Harvey began with winds, but its legacy will be water
Hurricane Harvey began with raging winds, but its legacy will be water. Seemingly endless, relentlessly insidious water — a staggering 40 inches or more that swamped parts of Houston in just five days.
Harvey scooped tons of water from the sea and hurled it down on the nation’s fourth-largest city, drowning vast swathes of the landscape and battering it with almost a year’s worth of rainfall.
Rooftops became islands poking up through swirling floodwaters. Thousands of houses were destroyed, and tens of thousands more, soaked and pounded by the storm, could face the wrecking ball.
The water — and the muck and mold that follow — will create misery that will linger for years and likely cost tens of billions of dollars all told.
For many of the displaced in southeast Texas, floodwaters stole every possession, leaving them to navigate insurance forms and federal disaster aid applications as they ponder how to even move forward.
The deluge will instill deep anxiety, too, for many who lived through Harvey, and inflict lasting emotional scars on some survivors.
In a storm destined for the history books, it’s the ravages of the water that define the story.
A broken pipe in a house is reason to call a plumber. A house buried in water for weeks could mean it’s time for the demolition crew.
It’s too soon to know how many of more than 37,000 heavily damaged homes in Texas are salvageable, but Houston officials said some will be submerged in water for up to a month. Thousands have already been destroyed in the state. Evacuees are slowly returning to their inundated homes, and others are staying in government-paid hotels .
The longer a house is under water, the greater the damage.
Furniture, refrigerators and other appliances will almost certainly be ruined. Water can compromise or ruin wallboard, electrical systems, insulation, doors, windows and cabinets. Wooden floors warp, swell and can even float away; mold grows in the moist, humid interior, posing the risk of respiratory problems.
For those that can be repaired, civil engineers recommend that after the contaminated water and muck are removed, it’s best to strip out the wallboard and insulation so the house is reduced to the studs, which must be dried before any rebuilding begins.
Steve Cain, a Purdue University extension disaster specialist, offers simple advice:
“You don’t want to be rushing into your home after a flood,” he said. “You want to make sure to go back when it’s safe . ... You can fall through a floor, gas lines could be leaking, electrical systems can be damaged and if the electricity is not shut off, you can get electrocuted.”
A few inches of rain can snarl traffic. Forty inches or more of water pounding the pavement in less than a week can undermine the streets people drive on every day.
Big bridges will fare better in Texas. They’re likely to escape major damage because the flooding was caused by the gradual rising of water, according to Julio Ramirez, professor of civil engineering at Purdue.
New Orleans was transformed by the devastating impact of water from Hurricane Katrina. Now the same thing is happening in Houston, displacing people and businesses and disrupting the local economy.
Experts expect the recovery from Harvey to go far smoother than that of postKatrina .
“I think Houston will rebound much more gracefully, more quickly than New Orleans,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “People aren’t going to leave. It’s a diverse economy.”
Moody’s estimates the total economic loss from Katrina at $175 billion and Harvey’s could be as much as $108 billion. But it’s too early to know the full scope of the Texas disaster.
Superstorm Sandy. Katrina. And now Harvey.
The epic disasters in the New York metro area and New Orleans left residents in both places wrestling with the emotional anguish of losing their homes, their livelihoods and their sense of security. The same psychological trauma is likely to emerge in southeast Texas.