Hurricane Harvey
Labels: hurricanes
posted by Tory Gattis @ 1:36 PM
Monday, August 28, 2017
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8 Comments:
Give us more encouragement...houston has got to be more than no zoning, trafficand development...add to the Houston spirit not just growth!
Agreed - upcoming post.
Charlie Hebdo and Politico are a bunch of clowns.
Growth at the expense of proper planning and regulated development has much to blame for the scale of the disaster in Houston. Other cities do a much, much better job at balancing growth and smart development that protects the lives and investments of homeowners.
Actually, there are now a ton of articles refuting that, and we're writing a report at COU compiling them. If the wetlands hadn't been developed, they would have absorbed less than 0.4% of Harvey's rain - a trivial amount.
I am not even talking about wetland development. I am talking about building adequate flood prevention mechanisms, drainage infrastructure and more retention ponds to hold water rather than just relying on two reservoirs that were built in the 1930's when Houston's population was a fraction of what it is now.
Developers in Houston should be required to build that infrastructure and should have been doing that for decades, like in other, better regulated cities. Instead, the fly-by-night nature of development in Houston allowed for developers to build neighborhoods without using land for those purposes. And now the chickens have come home to roost for decades of bad public policy.
My understanding is that developers *have* been required to do that (thus all of the large fountain retention ponds in new developments), but I've never read a clear understanding of how they work (county? state? region? city? all developments or just a certain size?) or how effective they've been.
Newer developments perhaps but in the past, they have not been required to the degree of other cities or based on the risk that faces a low lying area like Houston.
This is a colossal disaster but, sadly, one that Houston may experience again soon. Major flooding events in Houston are now an annual occurrence because the city lacks the infrastructure to handle the scale of rains that have been occurring. Harvey is just the latest and worst. When things dry out a major policy re-think is in order and that includes, for example, possibly condemning whole sections of neighborhoods in the city to expand flood infrastructure and build more canals. Most of those houses are still underwater and are a total loss at this point. Relying on a few bayous constructed decades ago is no longer adequate given the population changes and climate change.
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