“The city’s flood system is supposed to protect the public from a 100-year storm, but it’s based on a rainfall total of 13 inches in 24 hours.”
The eyes of the nation are focused on Houston as it faces biblical amounts of rain. The pictures of those stranded on top of houses and stories of brave citizens and safety officers working hard to rescue flooded victims has brought tears, prayers, and donations from around the country.
For as heartwarming as all of the efforts are, and as scary as the storm is, engineers have been warning about the potential for a flood for years. While Americans should be praying for Houston, the people of that city and those around the country should demand that politicians take proactive steps to ensure that these events never happen again.
Houston is built on a giant flood plain. The nearby rivers such as the San Jacinto are shallow, low flow rivers. The dams built near them are used more for water storage than flood control. For example, the Lake Conroe reservoir 43 miles north of Houston only has 12% of the capacity of the Oroville dam in California.
The city’s flood system is supposed to protect the public from a 100-year storm, but it’s based on a rainfall total of 13 inches in 24 hours. Yet Houston gets an average of 50 inches a year and has already received 50 inches since hurricane Harvey made landfall.
Politicians had ample reason to believe that they should take precautionary measures, but they failed to do so. Engineers and local officials have discussed ways to avert even greater risks by improving zoning, reducing the amount of pavement to allow better drainage into the soil, building retention ponds in new housing developments and constructing new storm barriers. But when the engineers tried to encourage land-use controls, politicians and developers resisted the necessary changes.
This matches the lack of foresight in places like California for their recent flooding and also during hurricane Katrina, which overwhelmed Louisiana’s dilapidated flood control system. Politicians are good at holding news conferences, promising to move heaven and earth to save the people, and having heroic photo ops during a disaster.
But these places don’t need a hero—just a dedicated public servant who is willing to take a look at potential problems and have the spine to make a case to the people for preemptively dealing with it. That might mean higher taxes and the relative drudgery of researching and implementing a flood control system. But the alternative is a crisis of the fourth largest city in the United States becoming a lake and billions of dollars of damage.
As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Competent and conscientious public servants should be willing to make the argument that they should spend a little on prevention to avoid spending a good deal on clean-up. More than that, that prevention could have saved the lives of victims washed away in the flooding. That is why Americans should pray for Houston but hold the politicians accountable who didn’t do enough to prevent foreseeable flooding.
