A hurricane exposes Houston’s infrastructure weaknesses — again
[...]
Pinto co-authored a 2022 report looking back at Harvey and its lasting impacts on Houston. It found that almost one in five residents surveyed said they still hadn’t fully recovered from the storm. The storm also changed people’s attitudes toward building regulations in a city famous for not having zoning laws. More than 90 percent of respondents said they were in favor of policies like restricting construction in flood plains, blocking development in wetlands, and building codes requiring flood-prone homes to be elevated.
However, many of these measures target the losses specific to Harvey, which were mainly caused by extreme flooding rather than the high winds that might wreak havoc in a stronger storm. “We tend to prepare for the last war. That’s how we allocate resources,” Pinto said.
And many of the post-Harvey proposals have been ignored.
Houston’s city council did approve some new regulations to address flooding risk, but people are still building homes in floodplains and paving over wetlands that buffer flooding, in an effort to accommodate the city’s booming population.
Beryl, on the other hand, moved faster through Houston and inflicted most of its damage from the strong winds and the tornadoes it spawned. Those 80 mph gusts knocked over utility poles and dropped trees onto power lines, which led to the widespread electricity outages. In addition to cutting off air conditioning during a heat wave, the blackouts interrupted power to fuel pumps, forcing residents to wait hours for gasoline and diesel from the remaining operational stations. That’s a major blow in a notoriously sprawling, car-dependent city.
[...]
Together, these hurricanes illustrate that the intensity of the storm is only one factor in its destructive potential; the severity and the extent of the disaster also hinge on how many people are in harm’s way and what they do, or fail to do, to prepare. It’s what’s known as the expanding bullseye effect — as more people and development are put in the path of natural disasters, the damage of even weaker events can grow.
[...]