Hurricane luck will run out, so let’s build the ‘Ike Dike’
It feels like Hurricane Nicholas took pity on us, in a way.
This was a sloppy-looking storm, and one that behaved erratically after forming in the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend. Although its trajectory and impact were hard to predict, we knew the tropical storm was heading for the Texas coast and bound to do something. So on Monday evening, most Houstonians were in a state of suspended animation, hunkered down at home, under an eerily beautiful pink and orange sky, waiting, once again, to see what the night would bring.
Those of us who could sleep amid the howling winds woke up to good news: Nicholas had mustered some ambition, making landfall on the Matagorda Peninsula shortly after midnight as a Category 1 hurricane. It then whuffled up the coast, uprooting trees and knocking down power lines and raining on everybody, but ultimately
seeming more oafish than anything else.
“This storm could have been a lot worse for the city of Houston,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said Tuesday morning.
That’s accurate. No deaths were immediately reported from Nicholas, and only a few highwater locations had been reported. Some 440,000 CenterPoint customers in the Houston region were without power Tuesday morning as a result of the storm, according to the company. But most Texans on the Gulf Coast did have power, which was — all things considered — a remarkable achievement as well as a pleasant surprise.
Not that there weren’t disappointments, like the cancellation of British pop star Harry Styles’ concert at NRG Stadium Monday night — surely the right move under the circumstances at the time.
“Safety must take priority, so please go home and be safe,” Styles tweeted Monday afternoon. “I’m so sorry, thank you for understanding. I love you all.”
Gov. Greg Abbott, for his part, made an unusual plea before the storm, tweeting to Texans on Sunday that they should “heed warnings from local officials and be sure to avoid high water.”
If only the governor were so respectful when it came to the mask and vaccine mandates that local authorities have been pushing for to bring an end to this 18-monthlong pandemic.
In any case, Abbott turned his focus back to politics soon enough. Monday evening, as Nicholas approached the Texas coast, the governor — who declined to take questions from the media at a briefing on storm preparations earlier in the day — appeared on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show to bash President Joe Biden’s new plan to promote vaccines. While there, he touted a monoclonal antibody treatment that he received after coming down with COVID-19.
“I’ve seen the value of Regeneron,” said Abbott, a pitch that echoed President Donald Trump’s own testimonial last year.
Back to Nicholas. The Houston region got lucky this week, just as we got lucky with Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 hurricane that made landfall in Louisiana last month and went on to kill dozens of people in four states. But our luck will run out at some point.
So let’s knock it off with the learned helplessness, shall we? The federal government should go ahead and build the “Ike Dike” — the proposed coastal barrier first envisioned (on a smaller scale) by Bill Merrell, a professor at Texas A&M University at Galveston. Merrell started pushing the idea shortly after Hurricane Ike caused massive damage to Galveston and other coastal communities in September 2008.
I checked with Evan Mintz, a former Houston Chronicle editorial board writer and a strong advocate for building the Ike Dike, to see if his mantra should be understood literally or metaphorically.
“Both,” Mintz said. “We should build the Ike Dike specifically, flood prevention generally, and Texas statewide officials need to lead on critical infrastructure issues rather than just pander to culture wars.”
It’s hard to disagree with that, isn’t it?
Some have argued that building the Ike Dike would give the impression that Houston’s most crucial vulnerability is to storm surge, rather than inland flooding. But that’s not an argument against the Ike Dike, per se. That’s a reflection of how low our expectations are — that we think the nation’s fourth-largest city (and a major hub of industry) can only be protected from one predictable catastrophe.
And now is the time to make the case for the Ike Dike. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last week released the final version of its Coastal Texas Study, six years in the making, which proposes various physical barriers to protect the region from storm surge. Texans on both sides of the aisle are backing the plan. And Abbott earlier this year signed bipartisan legislation to create the Gulf Coast Protection District, which can receive and issue funds for projects identified by the study.
The Army Corps of Engineers study is expected to go to Congress next month, where lawmakers will decide whether to pony up for the projects it identifies, which would cost $29 billion — a lot of money, of course, but less than the $30 billion in estimated damage that Ike caused.
So let’s make sure the nation hears from Houstonians on this subject in the coming weeks. We got lucky with Hurricane Nicholas — and when Houston gets lucky, the whole nation benefits. But luck is not a plan, much less a strategy: we all know that, and it’s time to act accordingly.