As of Monday night, meteorologists estimate that Hurricane Harvey has dumped 20 to 40 inches of rain on the Houston area, and rainfall totals could reach as much as 50 inches by the end of the week–enough that the Army Corps of Engineers had to release water from area dams to keep flooding from getting out of control. By mid-Monday, several law enforcement agencies reported that they had each made well over 2,000 rescues. Nearly all major highways are flooded out.
Amid such massive flooding, a lot of people both inside and outside Texas have wondered why officials in Houston and surrounding Harris County didn’t order a mandatory evacuation. However, local officials from Mayor Sylvester Turner on down maintain that there was no safe way to evacuate millions of people in such a short period of time. Turner reiterated this in a press conference on Sunday. Watch here.
Turner put it bluntly.
“You cannot put–in the city of Houston–2.3 million people on the road. That is dangerous.”
He added that when you factor in Harris County, which has a total of 6.5 million people, it would have been “a nightmare” that would have “literally put people in harm’s way.”
This line is backed up by a number of my friends in the Houston area. Many of them, like Turner, remember Hurricane Rita in 2005. The city ordered an evacuation, which turned into what the Houston Chronicle described as the worst traffic jam in Houston history. A three-hour trip to San Antonio wound up taking well over 20 hours, and 100 people died–equal to the number of people who ultimately died when Rita came ashore. By comparison, as of Monday night, only three people have died in Houston.
One of my friends recalled that had Houston and Harris County evacuated, it would have been next to impossible for residents living in areas like Galveston and Texas City, which are closer to the coast, to escape. It’s hard not to agree. Galveston County has over 291,000 people. Putting close to seven million people on just a few stretches of highway in a short period of time is a disaster waiting to happen.
According to Slate’s Henry Grabar, this situation wouldn’t be nearly as dire if Houston’s natural defenses against flooding hadn’t been plowed over to make room for development. For years, wetlands and prairies surrounding Houston protected the city from major floods. However, as Houston has grown to become the fourth-largest city in the nation, those wetlands and prairies have disappeared at a rapid rate. The Katy Prairie has been reduced by three-fourths over the last few decades, and the opening of two major highways has only increased the burn.
As a result, when heavy rain rolls in, there aren’t many places for that water to go. So it takes the path of least resistance–one which leads right into Houston’s sewers, streams, and streets. Harvey is the sixth “hundred-year storm” to hit Houston since 1989, and 2017 marks the third year in a row that the city has endured a “devastating, once-in-a-lifetime flood.” It doesn’t help matters that local officials encourage development in areas within the 100-year floodplain–an area where you can’t get government-backed mortgages without either elevating your home or buying flood insurance.
This closely dovetails with the situation to the east in Louisiana. According to a revealing op-ed written by Paul VandeVelder in the Los Angeles Times in 2011, the government embarked on a massive project to dam up the upper Missouri River in 1944, the Pick-Sloan Plan. However, lawmakers had been warned a decade earlier that such a project would make it all but impossible to control flooding along the Mississippi River in the event of heavy runoff. Chief Engineer Lytle Brown argued in a 1934 report that building dams along the Missouri would merely send more water into the Mississippi–an argument that has been echoed by many river hydrologists over the years.
VandeVelder argues that the dams prevented barrier islands along the Gulf of Mexico–New Orleans’ main natural defense against flooding–from getting critical nutrients. Those islands disappeared in the half-century after the dams were built, leaving New Orleans more vulnerable to heavy rain.
The message is obvious. When development takes precedence over science and the environment, it’s only a matter of time before it comes back to haunt you. New Orleans and the rest of the lower Mississippi delta are now more vulnerable to storms and flooding than they would have been had lawmakers taken Brown’s advice and scrapped the Missouri dam project. Likewise, had developers in Houston been more conscious of the environmental costs of bulldozing nearby wetlands, we probably wouldn’t be debating whether or not someone should have told the nation’s fourth-largest city to evacuate.
(featured image courtesy Texas National Guard, part of public domain)
