HOUSTON (AP) — Sharon Carr is frustrated. Like many others who lost power after Hurricane Beryl crashed off the coast of Texas earlier this week, she went to a cooling center in Houston to get relief from the summer heat while the city utility company warned that restoring electricity to everyone it may take longer than they could expect.
“There is a lot of wind, we have no power. It’s been raining for a long time, we don’t have power,” said Carr, who was also no electricity for a week in May when a destructive storm known as a derecho swept through the area.
Carr, who works for the city’s transportation and drainage department, thinks more could be done to keep the lights on — or at least restore them more quickly — if Houston and other urban areas prone to severe weather stopped concentrating. on immediate problems and look at the bigger picture, including climate change.
“This shouldn’t keep happening,” she said. “If it’s broken, let’s fix it.”
Hurricane Beryl is the latest in a long series of devastating storms that have paralyzed Houston, underscoring the city’s inability to sufficiently fortify itself against weather events driven by climate change. Past storms, such as Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Harvey in 2017, made it clear that the city needed to remove trees, reinforce floodplain protections and bury more power lines underground, but these efforts were insufficient or were completely crushed by the recent storms that flooded the city and cut off power to millions.
With climate change warming ocean water, fueling storms that are more powerful and intensifying much more quickly, experts say cities need to rethink how they prepare for and respond to such events.
“It’s a totally different game than what we’re playing today,” said Michelle Meyer, director of the Center for Hazard Reduction and Recovery at Texas A&M University. The old playbook, she said, “doesn’t work anymore.”
If we rebuild, it will flood again
Where and how developers build is an obvious question, he said Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Barack Obama. He said this became evident to him 20 years ago while working in Florida, where four successive hurricanes were not enough to stop waterfront development.
“You have to ask yourself: How many times do we need to rebuild something before we rebuild it differently or not rebuild it in the same location?” he said.
Fugate believes taxpayers are increasingly shouldering the burden, supporting expensive insurance programs for at-risk areas when developers could instead stop building in storm-prone areas and residents could move out of flood plains.
“It’s the hardest system to implement because people resist it,” said Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University’s severe storm center. “People really like where they live, as a general proposition.”
Buyouts in lieu of insurance payments are one way to get people to move, but Fugate notes that such programs often take a long time to kick in after a storm. Once those funds are ready, persuading someone to make an acquisition will be “nearly impossible,” he said.
Problems with known solutions
In many cases, authorities know what actions are needed to mitigate severe climate disasters, but find them difficult to implement.
For example, the city of Houston commissioned a report documenting how falling trees caused power outages after Hurricane Ike in 2008. But no one wanted to cut down the trees that still stood. Today, utility officials note, they install underground electrical lines for every new construction project.
Updating the city’s electrical infrastructure could also go a long way toward avoiding power outages, Meyer said, noting that North Carolina did the same after Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
“They were really thinking about the future, like, ‘OK, we’re not going to be in this situation again,’” she said.
CenterPoint Energy, which supplies power to Houston, has partially installed a “smart grid” system that automatically redirects power to unaffected lines during an outage. A document on the utility’s website noted that 996 of the devices had been installed in 2019 – less than half the network at the time. It is unclear whether further progress has been made since then. The company did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
A changing reality
With more storms like Beryl expected due to climate change, cities are having to plan for the worst – and the worst is getting even nastier.
“It’s all about learning to live with water,” Blackburn said.
After Hurricane Harvey – the most violent hurricane to hit the US in more than a decade when it made landfall in Texas in August 2017 – Houston approved a $2.5 billion bond measure to finance energy reduction projects. flood damage in Harris County, which includes the city. The action resulted in “a lot of improvements,” Blackburn said, but was based on old flood projections.
Additionally, a task force created by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in 2018 made dozens of recommendations in a nearly 200-page report, including investigating ways to strengthen public services and creating an inventory of mitigation and resilience projects that are needed throughout the state.
But with the weather becoming increasingly unpredictable, even cities that make improvements can be caught unprepared if they don’t plan with the future in mind. The “diabolical” component of climate change, Blackburn said, is that the goalposts keep moving: as cities adjust to heightened risk, the risk rises again.
Scientists are more equipped than ever to make decisions about evacuations, development and other measures using computer systems that can predict the damage a given storm will inflict, noted Shane Hubbard, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin.
And yet, he added, all the computing power in the world can’t match the unpredictability of climate change. Warming oceans are driving rapidly intensifying climate events that challenge models and rapidly change conditions on the ground.
“That’s the thing I’m most worried about” moving forward, Hubbard said.
Complicating matters in Texas, some leaders still don’t recognize climate change. The report issued by the governor’s task force in 2018 noted that powerful natural disasters in Texas would become more frequent due to climate change. But he made no mention of “climate change,” “global warming” or the reduction of greenhouse gases in Texas, the country’s oil refining epicenter and which leads the U.S. in terms of carbon emissions. Texas is a state where politicians, at least publicly, are deeply skeptical about climate change.
Cities must be willing to face the scientific facts before their planning can truly improve, says Blackburn.
Asked whether coastal cities in general are prepared for climate change, Meyer said simply: “No.”
She said prevention and mitigation measures must evolve to the point where a Category 1 hurricane “will not be a problem in the future.”
A city like Houston “shouldn’t be touched by a Cat 1,” she said.
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Walling reported from Chicago. Associated Press/Report for America writer Nadia Lathan in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report. Follow Walling on X: @Melina Walling.
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