorded with the county. Some buyers had no paperwork at all.

Texas did not adopt the Model Subdivision Rules requiring developers to provide water, sewer, and drainage infrastructure until the year 2000. In 1991, in 1993, the legal framework that might have stopped a developer from platting lots over an arroyo floodplain and selling them to families who could not afford to say no simply did not exist in any enforceable form.

The lots were sold, the houses were built, and every few years the arroyo reminded everyone why neither should have been there.

Of all the floods on record, the one that hit on August 18, 2008 produced the kind of damage that produced the kind of damage that no one in Starr County has been able to forget. A storm system dropped a foot of rain on Roma in six hours. The Arroyo Roma overflowed almost instantly. So did Arroyo Los Morenos and Arroyo Quiote, which pushed three feet of water across U.S. Highway 83 and cut Roma off from the rest of the Rio Grande Valley. Around 1,000 homes flooded across Roma, Escobares, and Garceño, with water reaching five feet inside some structures. Over 200 people were evacuated. Property damage exceeded five million dollars. The National Weather Service classified portions of it as a 100-year flood event. A city official told the Texas Observer the obvious: "Those houses shouldn't be there, but there was no regulation back then, there was zero planning."

Two years after that, Hurricane Alex never directly hit Starr County. The storm hit elsewhere, but it dropped enough rain into the Sierra Madre Oriental in northern Mexico to overwhelm the Rio Grande basin. Falcon Dam released water downstream. River levels at Starr County peaked at 57.63 feet on July 11, 2010, and the flooding lasted from July 9 through August 3. According to the Starr County Multi-Jurisdiction Hazard Mitigation Plan, a water plant serving 8,000 residents submerged under six feet of water and shut down for three weeks. La Grulla remained under voluntary evacuation as waters receded slowly. Highway and bridge damage in Starr County alone reached $19 million, with public and private property losses adding another $18 million on top of that.

A Master Drainage Plan for Arroyo Roma and Arroyo Los Morenos had already been submitted to the Texas Water Development Board in 1999. Engineers identified five flood control alternatives for the Arroyo Roma corridor alone. The cheapest was priced at $9.4 million. The plan estimated that a 100-year flood event could affect 9,000 residents. That was 25 years ago.

March 7, 2026 produced the most recent entry in this long record. A supercell dropped up to 2.5 inches over Roma in thirty to forty-five minutes, overwhelmed drainage near Arroyo Roma, and flooded the city again. Starr County Judge Eloy Vera signed a disaster declaration after the storms left more than 600 homes and businesses damaged in Roma and Rio Grande City. According to KRGV, a Roma resident named Maria Teresa Garcia, who had lived in the same apartment for 16 years without a drop of water indoors, described watching it push through all three of her doors. "It was like a river," she said.

The Rio Grande Valley is entering a period of heavy rainfall, with forecasters warning of flooding across South Texas. The Weather Channel and regional meteorologists point to a combination of tropical moisture, a Gulf disturbance, and a slow-moving frontal boundary expected to stall over the region. Forecast models project several rounds of rain and thunderstorms capable of producing localized flooding, particularly in low-lying areas and neighborhoods with longstanding drainage concerns. Some locations could receive several inches of rain within a short period, raising concerns about rapidly rising water and hazardous road conditions.

As of this week, the National Weather Service has issued a valley-wide flood watch for the entire Rio Grande Valley. The geography has not changed, the drainage has not improved, and the conversation that commissioners tabled in the summer of 1991 remains exactly where they left it.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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Screenshot credit to Rio Grande Herald, September 9, 1993. All rights reserved.

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