Mother Nature, man-made folly meet in Houston
Nursing home residents confined to their chairs as brown water rises around them. Waves lapping into a shopping center as if high tide has arrived. Residential neighborhoods accessible only by boat or helicopter.
These are some of the scenes that have appeared over the last couple of days from Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city and, for now, the site of a natural disaster that lives up to the “catastrophic” label. Harvey, the hurricane that is now a swirling and relentless tropical storm and is heading toward Louisiana, has left at least nine dead, with the possibility of more bodies emerging once flooding dissipates and the full extent of the carnage becomes clear.
Harvey is, of course, the handiwork of Mother Nature. Hurricanes routinely form in the Gulf of Mexico in August and September, and have wreaked havoc on Texas, Florida, Louisiana and other points in the Southeastern U.S. almost every season. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan even hammered the Pittsburgh region as it marched up the East Coast, bringing almost 6 inches of rain in a 24-hour period and causing widespread flooding.
But some of the devastation Harvey has brought to Houston is man-made.
As many have noted, our changing climate isn’t necessarily the spark that causes hurricanes, tornadoes or other forms of severe weather, but our warming climate has likely strengthened them, will make them pack a more devastating punch and become more frequent. But Houston is uniquely vulnerable to flooding because of its anything-goes ethos when it comes to development.
Like its Sun Belt brethren Atlanta, Orlando and Phoenix, the Houston metropolitan area has seen turbocharged growth in recent years thanks to inflows of immigrants, young people and older Northerners looking to escape winter chill. Houston itself is known for its minimal-to-nonexistent zoning laws, privileging the rights of property owners to do with their land as they please. This has led to such incongruous arrangements as, we kid you not, a sex shop, department store and a skyscraper all bumping up against one another. There has also been a laissez-faire approach to regional planning, with developers bulldozing up acres upon acres of earth to build more office parks, townhouses and shopping centers.
This has resulted in a loss of wetlands and prairie that can absorb water when it rains. According to a 2016 investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, runaway development “means rain is now falling on what are called impervious or impermeable surfaces, like concrete, preventing the ground underneath from absorbing it. So the rainfall becomes ‘runoff,’ traveling to wherever it is easiest for it to flow. The water might flow to a nearby stream, but on its way the water could flood homes, cars and businesses, or the stream might be overwhelmed by that water, causing more flooding nearby.”
Officials in the Houston region have also been slow to update flood-control systems, leading to overtaxed reservoirs and a lack of dikes and levees that could help ease the blow when something like Harvey comes ashore and brings 40 inches of rain with it.
Zoning laws can be a source of fierce wrangling within communities. We’ve seen that recently in Washington County’s Donegal Township, as a newly adopted zoning ordinance was met with unyielding resistance from some residents. But rather than encroaching on individual freedom, the ordeals Houston has endured in recent days demonstrate the value of thoughtful and rigorous planning and zoning.