There is no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster
Harvey showed how development impacts Houston.
Almost exactly five years ago I was on the campus of Rice University, teaching my first classes of the semester. I tend to teach in the afternoons, and I took my class outside to watch the eclipse. A few students had brought special cardboard glasses. Some watched the light shining on the ground through pinholes cut in pieces of paper. I realized I could see the crescent shape by looking at almost anything: the shadow cast by my open hand, the space between the leaves on a tree.
That was a Tuesday, and by Wednesday we had turned our eyes to the Gulf of Mexico, where the remnants of a hurricane that had struck Barbados and the Yucatan Peninsula reformed and took aim at the Texas coast. On Thursday, I could see the outer bands of the approaching storm in the evening sky. On Friday, as the storm made landfall to our south, in Rockport, my family ate a nervous dinner at our neighbors’ house and walked home in the pouring rain.
On Saturday night, heaving bands of thunderstorms passed over our house, dropping as much as five inches of rain in homes. People took shelter on their second floors; those who didn’t have second floors climbed onto their roofs. They waved white flags and waited for rescue. Rescue began arriving the next morning in unexpected forms: teenagers in canoes, beer brewers in their flatbed Army truck, anyone with access to a kayak or a boat, anyone willing to coordinate rescue, food, clothes, diapers and medicine. At George R. Brown so many volunteers arrived that they had to be turned away.
By Tuesday, when Harvey turned toward Beaumont and Port Arthur, I saw the sun for the first time in four days, and through the pinhole in the clouds it made, saw a city that had been changed: over 150,000 homes flooded; a third of the city underwater. Some places had recorded 61 inches of rain — 19 trillion gallons for the entire metro region, enough to compress the earth two centimeters.
In my neighborhood in west Houston, street flooding came with the rain and receded as the storm turned to our east. Then, when the Army Corps of Engineers opened the dams at Addicks and Barker reservoirs, the water returned again, bub
bling out of storm drains, out of the sewer, getting deeper night after night while we tried but failed to sleep. On Wednesday, the bayou lapped at our front door while airboats flew up and down the streets. A guardsman asked if we wanted to leave, telling us the water would get deeper that night, but he didn’t know how much — maybe inches, maybe feet. We chose to evacuate, and carried our most precious belongings in backpacks. I held one child’s hand as we trudged through the fetid floodwater and carried the other child on my hip.
What shocked me most when I left my flooded neighborhood — more than the sight of entire streets where every home was underwater, more than the smell of wet rot and contagion — was finding so much of the city still normal. Buses ran; food could be delivered. People gathered at coffee shops and bars to talk about the latest episode of their favorite television show. For these people, maybe nothing had changed — as if the storm had come and gone with no more consequence than the eclipse.
Houston Flood Museum
When my family returned to our neighborhood after Harvey, we found a waterline of debris about 15 horizontal feet from our house. That the house itself was miraculously intact was not just a matter of luck, but of privilege, I realized. It was also a responsibility. We helped neighbors and friends and coworkers muck out their moldy sheetrock and carpet, their books and record collections, their heirlooms and photo albums — irreplaceable archives of family history. They were lucky, they said, to have not lost everything they owned.
After most of the mucking work we could find to do was done, after we returned to work and I started teaching again, I felt that responsibility begin to change and grow, especially as so much of the city returned to “normal.” I didn’t want to return to normal, which isn’t to say that that there was anything about the disaster I particularly wanted to preserve, but rather that I was beginning to understand that normal is what had led us to disaster in the first place.
I didn’t grow up in Houston, but I’ve lived here long enough to know that every time the city floods there is the same predictable pattern: we come together, we muck out homes, we rebuild, and then life goes on pretty much as before. But Harvey wasn’t like other storms, and I didn’t want to respond in the same old way. In particular, I didn’t want to move on without making space for people’s stories about what they had been through. I’m a writer and I know the work that stories can do to make sense of that which is nonsense, to make order from chaos, to make a purpose from the messiness and joy and occasional disaster that is life.
In the months after Harvey, I brought together a massive team of people to launch a project called the Houston Flood Museum. Funded by the Houston Endowment, we collected dozens of poems, essays, documentaries, paintings and photographs from the community through an open call; and with the help of community partners, we collected audio recordings, poems written by schoolchildren, poems written by men incarcerated at the Harris County Jail, podcasts, articles, archival footage of community tribunals, memorials and remembrances. We sent trained writers into neighborhoods that had flooded during Harvey — and some that had flooded many times before — to lead writing workshops that helped community members to write about those experiences, about what they had lost and what they wanted for the future.
In that first year, I began to see patterns emerge: flooding had affected hundreds of thousands of people, but it wasn’t Harvey’s only effect. Near the Houston Ship Channel, communities were exposed not only to flooding, but also to harmful carcinogens due to toxic emissions, spills and fires that sent black plumes of smoke into the sky for days and days. In affluent neighborhoods, people often had flood insurance that covered the damage to their homes, and within months those families returned home and got back to what we were still calling “normal.” Elsewhere in the city, especially in lower-income communities, it took months for people to find the resources to muck out. Some hadn’t found those resources weeks or even months later — some are still looking even now. People were being denied assistance because they had inherited their home from a relative and heirship properties were not being recognized as legitimate. People couldn’t get assistance because they called the hotline and found no one who spoke their language.
For the past five years I’ve been listening to stories like these — first as part of The Houston Flood Museum, and now as part of a book called “More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas” published last month by University of Texas Press. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about flooding in this city: I’ve learned it isn’t new, it isn’t neutral, and at this point in our history, we can no longer call it an accident.
