Amid shattered buildings and ruined lives, a hurricane strips away the veneer of normalcy that conceals uncomfortable truths.

Hurricane Harvey showed us, for example, that the two aging reservoirs on Houston's west side are inadequate to protect the heart of the city lying downstream. The storm exposed gaps in the Houston Fire Department's rescue training and equipment. It eliminated any doubt about the need for stricter limits on development in flood-prone areas.

Harvey's floods also illustrated a structural problem, often glossed over in ordinary times, that cries out for attention in a crisis. The dominant role of so-called "special districts" in the region's vast unincorporated areas deprives millions of residents of the responsive, transparent local government they deserve.

As the Chronicle's James Drew reported this week, residents of the Timarron Lakes neighborhood in The Woodlands are convinced that their municipal utility district's inattention to a faulty drainage system led to the flooding of 100 homes during Harvey.

After a May 2016 flood, residents had asked the MUD board to install a culvert they believed would ease the problem. The board declined.

"The District's existing drainage improvements are designed to accommodate 100-year storm events as required by Harris County," said a statement written by the district's engineer and attached to an email sent to Timarron Lakes resident Frank Gore. "These (requested) potential drainage improvements would only engage during an event greater than a 100-year storm, which is beyond the District's current design standard."

If you cut through the jargon, the message seems to be: "You're asking us to do something that exceeds our minimum requirements, and we're not willing to do it."

I'm not qualified to say whether the improvements sought by residents would have prevented or reduced the flooding of homes in Timarron Lakes. But surely the residents deserved better answers than they got.

Drew's article demonstrates why MUDs - entities invented by lawyers and developers in the 1970s to facilitate the efficient development of empty fields and prairies - are a poor substitute for true local government, particularly when urgent needs arise.

A MUD's elected board members theoretically serve the same role as City Council members, and no doubt many of these volunteer public servants perform their duties diligently. But the close ties between MUDs and the developers of the communities they serve, as detailed in a series of articles by Drew, raise obvious questions about where their loyalties lie.

The Woodlands, at least, has an option not available to many of the region's other suburban communities. A deal it struck with the city of Houston to forestall annexation gives The Woodlands the authority to incorporate, and the township board is seeking proposals from companies to conduct a study of potential incorporation.

City governments, of course, have an imperfect record of responding to residents' concerns. But city council members, particularly in single-member district systems, are more accountable to voters than board members of entities with such obscure-sounding names as "Harris-Montgomery Counties Municipal Utility District 386," the district that serves Timarron Lakes.

MUD board members are not required to live in the districts they serve. Board meetings often take place outside the community, sometimes in the offices of the MUD's attorneys. This hardly facilitates engagement with residents.

Incorporation would create a better system to respond to problems like those in Timarron Lakes, said Gordy Bunch, the chairman of The Woodlands Township board.

"It does highlight some of the inequities of not being a city," said Bunch, noting that the fragmentation of authority among the 11 MUDs serving The Woodlands makes regional coordination difficult.

Gore, the Timarron Lakes resident who pleaded in vain for help from the MUD board, said he favors incorporation: "The big problem is with all this segmented government, you never get to one particularly responsive or responsible authority for everything."

The Woodlands, with a population of about 110,000, would be the largest community by far to incorporate in Texas. The new city would face the challenge of assuming the debt and facilities of its 11 MUDs and setting a uniform tax rate; it could also choose to leave some or all of the districts intact.

But at least The Woodlands, unlike many of the area's suburban communities, doesn't have to get permission from an adjacent city to incorporate. As the process moves forward, the leaders who favor incorporation can point to the Timarron Lakes experience - flooded houses, unanswered questions, frustrated residents - as evidence of the need for change.