As support for Ike Dike grows, we still need stubborn boosters

It’s been a long, hard slog for Bill Merrell since he first proposed the concept of an “Ike Dike” nine years ago. At times, the Texas A&M oceanographer probably could have used his own dike of sorts to keep all the dismissiveness at bay.

Merrell’s fight isn’t over just because political leaders in the weeks after Harvey are calling for action on his concept, but he says it’s heartening to finally see progress. His plan, a “coastal spine” composed of a system of floating gates, is intended to protect Galveston Bay and much of the Houston region from a killer wall of water known as a surge that could accompany a direct-hit monster storm.

“The parade is forming,” the 74-year-old professor said in an interview last week as he sat in a maroon swivel chair in his office overlooking the Galveston channel.

“I learned a long time ago,” he said, referring to his time as a Reagan appointee to the National Science Foundation, “if you’re going to be a hammer, you’ve got to be an anvil, too. People are going to hit back and you can’t take anything personally. Just keep working.”

Early skepticism is perhaps best summed up in a colorful rant by Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack reported by the Chronicle in 2010, when he suggested the closest we’d get to the Ike Dike in his lifetime might be people lining up their cars along the beach.

“Who knows what it’s going to be? Train a bunch of dinosaurs to stand up at a given time?” Radack went on. “Do I believe that man can stop a category 4 or 5 hurricane? The answer is, ‘I don’t believe man can stop a (category) 4 or 5 hurricane unless they pray a lot.’”

Radack wasn’t alone in his resignation about Houston’s vulnerability. Merrell says

he once held a similar view himself — that an engineering solution to prevent death and destruction might be well impossible for an area prone to powerful hurricanes. Then came Ike.

Merrell remembers hunkering down with his wife, daughter and grandson for the 2008 hurricane on the second floor of a sturdy 1870 brick-andiron building he owns on The Strand in Galveston. He recalls the helpless feeling as he listened to the 100-mph winds howl, as he watched the streets turn into rivers. The next morning, as he surveyed the destruction around him, he heard about an old friend, a World War II veteran who had lost one hand in combat, who had tied himself to a signpost to avoid being swept out to sea during the storm. When rescuers got to him, he vowed never to weather another hurricane. A policy ‘of failure’

He was one of the many people Merrell knew, most elderly and poor, who would leave the island and never return. There had to be another way, Merrell thought. He questioned the wisdom of focusing all efforts on recovery and nearly none on prevention.

“Our national policy is one of failure,” he says. “We don’t prevent. We let them hit us in the nose, and we fix it. And we let them do it again. Think about it. If we were doing that for terrorism, we’d throw every damn politician out.”

He says even if a storm is “equal opportunity” in its aim, the poor and elderly — the people lacking in money, insurance and energy — are always the hardest hit. They may escape with their breath, but their lives as they knew them are often wiped out.

“You’re bused up to Dallas or Austin. Your possessions are bulldozed. You only have what you can carry in a sack,” Merrell says. “That’s not how you should treat people.”

Merrell says Ike left him with an “epiphany” that an engineering solution was possible. He sat down and began sketching out an idea for a coastal barrier in Galveston Bay, similar to one he’d seen in the Netherlands.

“The Dutch wouldn’t put up with this,” Merrell says.

It’s become a familiar refrain that poses a provocative question: Why do Texans?

Merrell, a native Texan raised in Bellaire who has lived in Galveston since the 1980s, knows part of the answer: our rugged, risk-taking culture.

“Texans are a pretty resilient lot, but we’re kind of cowboys, too,” he says. “I wish we’d accept the fact that we could reduce risk, rather than just live with risk.”

That’s at the heart of Merrell’s argument — prevention is not only possible, it’s smarter and more cost-effective than simply spending billions of dollars to rebuild things the way they were and expecting different results.

Last week, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner led a bipartisan group of local officials to demand a “coastal spine” project be federally funded as part of any Harvey recovery package. The estimated cost cited at Turner’s press conference was up to $14 billion, but Merrell believes it’s not more than $8 billion.

Regardless, he says, “it’s going to be cost effective at any cost,” if one accounts for lives and property saved, and the nation’s largest petrochemical complex protected. “Prevention is expensive, but usually, you only do it once.”

He acknowledges the millions of dollars in maintenance costs, which would likely be paid by local or state governments. And he knows there’s plenty of skepticism about whether Congress, outside of the Texas delegation, has the political will to fund the massive project. Fighting for his idea

Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation, wrote in an op-ed published in the Chronicle last week that leaders should consider a less expensive option. Others agree, including environmental lawyer Jim Blackburn, who is also concerned about the environmental impact of Merrell’s concept.

“Bill’s done some beautiful work. I think his initial conceptualization was great,” said Blackburn, who is also co-director of the SSPEED Center at Rice University. It stands for the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center. “I just think we should have more detail on it than we do. And I don’t think it’s the best alternative for the money.”

Merrell acknowledges his concept is just that, albeit a concept heavily studied and already tested in other places. He’s not an engineer, and Merrell notes that neither the state nor the federal government has funded a design phase anyway.

He’s simply an academic who, rather than publish an idea and let it wither in the literature, decided to fight for it. He spent years, and plenty of weekends, raising money for research, educating local government leaders over coffee, cheerleading to congressional members, and organizing trips to the Netherlands to observe a real gated barrier system that has worked more than two dozen times.

Merrell says he shares Blackburn’s environmental concerns, but he believes engineering can address those, as well as aesthetics. “Nobody wants to go down and look at a concrete wall and somebody tells you the ocean is on the other side.”

At this point, he and his colleagues have turned over everything they’ve learned to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Merrell says. The agency, which would be tasked with building such a structure, has a broad study going on coastal resiliency.

Merrell credits any progress he has made on the Ike Dike to the colleagues who have helped him and to his own hardheadedness — a characteristic he shares with the man whose endowed chair he holds at A&M: George Mitchell, the late Texas billionaire shale pioneer known as “the father of fracking.”

“He used to say it’s OK to be stubborn if you think you’re right,” Merrell says. ‘Hard decisions’

Of course, it’s not enough to think you’re right. You actually have to be right. Merrell is convinced that he is, and he has persuaded leaders across the region.

Now we need details and careful study to be sure. We need a member of Congress to call on the Corps of Engineers to draft a design.

As Harris County Judge Ed Emmett told me Friday, we need action.

Merrell points to Emmett’s tone these days as proof of how far the Ike Dike has come. He says Emmett is among the elected leaders who initially laughed at the idea. Emmett says he didn’t laugh, only cautioned that there was no way the Obama administration was going to foot the bill.

“I don’t know anyone who ever thought it was a ridiculous idea,” Emmett said. “But it’s time to quit having press conferences and saying, ‘Yeah, we want a coastal barrier,’ and get on with designing it and making the hard decisions.”

He’s right. Merrell gave us a concept that could help protect our region from the monster storm we all know is coming. Now we need someone just as stubborn to make it a reality. lisa.falkenberg@chron.com twitter.com/ChronFalkenberg