Houston was warned

The following is an excerpt from a column in the New York Times by David Leonhardt on Aug. 30.:

“Houston’s perfect storm is coming — and it’s not a matter of if but when,” journalists wrote, a year and a half ago. “Why isn’t Texas ready?”

The story was a joint project of The Texas Tribune, an excellent local publication, and ProPublica, the deservedly well-regarded national group. Headlined “Hell and High Water,” it exposed the lack of preparedness, and downright denial, in Houston about flood damage. The project mixes maps and text, and you can dip into it briefly or dig into the details.

“We’re sitting ducks. We’ve done nothing,” Phil Bedient, a Rice University professor and storm-surge expert, says in the story. “We’ve done nothing to shore up the coastline, to add resiliency . . . to do anything.”

The article isn’t perfectly clairvoyant. But the story offered an important — and, sadly, unheeded — message: Even though it’s pos- sible to mitigate the effects of extreme weather, we’re instead making choices that aggravate them.

In Slate, Henry Grabar points out that grasslands around the city could have absorbed some of the nearly 52 inches of rain that have fallen so far — had they not been cut by development. To make matters worse, he writes, officials “encouraged development in low-lying, flood-prone areas without regard to future risk.”

At CityLab, Tanvi Misra notes that the failure to prepare for floods often hurts low-income, minority communities the most. These communities “are most vulnerable to flooding, or near petrochemical plants and Superfund sites that can overflow during the storm. This is especially true for Houston.” So far, Harvey has submerged an area greater than 15 times the size of Manhattan. “It’s basically impossible for any of us to get our heads around the scope of just how much damage there’s going to be when this is over,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted.