Harvey’s flooding was fierce, but we must prepare for even worse

What’s more daunting than a historic flood that killed more than 70 people, inundated thousands of homes and caused damage totaling an estimated $150 billion?

The realization that Harvey wasn’t even the big one.

Houston-area leaders took a risk this week in asking people, some of whom still have ponds in their living rooms, to look beyond the current devastation to the storms that are still coming with growing intensity.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett took the bold step of calling for a sweeping review of the region’s flood control efforts. He put everything on the table — large-scale buyouts of flood-prone homes, limiting development in some areas, a new storm water reservoir, and even a local sales tax to pay for flood protection that could total billions of dollars.

Mayor Sylvester Turner, meanwhile, asked people to consider an even worse scenario than Harvey. It is inevitable that at some point, Houston will suffer a direct hit by a powerful, high-category hurricane wielding a dangerous wall of water known as storm surge. Such a storm will take not only lives, homes and jobs, but it could cripple the largest petrochemical complex in the nation.

“Just imagine what the cost would be if the storm surge (during Harvey) had come through the Galveston Bay,” Turner said this week.

The mayor led a bipartisan group of Houston-area officials in pledging to support the longdebated coastal spine, or “Ike Dike,” as the cornerstone of a united regional flood prevention effort that could protect the region in a surge event.

After years of reluctance from local leaders to embrace the large-scale project, or any project, the commitment to real action was encouraging.

Turner called the coastal spine, a proposed system of massive floating gates stretching from the mouth of Galveston Bay, “an idea whose time has

come.” He challenged Houstonians to take the lessons of Harvey, Ike, and other storms, and to urge their national, state and local leaders to put them into action.

“Are we going to make the investment that can prevent huge losses or are we going to be shortsighted and think we have plenty of time and then wait until it’s too late? And literally, we’d be spending $100 billion to replace the Gulf Coast?” Turner said.

It’s a question every one of us needs to ask ourselves.

And it’s refreshing turnabout from the response Turner’s office provided investigative reporters for the 2016 project Hell and High Water, a collaboration between the Texas Tribune and ProPublica which depicted Houston as a sitting duck for a monster storm that would virtually wipe out Clear Lake and devastate the Houston Ship Channel.

Turner, a former state representative who was a new mayor at the time, declined an interview for that story, and his public safety and homeland security director initially provided a statement saying “only a small portion of the city of Houston is at risk for major storm surge.” A follow-up statement put the onus on the federal government to safeguard the city against a monster hurricane.

The nation’s problem

This week, Turner and other officials continued to argue, correctly, that the coastal spine should be built and paid for by the federal government. The project could cost as much as $14 billion, according to Bob Mitchell, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership. He compared that to the $30 billion in damage wrought by Hurricane Ike.

But Turner and others now realize it will take local leadership to sell the idea to residents and to congressional leaders. As such, city officials presented a video titled “Unprepared – A Nation at Risk,” which sought to explain a monster hurricane isn’t just Houston’s problem; it’s the whole nation’s problem.

Considering that the region refines 27 percent of the nation’s gas and 60 percent of aviation fuel, among other vital products, officials surmised that a direct-hit to the area causing flooding could shut down refineries for 18 to 36 months, causing gas to surge to $8 per gallon.

Tying Houston’s fate directly to that of the nation is key in getting congressional leaders to buy in to the expensive endeavor. In this post-earmarks era, such legislation will take hard-fought consensus. It’s not there in Washington, yet.

Need to ‘lock arms’

Locally, support for a storm surge solution has been growing over the past year, but Harvey seems to have created a sense of urgency that is compelling agencies across the six-county region to focus their efforts.

“It’s going to require everybody to lock arms,” said Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, who for a while seemed to be the only state leader losing sleep over Houston’s vulnerability to hurricane destruction and flooding.

Bush’s study of the coastal spine project helped move the idea forward, said the guy who first proposed it in Texas, William Merrell, a professor at Texas A&MGalveston. Merrell, who was inspired by a similar system in the Netherlands that has been used successfully dozens of times, told me Tuesday he has new hope that the Gulf Coast version will finally get built now that leaders are demanding action.

“We’re no longer just stuck there,” Merrell said. “Now we have a path. We kind of know what we need to build.”

Merrell stressed that the coastal spine will only help prevent surge, not the kind of fresh water flooding we saw after Harvey. He said that problem is complex and requires “a thousand points of light” to address, some of which he was glad to see Emmett putting on the table this week.

“It seems that Harvey has brought our community together,” said Robert Eckels, the former Harris County judge who serves as president of the Gulf Coast Community Protection and Recovery District. “We’re more united than ever to deal not just with the surge but with the flooding.”

It shouldn’t have taken this long for leaders to act. Now that they have, we need to insist they stay the course.

Harvey brought catastrophic devastation to the Houston region. The next storm may not be so kind.