Experts: City must use better flood data
Engineers and elected officials are using outdated tools to assess flood risks and make coastal areas more resilient to storms, which are becoming increasingly severe and frequent, a panel of experts testified Monday at a congressional committee hearing in Houston.
The panel, convened by U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher for a House Science subcommittee hearing, told Congress members that scientists have become better than ever at forecasting hurricanes and storm surges.
Yet Houston remains acutely vulnerable to major storms, they said, and the metro area’s economy will face repeated threats from future hurricanes if refineries and chemical plants around the ship channel do not receive better protection.
“Current engineering and political science methodologies are antiquated. Our floodplain maps are wrong and understate the risk,” said Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University’s SSPEED (Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters) Center. “In many ways, our current thinking about flooding is obsolete. We are not going to control storms like Harvey. We can learn to live with them.”
Another panelist, Hanadi Rifai, director of the Hurricane Resilience Research Institute at the University of Houston, said storms like Harvey are “the new normal,” and future hurricanes and severe storms “will be more
frequent, more intense, linger around longer and move slower.”
Though congressional committees typically meet in Washington, D.C., Fletcher, D-Houston, instead called a hearing of the House Science Committee’s environment subcommittee, which she chairs, at the West Loop Campus of Houston Community College.
The pointed testimony about the urgency of making coastal areas more storm-resilient left Fletcher with the impression that flood modeling may leave areas unprepared for future storms if the models rely too heavily on data from prior disasters.
“Every hurricane has been different,” Fletcher said. “…Thinking creatively and thinking outside the box is what we need. If you look at Addicks and Barker (reservoirs), they are some of the greatest investments the federal government has made in our area. And they’ve changed the way that we live here, because of those floods in the 1930s. So, we need big-scale thinking about this problem.”
Joining Fletcher at the hearing were U.S. Reps. Brian Babin, R-Woodville, Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas, Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land, and Randy Weber, R-Friendswood.
Among those testifying Monday was Emily Grover-Kopec, director of the insurance practice at One Concern, a company that seeks to develop disaster preparation and response through artificial intelligence. She contended that machine learning and AI could help local leaders decide during storms whether to evacuate large metro areas.
“Our AI platform removes the elements of human bias and insufficient data in times of crisis, providing objective situational awareness in near real time to drive informed response,” Grover-Kopec said.
Weber, whose district runs along the coast from Beaumont to Freeport, appeared skeptical of the idea. During the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, he said, officials working in emergency management centers made decisions “based on families and houses and neighborhoods and, yes, industry.”
Grover-Kopec acknowledged that some people are hesitant to embrace machine learning due to the perception that is it biased in one way or another, but she insisted One Concern builds its models “in a way to avoid that bias.”
At one point, Blackburn urged Congress members to find more ways to get the private sector involved in flood mitigation and resilience, because the federal government lacks enough funds.
In his prepared testimony, National Weather Service director Louis Uccellini pointed to newly developed technology by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that uses unmanned devices to better track cyclones. The agency is working with private firms to improve the technology, Uccellini said.
Russ Poppe, executive director of the Harris County Flood Control District, said he appreciated that Blackburn appeared to be challenging flood control officials “to be forward thinking.”
The flood control district already is redrawing its floodplain maps using FEMA funds, though Poppe said the process will take another three to four years as it moves through the slow-churning wheels of federal bureaucracy.
As for machine learning, Poppe said, “I definitely think there’s a place for computing in how we look at things moving forward.”
He said he would hesitate to remove humans from the process altogether, though. The flood control district already relies on modeling to analyze storm systems, but an engineer makes the final decision.
“Can you write an algorithm that takes into account morals and ethics?” Poppe said. “I don’t know.”