Stopping flow of innovation
Flood tech’s grand ideas hampered by county’s liability concerns
It didn’t take long for a Howard Hughes Corp. executive to see the potential of flood control technology. A simple pump and meter would increase the amount of stormwater stored in a Cypress community, reducing the risk of flooding in the neighborhood and downstream.
But Heath Melton, executive vice president at the developer, had one caveat: the Harris County Flood Control District needed to be on board. Water knows no boundaries, he explained, and he wanted the backing of an official entity with knowledge of the impact on the greater watershed.
But it was the District that had sent the flood-tech company his way in the first place.
“If the private sector is willing to take the risk and liability and prove it, then we’ll talk,” said Matthew Zeve, deputy executive director at Harris County Flood Control.
Houston has become a hub for flood-tech startups, as industry players from developers to insurance companies seek ways to reduce future damages. Tech companies focused on battling the impacts of climate change on flooding are drawn to the Bayou City as a place to pitch their solutions.
But new solutions come with new risks, and when it comes to flooding, the potential liabilities are causing a conundrum for some startups in Houston: Government authorities want solutions to be prov
en before putting them in place. And the private sector wants the government’s blessing before participating in pilots that could provide that proof.
That has left Richard Seline, a cofounder of Houston’s Resilience Innovation Hub who has been trying to bring flood-tech technology to the Houston area, tearing out his hair.
“What’s really happened is innovation and alternative ways of doing flood mitigation are literally being pushed out,” he said. “Pushed away.”
Zeve said the flood control district consistently says no to different versions of the concept proposed to Melton because of the potential liability.
“The reason why we tell these folks that we’re not interested in active management is it introduces one or more potential points of failure during a flood event,” he explained. “We’re very concerned about the additional legal liabilities introduced by one of those systems. Because all it takes is one person to flood… They can say it’s your fault because you didn’t operate the system correctly — and then it’s who is right and who is wrong, and we have enough problems as it is.”
No real comparisons
Thousands of ponds surrounded by grassy slopes dot the Houston region. Man-made, they serve a purpose: when it storms, the area’s rainwater is meant to drain into the pond, away from buildings.
When the water reaches certain height, it drains into the nearest outflow stream. That system, which leverages the laws of gravity to mitigate the risk of flooding, has worked with varying degrees of success over the years. But now, some tech companies are suggesting giving nature a hand — what’s known as active management. If a meter and pump could be installed to augment the process, draining ponds and making room for more water before severe rains hit, they argue, it could prevent stormwater from being released into the waterways until the threat of flooding had passed.
One of the companies attempting to change Zeve’s mind about such technology is OptiRTC.
The Boston-based company has partnered with cities such as Ormond Beach, Fla., to actively manage their stormwater. In Ormond Beach, a major storm in 2009 sent down 30 inches of rain in 72 hours, significantly flooding portions of town. Afterward, said Shawn Finley, the city’s public works director, Ormond Beach improved the connections between its detention ponds and partnered with OptiRTC to install a pump where the system connected to an outflow stream.
The area surrounding the system has not flooded in the two subsequent hurricanes, although Ormond Beach has yet to re-experience the intensity of rain that occurred in 2009.
“It gives us peace of mind more than anything else,” Finley said. “If we were to have a bad situation, we feel like that’s one part of town we wouldn’t have to worry as much about.” The city pays between $9,000 and $10,000 a year for OptiRTC to maintain the system.
But even with other cities implementing the technology, it’s hard to find a test case that would handle the volumes of water seen in the Houston region.
“Our storm events and the volume of rain that we get in Harris County — unfortunately for us, it’s larger than most places in the country,” Zeve said. “So, it’s hard to find a place on the ground to match our conditions in Harris County.”
Proof of concept
The Resilience Innovation Hub hosted its virtual grand opening in Houston in January. Its 32 members are focused on all aspects of
disaster resilience, including how to automatically switch off a home’s power during a flood and how to protect a car from water damage. The Hub was launched in part by the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group whose members are searching for ways to lower the costs associated with storms.
“Public and private-sector insurers and reinsurers have lost over a trillion dollars on the U.S. Gulf Coast alone,” Seline said.
Still, the Hub’s members have found new privatesector solutions are a tough sell to local governments, Seline said. “There’s no office or process to introduce something that isn’t traditional,” he explained.
For example, Floodframe, a waterproof cloth barrier that is installed around a home’s perimeter and unfurls to protect against floods, markets itself as a cost-effective alternative to paying to raise a home. But Seline said the company, which had hoped to pitch its product to city programs interested in protecting low- and moderateincome housing, has yet been able to launch a pilot.
Of course, there’s the private sector, which includes developers that invest considerable resources into preventing flooding.
Howard Hughes Corp. — famous for its masterplanned communities, including The Woodlands and Bridgeland — has developed networks of detention and retention ponds, which it stocks with fish and kayaks and landscapes with plants that attract wildlife. The developer has made it a point to plan for storm events: In Bridgeland, where the lead developer was a civil engineer with a background in drainage, 22 percent of the land was reserved for open space and drainage investment, and detention ponds exceed the county’s minimum guidelines in terms of capacity.
“Instead of fighting nature, we decided we’d work with it,” Melton said. Not a single Bridgeland home flooded during Hurricane Harvey.
Melton said the OptiRTC solution sounded interesting. But he was unsure about impacts on areas downstream or the potential for a mechanical failure, and in turn looked to the authority of the Harris County Flood Control District, which he believed had an understanding of the greater picture.
“They might have some creative ideas that could be more of a private-public partnership,” he said. “We’d like to be part of that testing to see if that would work out.”
And so the conversation has landed back in the Harris County Flood Control District’s lap in a manner Zeve called “circular.”
“It’s just one of those things where a lot of people, and rightly so, are scared of increasing their risk and liability when it comes to major flood events.”