Let’s move aggressively on surge protection

Nine years have now passed since Hurricane Ike ravaged the Texas coast, and the Houston region is as vulnerable to a major hurricane today as it was then. What many do not realize is just how much worse Ike could have been.

Our region dodged a bullet when Ike drifted to the east, moving its centerline track to the middle of Galveston Bay. If Ike had stayed on its earlier course and made landfall closer to Freeport, what researchers call the “Scenario 7” storm, the consequences would have been dramatically more dire.

A more westerly course would have put Galveston Bay on the “dirty side” of the storm. Surge heights would have been five to 10 feet higher. Thousands would have died. The property damage in the communities along Galveston Bay’s western shore would have been in the billions. Many industrial complexes in Texas City, Bayport and along the Houston Ship Channel would have been inundated, causing many more billions in property damage and inestimable environmental damage. Global markets would have been significantly disrupted and the nation’s supply of many critical resources, like jet fuel, would have been adversely affected.

A Scenario 7 storm is an existential threat to our region and a major risk to the national economy. We cannot continue to delay action to protect ourselves.

There are many reasons why more progress has not been made so far. Trying to move a massive project is always difficult. And this is the most important decision our generation will make for this region. We need to take the time to get it right.

But those who continue to argue that there is some solution other than a coastal spine barrier, commonly referred to as the Ike Dike, are misleading the public. Ideas like building a dike around Galveston or at the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel have been studied in sufficient detail and discarded as unworkable. Also, nonstructural alternatives, while important elements to a comprehensive plan, have been clearly shown to be inadequate alone.

But the most misleading argument frequently advanced by Ike Dike skeptics is that somehow, we can gradually withdraw from the threatened area or reduce the risk just by not letting anyone build there. The problem is that the “threatened area” includes all of Galveston County, about a third of Brazoria County and about a fifth of Harris County. The threatened area is already home to about a million residents, thousands of schools, hospitals, nursing homes and critical infrastructure like the Johnson Space Center and University of Texas Medical School at Houston. The idea that we can finesse this problem with smarter development policy is nonsense.

An equally uninformed argument is that we can avoid any loss of life by evacuating the surge zones ahead of a storm. I chaired the working group that re-wrote the evacuation plans after Hurricane Rita. I can tell you from that experience there is no evacuation plan that will not result in a significant loss of life in a Scenario 7 storm.

There is still work to be done on the positioning of the coastal barrier, how it should be constructed, and most important, the configuration of the gate that would span the strait between the tip of the Bolivar Peninsula and the east end of Galveston Island. There are unquestionably serious environmental considerations that need to be taken into account, especially how any gate structure will affect the exchange of fresh and sea water through the Bolivar Strait. And there are other issues. We need to develop an innovative financing structure that allocates most of the cost to those property owners who benefit the most. But everyone in this region and every American has a stake in getting this done.

The sad history of projects like this is that no action has been taken until a catastrophic storm hits, killing a bunch of people. That was what prompted construction of the Galveston Seawall after the 1900 storm (8,000 killed), the Dutch dike system after the 1953 North Sea storm (2,300 killed) and the recent flood control work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (1,250 killed). Hopefully our region can address this risk without such a gruesome prompting.

But it is time to stop asking whether we are going to build a coastal spine and start concentrating on how we are going to build a coastal spine.

King is former mayor of Kemah.