How a 'Monster' Hurricane Could Swamp Houston and Sink America
Cars remain stranded along a flooded section of Interstate 45 after heavy rains overnight in Houston, Tuesday, May 26, 2015. David J. Phillip / AP File Photo
The nation's fourth-largest city does not drain well. And that will someday have catastrophic impacts for the rest of the nation.
In the fall of 2002, I found myself in the control room at Houston TranStar, a multiagency facility that helps oversee transportation operations and emergency management in the nation’s fourth-largest city. At the time, I was working as a consultant on a post-9/11 Federal Transit Administration emergency preparedness program and the team I was traveling with got a tour of the facility.
During our visit, some of the lights on a large control room map were blinking, indicating that water levels were rising in some of Houston’s local bayous and waterways following some recent heavy rains. It wasn’t anything too serious—par for the course for Houston.
I asked our host from Harris County: “What would happen if there were a repeat of the 1900 Galveston hurricane?”
The answer: The control room would be “lit up like a Christmas tree.”
Houston does not drain well, a fact that everyone who works in local emergency management knows well.
It doesn’t take a major hurricane to cause widespread damage in the city and its surrounding area. Significant rainfall over Memorial Day weekend last year—which dumped, in some cases, 11 inches on Houston in a few hours—inundated freeways and low-lying areas. The year before my visit to Houston, Tropical Storm Allison dumped 35 inches of rain on the city over five days.
In 2008, Houston dodged a bullet when Hurricane Ike, a Category 2 storm, slightly changed course before landfall. Still, it did rank as the nation’s third-most costly storm with damages estimated to be around $28 billion.
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So how would Houston fare if there were a repeat of the 1900 hurricane, a storm that destroyed nearby Galveston and killed at least 8,000 people on that low-lying barrier island city? Depending on the strength and precise trajectory, it would be catastrophic—not just for Houston, one of the nation’s most important cities, but for the entire U.S. economy.
In “Hell and High Water,” a new eye-popping joint report from ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, Houston’s severe hurricane risk is put on full display, complete with interactive maps and disaster scenarios.
While the immediate impacts from Houston’s inevitable “monster hurricane” will certainly be horrific, the long-term economic fallout will be devastating for the rest of the United States.
Houston’s Ship Canal, connecting the city’s busy port facilities with the Gulf of Mexico, is lined with oil and gas refineries, other critical energy infrastructure and chemical plants. It's extremely vulnerable to storm surge pushing inland from Galveston Bay.
With a perfect storm in Houston, “it’s going to kill America’s economy,” U.S. Rep. Pete Olson says in the report.
According to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune:
Thousands of cylindrical storage tanks line the sides of the narrow Houston Ship Channel. Some are as small as residential propane tanks, others as big as the average 2-story house.
Inside them sits one of the world’s largest concentrations of oil, gases and chemicals—all key to fueling the American economy, but also, scientists fear, a disaster waiting to happen.
Hundreds of thousands of people live in industrial towns clustered around the Ship Channel, in the path of Houston’s perfect storm. And if flooding causes enough of what’s inside the storage containers to leak at even one industrial facility nearby, scientists say, the damage could be far-reaching.
A chemical release could fuel an explosion or fire, potentially imperiling industrial facilities and nearby homes and businesses. Nearly 300,000 people live in residential areas identified by one scientist as particularly at risk to a chemical or oil spill.
Pleasant, eh?
Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive's Route Fifty.
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