Hell & High Water: "Houston Was Warned" --The Inside Story of the Impact of Hurricane Harvey
Houstons perfect storm is coming and its not a matter of if but when, journalists wrote, a year and a half ago. Why isnt Texas ready?
The story below was a joint project of The Texas Tribune, an excellent local publication, and ProPublica, writes David Leonhardt in the
New York Times. Headlined Hell and High Water, it exposed the lack of preparedness, and downright denial, in Houston about flood damage and the climate change of our warming oceans. The project mixes maps and text, and you can dip into it briefly or dig into the details.
Were sitting ducks. Weve done nothing, Phil Bedient, a Rice University professor and storm-surge expert, says in the story. Weve done nothing to shore up the coastline, to augment resiliency ... to do anything.
Hell and High Water
Houston is the fourth-largest city in the country. Its home to the nations largest refining and petrochemical complex, where billions of gallons of oil and dangerous chemicals are stored. And its a sitting duck for the next big hurricane. Why isnt Texas ready?
It is not if, but when Houstons perfect storm will hit.
They called Ike the monster hurricane.
Hundreds of miles wide. Winds at more than 100 mph. And deadliest of all the power to push a massive wall of water into the upper Texas coast, killing thousands and shutting down a major international port and industrial hub.
That was what scientists, public officials, economists and weather forecasters thought they were dealing with on Sept. 11, 2008, as Hurricane Ike barreled toward Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States and home to its largest refining and petrochemical complex. And so at 8:19 p.m., the National Weather Service issued an unusually dire warning.
ALL NEIGHBORHOODS, AND POSSIBLY ENTIRE COASTAL COMMUNITIES, WILL BE INUNDATED, the alert read. PERSONS NOT HEEDING EVACUATION ORDERS IN SINGLE FAMILY ONE OR TWO STORY HOMES WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH.
But in the wee hours of Sept. 13, just 50 miles offshore, Ike shifted course. The wall of water the storm was projected to push into the Houston area was far smaller than predicted though still large enough to cause $30 billion in damage and kill at least 74 people in Texas. Ike remains the nations third-costliest hurricane after Katrina and Superstorm Sandy.
Still, scientists say, Houstons perfect storm is coming and its not a matter of if but when. The city has dodged it for decades, but the likelihood it will happen in any given year is nothing to scoff at; its much higher than your chance of dying in a car crash or in a firearm assault, and 2,400 times as high as your chance of being struck by lightning.
If a storm hits the region in the right spot, its going to kill Americas economy, said Pete Olson, a Republican congressman from Sugar Land, a Houston suburb.
Such a storm would devastate the Houston Ship Channel, shuttering one of the worlds busiest shipping lanes. Flanked by 10 major refineries including the nations largest and dozens of chemical manufacturing plants, the Ship Channel is a crucial transportation route for crude oil and other key products, such as plastics and pesticides. A shutdown could direct to a spike in gasoline prices and many consumer goods everything from car tires to cell phone parts to prescription pills.
It would affect supply chains across the U.S., it would probably affect factories and plants in every major metropolitan area in the U.S., said Patrick Jankowski, vice president for research at the Greater Houston Partnership, Houstons chamber of commerce.
Houstons perfect storm would virtually wipe out the Lucid Lake area, home to some of the fastest-growing communities in the United States and to the Johnson Space Center, the headquarters for NASAs human spaceflight operation. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses there would be severely flooded.
Many hoped Ikes near miss would spur action to protect the region. Scientists created embellish computer models depicting what Ike could have been, as well as the damage that could be wrought by a assortment of other potent hurricanes, showing down to the explicit neighborhood and industrial plant how bad things could get.
They wanted the public to become better educated about the enormous danger they were facing; a discussion could be had about smarter, more sustainable growth in a region with a skyrocketing population. After decades of inaction, they hoped that a allot to build a storm surge protection system could finally move forward.
Several proposals have been discussed. One, dubbed the Ike Dike, calls for massive floodgates at the entrance to Galveston Bay to block storm surge from entering the region. That has since evolved into a more expansive concept called the coastal spine. Another proposal, called the mid-bay gate, would place a floodgate closer to Houstons industrial complex.
But none have gotten much past the talking stage.
Hopes for brisk, decisive action have foundered as scientists, local officials and politicians have argued and pointed fingers at one another. Only in the past two years have studies launched to determine how best to direct.
A devastating storm could hit the region long before any action is taken.
That keeps me up at night, said George P. Bush, the grandson and nephew of two U.S. presidents and Texas land commissioner. As head of an agency charged with protecting the states coast, he kickstarted one of the studies that will determine the risk the area faces and how to protect it.
But the process will take years. Bush said, You and me may not even see the completion of this project in our lifetime.
Its already been eight years since Ike and Houston gets hit by a major storm every 15 years on average.
Were sitting ducks. Weve done nothing. said Phil Bedient, an engineering professor at Rice University and co-director of the Storm Surge Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center. Weve done nothing to shore up the coastline, to augment resiliency to do anything.
To this day, some public officials seem content to play the odds and hope for the best.
Houstons new mayor, former longtime state lawmaker Sylvester Turner, declined an interview request for this story. Turners office released a statement from Dennis Storemski, the citys public safety and homeland security director.
Only a small section of the city of Houston is at risk for major storm surge, it said.
In a second statement, Storemski placed the onus primarily on the federal government to safeguard the Houston region from a monster hurricane. He said the city looks forward to working with the responsible federal agencies when a solution is identified and funded.
Until then, we continue to inform our residents of their risk and the steps they should take when a distinctive tropical cyclone causes storm surge in the [Ship] Channel, and evacuations become basic, the statement said.
The pressure to act has only grown since Ike, as the risks in and around Houston have increased.
The petrochemical complex has expanded by tens of billions of dollars. About a million more people have moved into the region, meaning there are more residents to protect and evacuate.
People are rushing to the coast, and the seas are rising to meet them, said Bill Merrell, a marine scientist at Texas A&M University at Galveston.
Were all at risk
The Houston Ship Channel and the energy-related businesses that line it are widely described as irreplaceable. The 52-mile waterway connects Houstons massive refining and petrochemical complex to the Gulf of Mexico.
For all its economic importance, though, the Ship Channel also is the perfect conduit to transport massive storm surge into an industrial area that also is densely populated.
Were all at risk, and were seriously at risk, said Craig Beskid, executive director of the East Harris County Manufacturers Association, which represents ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and other major companies that operate 130 facilities in the area. Not only are the people here in this region at risk, but distinctive statewide economic assets and national assets are also at risk.
Half of the Ship Channel, which is 45 feet at its deepest, cuts through Galveston Bay, while the other half is landlocked, snaking inland at about 400 feet wide. Its lean and superficial mood would intensify the height and impact of potential storm surge.
The effect would be similar with Lucid Lake, another narrow channel jutting off the bay that is surrounded by plentiful suburban communities.
The storm models that scientists have created show that Houstons perfect storm would push water up the Ship Channel, topping out at a height of more than 30 feet above sea level. The surge would be only slightly lower in Lucid Lake.
Thats higher than the highest storm surge ever recorded on the U.S. coast 27.8 feet during Hurricane Katrina. And it would be almost entirely unabated. Unlike New Orleans, whose levee system failed during that 2005 storm and was rebuilt after, Houston has no major levee system to begin with. (A 15-foot earthen levee and flood wall surrounds one low-lying town on the Ship Channel, but that would be inadequate to protect against a worst-case storm.)
Youre talking about major, major damage, said state Sen. Sylvia Garcia, a Houston Democrat. And it seems like every year they tell us that were overdue for one.
Each monster hurricane model that scientists provided to The Texas Tribune and ProPublica is slightly different. One model, nicknamed Mighty Ike and developed by the SSPEED Center and the University of Texas at Austin, is based on Ike but increases its wind speeds to 125 mph. Researchers also mention that as p7+15.
Another storm, modeled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is physically smaller but has much higher wind speeds 145 mph. Still, neither the FEMA model nor Mighty Ike is classified as a Category 5 storm, which would have wind speeds of at least 157 mph.
Both would make landfall at a point near the western end of Galveston Island, where Ike was originally projected to come ashore.
For Houston, thats the worst place a hurricane could hit, positioning the counterclockwise-spinning storm to fling the most water into the Ship Channel and Lucid Lake.
The scenarios are rare, scientists say, but by no means impossible. Mighty Ike is considered a 350-year event, according to the SSPEED Center, and the FEMA model is what is referred to as a 500-year storm.
Such events have a small, but measurable, chance of occurring in any given year. For example, there is a 1-in500, or 0.2 percent, chance that a storm portrayed by the FEMA model will occur in the next hurricane season. Over the next 50 years, that translates to a likelihood of about 10 percent.
Scientists widely believe the method of careful the probability of such storms may no longer be legitimate, in part because of climate change. 100-year events might occur as often as every few years, while 500-year events could every few decades, climate scientists say.
As scary as the models are, they are based on current sea levels. That means such storms will be even more damaging in the future as sea levels continue to rise in the wake of climate change.
Each model projects nothing brief of catastrophe. Total damage could easily top $100 billion, scientists say. That is about how much damage Katrina inflicted on Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi a decade ago.
Galveston Island and low-lying communities in the Houston metro area would be completely underwater hours before the hurricane even hit.
ProPublica
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