More Floods

Interstate Highway 45 in Houston on Sunday. CreditRichard Carson/Reuters

Just a couple of weeks ago, torrential rains led to loss of lives and property in the Terai in Nepal and Bihar in India. Just a few days ago, Hurricane Harvey began an onslaught on Southeast Texas, devouring Rockport, Texas, battering and ruining how much of Corpus Christi and flooding Houston, the fourth largest city in the United States. So far ten people have died, somewhere around a quarter of a million are without power, and there's no telling right now how extensive the damage is in terms of billions of dollars.

Can't say it was unexpected

Harvey may well be the new normal and it's only the most wilfully blind who will deny that Harvey played out as a textbook example of what climate change is looking like in this early part of the twenty-first century. As the people in Nepal, India, and now Texas are discovering, monsoons and hurricanes are no longer "business as usual."

Hurricane season is just beginning in the Atlantic and while we can hope that there's no repeat of a Harvey, and I really don't want to be alarmist, it is a period of heavy rains. After this devastation, additional rains aren't really what the region needs.

Could it have been worse? Sure, a direct hit on Houston while Harvey was still at Category 4 levels of intensity of energy would have shattered the region and resulted in far greater damage. But as it is, enough damage has occurred. Could some of what the hurricane wreaked been avoided? That's another question and by many accounts, yes. And to be sure, above and beyond the initial "shock and awe" of a direct hit, there's the flooding.

While the city is not unique in terms of why cities do flood, Houston is notorious for a lack of zoning, city planning, few if any environmental impact studies, and is, quite succinctly, a developer's wet dream. The rampant growth that characterizes Houston and draws people from all over to follow their dreams is due in large part to this lack of regulations and planning. Yes, the city has an often burgeoning economy, but it also sets records for unoccupied buildings. While the metro region inside the 610 Loop is verdant, much of the suburbs, particularly due south and southeast are vast stretches of pavement and flatland increasing filled in with subdivisions.

The freeways are part of the drainage system, if you think about it, but woefully inadequate in terms of handling traffic at peak hours (and as the city learned from evacution during Hurrican Rita in 2001, fatally inadequate for evacuation of a region home to six million plus people; hence, the shelter in place recommendation with Harvey). Add to this that the area doesn't have a robust levess system, Addicks Reservoir is in desperate need of repair and there's been increasing development in low-lying areas and flood plains and to say that this is a recipe for disaster isn't just understatement, it's frightening.

As I write this, my sister's condo building has been evacuated, other friends are in upper storeys of their buildings, some left town ahead of Harvey hitting landfall, and a couple, well, I haven't heard from.

Hindsight

It's not valuable to stay that this could have been avoided, pehaps, but there's been no secret to the negative impact of unchecked expansion and "growth". For many years, Houston had an aggressive policy of annexation that often proved disastrous to the local, incorporated communities it absorbed. In some ways, during the years leading up to the bust of the mid-1980s, Houston's expansion and growth looked really good, but then came the oil glut of the 80s, though the local economy was taking earlier coincident with the glut and the Savings and Loan debacle that played no small part in the stock market crash of 1987, and the development and build-out of strip malls, vast apartment complexes, and office buildings that lay fallow.

Houston learned from its recovery going into the 1990s and curried VC investments, wooing major corporations and broadening its tax base. The city has since seen an explosion of "mixed-use" buildings that incorporate offices and residences and often a couple of floors of retail stores and services.

In the meantime, the bayous have been altered in greater or lesser degree and while bike trails and access to foot traffic has connected wide swaths of the city (Buffalo Bayou, Braes, and White Oak are wonders of engineering), but I'm wondering if the increased building along the banks has also increased drainage issues. Moreover, as Harvey continues to pour down around Victoria and outer areas, as the Guadalupe swells his banks, this will continue to ensure that the bayous remain full.

What should have been done? All the things that haven't been. Had Houston taken a more reasoned approach to city planning in the fifties, say, it's difficult to say whether the city would have grown as rapidly as it did from the late sixties to the mid-eighties.Or would it have grown more smartly? Would it have developed a more diverse, broader based economy? Additionally, what would the political landscape look like?

It's this last that requires some thought. When I was younger, Houston had a high crime rate, there was obvious social division and unrest and if there weren't as many riots or anything quite on the order of Watts in California, race relations weren't exactly free of volatilitiy. The ethnographic make-up that has come to characterize Texas overall and Houston more specifically, shows increasing parity and a reduction in the percentage of the white population as a majority. Indeed, it appears to be indicative of the eventual ethnographic distribution of the U.S. as a whole.

That said, had Houston a more regulated and measured approach to growth and development, would this have resulted in a more concervative make-up in the population? I would say yes. Less regulation, while not optimal for infrastructure, draws people to areas who are willing to take chances and find a greater deal of economic freedom. At least on the surface. Conversely, marginalization and gentrification are still very much part of the make-up in the city, but it has been a remarkable social experiment in the number of immigrants from all over the world that have contributed to the city's make-up and economy.

To some degree, it might well be that around the early eighties, any window for enforcing something like zoning may have closed; the city was too big, too developed and past the point of turning back. Nevertheless, other approaches to city planning could have been implemented that might have checked the infrastructural shortsightedness that has characterized much of the issues that now glow in stark relief in the light of Harvey.

What now? Local, regional, state, national, and global impact

Briefly, in the wake of Harvey, Houston and the region is and will be in a world of painful reconstruction and restoration. Early assessments seem to be around $40 billion, not including flood damage. It doesn't appear that catastrophic damage to refineries or supply chains along the Houston Ship Channel has been sustained.

My guess is that any national or global impact will be relatively minimal. Absent any significant damage to the Port of Houston, it seems unlikely that there will be much of a downturn in the larger economy. That said, there will be some effect because we are, after all, dealing with the fourth largest city in the United States and it has been for all intents and purposes, offline for several days. This is not a trivial issue.

All of this said, any analysis here would be lousy guesswork. When we look at natural disasters, they're repercussions depend very much on an economy of scale. The tragedy of the Terai/Bihar floods is immense loss of life (much of which was avoidable) but in terms of impact, mostly restricted to Nepal. Along with the tragic loss of lives, there's been significant damage to crops that will result in food shortages, and owing to Nepal's lack of infrastructure, recovery may take years.

Where sustained damage to a larger economy that's more tied into global markets, the effects would be potentially more far-reaching and at present while they're well-known, little has been done to implement solutions.

So what to do now?

Following are lists of sites with resources to help out. Apparently, Congress is opening the wallets and ready to move more quickly on reparations. While this is heartening, given recent White House policies and a major change in Texas insurance code making it more difficult to file claims, this only highlights the conflicting political will and lack of understanding of climate change, social inequities and the need for a budget to support rebuilding and buttressing already existing infrastructure (not just in Texas, but nationwide).

In sum, I'm watching climate change play out on a global scale where similar circumstances have led to tragic and devastating consequences and where, sadly, in each case, I don't think that much is going to be done over the longterm to ensure remedies that will mitigate similar tragedies from occurring again. Yes, Congress seems to be pushing for immediate restoration and reparation, but given its current make-up of climate change denialism, ignorance of scientific proof, and lack of political will to ensure that the U.S. infrastructure is updated, I don't have much hope for the future in the face of similar or worse events, either in Texas or elsewhere.

Additional metrics for perspective.

Following is a list of resources to assist more directly:

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/hurricane-harvey/hurricane-harvey-how-help-storm-victims-n796406

https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/hurricane-harvey-relief-fund/

https://ghcf.org/hurricane-relief/

Also, beware of scams.