Not new
Houston has flooded at least 50 times since its founding — at least 16 floods in the first 100 years, and 34 floods in the 86 years since. Founded on wetlands and coastal prairie, to talk about flooding in Houston is somewhat imprecise. It isn’t a flood when a wetland fills with water; it becomes a flood when the wetland is drained and paved and when the prairie grass — which would have opened up the structure of the dense clay soils so that the ground acted less like a bowl and more like a sponge — has all been cleared away.
The city flooded for the first time in September 1837, 13 months after its founding, when a hurricane submerged Main Street to a depth of 4 feet. At that time, the plan for the town encompassed about 62 total blocks — few of them were yet built. Now, the metro region is home to over 7 million people and covers an area of over 10,000 square miles — a vast archipelago of pavement the size of Rhode Island. In the years between 1992 and 2010 alone, developers removed 25,000 acres of wetlands from our region, and between 1997 and 2016 added 386 square miles of impervious surfaces — an area larger than Galveston County. In that same two-decade time period, Houston suffered at least 11 catastrophic floods, an average of one every 20 months.
In April 2016, the Tax Day Flood inundated nearly 10,000 structures and brought the Addicks and Barker reservoirs to historic levels; a month later, the second of two Memorial Day floods damaged structures in multiple watersheds across Harris and Montgomery counties. Two years after Harvey, in September 2019, Tropical Storm Imelda arrived almost without warning and flooded 4,000 structures. The following year, in 2020, when there were so many storms that forecasters ran out of names, tropical depression Beta became the first storm named for a Greek letter to make landfall, and left large swaths of the city underwater. Five floods in five years, and that’s not even counting all the minor flooding that occurs every time we have a good rain.
Not neutral
I learned that there are some neighborhoods that have flooded 10 times since Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. I also learned that the wealthiest neighborhoods almost never flood. Because of outdated and unjust criteria that evaluate projects based on the total monetary value of the property protected, not on the number of people protected — criteria that date back to the Flood Control Act of 1936 — wealthy neighborhoods almost always qualify for flood mitigation projects, and poorer neighborhoods almost never do. In my affluent neighborhood, for instance, the city has just finished installing massive underground culverts to capture stormwater when it leaves the bayou and approaches our homes, diverting it back to the bayou and then out towards the bay. Elsewhere in this flood-prone city, residents haven’t seen a single drainage project in decades. Nothing stands between their homes and flooding but a 3-foot ditch.
Over the past five years, little has changed in this regard. There are proposals for flood mitigation projects in vulnerable communities, but they haven’t received federal funding yet. Some people seem to think more infrastructure will save us from future storms: more channelizing the bayous, massive underground drainage systems and possibly a third reservoir. The idea being that it’s the water that needs to change — not the way we live with it and each other — and that if we can just control the water better we won’t have to get out of its way.
Not natural
Over the past five years of listening to stories about flooding in this city, I’ve come to realize there really is no such thing as a “natural” disaster. The circumstances that create disastrous conditions occur when a hazard (such as a hurricane or a winter storm) exceeds a community’s capacities to address it. We tend to think of these hazards as socially neutral — as something that happens to all of us, equally, and in ways that are out of our control. Rain is produced by a hurricane, for instance; it pools as stormwater in the streets; it moves and enters peoples’ homes. But it becomes a disaster — the kind of disaster from which so many people have not recovered even five years later — when the rain hits the ground and encounters a history of people deciding what a city should be, and who should get to live in it, and how.
The disasters we face are not limited to flooding, and they’re not unique to Houston. The same year that Hurricane Harvey devastated so many of our friends and neighbors, Hurricane Maria claimed the lives of over 3,000 people in Puerto Rico; in the Virgin Islands, Irma made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane. Over 1,400 tornadoes were a major cause of $18 billion in thunderstorm damages in the United States alone. The following year, in 2018, a wildfire leveled the entire town of Paradise, Calif. — the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history at that time, though in the years since, wildfires in the Southwest have become so severe we’ve had to create new names for them, “gigafires.”
Once, I might have wondered what these disasters have to do with us here in Houston, but in the five years since Harvey, I’ve realized: everything.
Every time a disaster happens, we have chosen to preserve things exactly as they are: dams are fortified, wealthy neighborhoods are given more drainage infrastructure, developers pave over more and more of the coastal prairie; the Ship Channel is widened and deepened, again, oil leases are auctioned in the Gulf, a new 430mile-long pipeline is completed and now moves 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. Can we call whatever happens next a disaster, when so little has changed?
But if disasters aren’t natural — if they become disasters only when they exceed our capacity to respond — then we are not helpless; there is more we can do — and we must. We must respond by lifting up those who are most vulnerable, by acting with each other in mind, by making room at the decision-making tables for those who find themselves at the frontlines of disaster time and time again. We can protect communities and ecosystems by reducing environmental harm; we can restore the wetlands; we can give the bayous the land they need to swell and meander and carry stormwater out to sea. A more just city is within our reach.
I am reminded of that eclipse I watched with my students in the days before the storm made landfall, when the hurricane was still a swirling spiral in the Gulf — a real storm heading toward us but still just an idea in so many of our minds. I remember how we came outside to see the shadow of the moon crossing in front of the sun, how the shadows got longer and sharper and seemed to come from everything we looked at, even from us.
Harvey is like that, too: it showed us the shadow we cast — as a city, as people — over the land on which we live, and over one another. It showed us who we are, and who we’ve always been. But if I’ve learned anything in the past five years, it’s that the future isn’t written yet. There’s more this city still can be.
Lacy M. Johnson is a Houstonbased professor, curator, activist and author of the essay collection “The Reckonings” (Scribner, 2018) and the memoir “The Other Side” (Tin House, 2014) — both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists — and the memoir “Trespasses” (U Iowa Press, 2012). She is editor, with the graphic designer Cheryl Beckett, of “More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas” (UT Press, 2022). She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the founding director of the Houston Flood Museum.