May Have To Move Houston To Higher Ground. Where To Put It

[TheMastersNemesis]

What we see could be Houston sooner than we expect when the Gulf of Mexico flows in due to global warming. It is not that high above sea level.

[Demtexan]

1. Over building.

No zoning.

Just pour more cement everywhere.

A lot of this rain is run off.

Not ground left to hold the water.

[defacto7]

3. Mistakes of lacking and lax regulation.

Amsterdam is built on stilts. Maybe Houston will need them too.

[Not Ruth]

7. I wonder what Venice, Italy will do

The ground floor of buildings there are set up to let the ocean just flow through. Perhaps buildings in TX need to do the same for rain.

[Demtexan]

9. I was thinking house boats.

They can float when needed.

[defacto7]

10. It will have to be pondered. Many cities will need to

rethink their positions and prepare.

[Not Ruth]

2. Al Gore won a Nobel Prize in 2007 for warning people

TX is a big state. In that respect, TX is luckier than most states. Move the people inland, fix climate change and move the people back. It might take a few generations, but it is definitely feasible.

[defacto7]

4. It may be the only way to survive. Humans do what

they have to do.

[NotASurfer]

5. Galveston figured it out after the 1900 hurricane

Big concrete sea wall, backfill, raise buildings or turn the first floor or two into basement. State of the art Roman tech, I have confidence even Texas can do it.

Of course we could just take steps to prevent the problem in the first place, strikes me as a better solution

[tammywammy]

8. Um, considering the effects of Hurricane Ike

I don't know that you can hold Galveston up as the gold standard.

[NotASurfer]

12. They didn't figure on things getting worse

Agree, if they knew then what we know now, it'd be several feet higher. Just saying I'm reasonably sure Houston can figure out the concept of fill dirt

[Igel]

13. Houston is Galveston moved.

Houston was a backwater and Galveston was the big port of entry for immigration, for shipping, for finances.

Houston took over when Galveston was seen as vulnerable and easily destroyed. All a matter of perspective: 50 years' history wasn't enough to say much about Galveston's long-term viability.

Houston's figuring it out, too: They're redoing a heck of a lot of drainage systems. Part of the problem is that "nice" places that could handle runoff routinely 50 years ago flood these days because now they get all the runoff from 2 and 3 miles up-slope or up-stream with nice, new, large draining systems that just dump the water into older areas. It gushes up through the storm drain grating. Or a safe area 15 years ago isn't safe not because of huge parking lots but simply because of all the additional housing. You put up a house with a 1500 sq ft footprint and you not only keep that land from absorbing anything, you also raise it a foot or two so that land can't hold flood waters. It really pays to look at flood plain maps when looking at land here, and then through in some additional margin of safety.

But Houston's problem isn't just paving over soil (a lot of the stuff down here is gumbo and not real absorbent anyway) but building in really bad places. A lot of the places that are flooded with some consistency are also old poor neighborhoods that built cheap houses on cheap land because that's all they can afford. (Looked at some when house hunting a decade back. From time to time you still find 1/4 acre lots with 50 or 60-year-old 500- or 600- sq-ft houses on them. (Those are easy to put on blocks. Some were just jacked up and put on cinder blocks.)

A third problem isn't one that anybody likes discussing but it's subsidence. A number of areas are inches lower now than they were 20 years ago. That not only makes them lower and more likely to have water standing on them, it also affects how fast water flows off and out through the (now flatter) draining system. We often rely on ground water and while it can be replenished fairly easily it isn't replenished quite quickly enough--the aquifers are open north of here, but often closed where some of the population is.00

This is leaving aside any climate change.

[politicat]

6. Limit parking lots, make them permeable.

Colorado Springs dealt with a form of this in the 1990s -- it doesn't get hurricanes, but if a storm cell holds over the mountains in the spring and melts the snow with rain, the city can just wash off the side of the mountain.

Parking lots are built for the day after Thanksgiving, not the normal use, so there's 3-4 times the actual needed capacity. (In fact, even Black Friday capacity is rarely what is paved.) If we built parking lots for actual normal use, we'd make retail about 95% more walkable, and reduce flooding by orders of magnitude. Which is what the Springs did -- new parking lots are now smaller, and they're water permeable.

I think Swiss Re, Convergence Re, Munich Re, and AXA are going to have to insist on rebuilding for sustainability. (The current model is to rebuild exactly what was there. It doesn't work, for obvious reasons.) If anyone can force a model change, it will be the catastrophic reinsurers and the insurance companies. This affects their bottom line, and they're tired of being the bad guys who charge more every year and still barely keep both their clients and their own bottom lines in the black. (Re is a totally different industry than insurance, and Re has been pushing climate as a disaster for decades. Insurance has been resisting, but if insurance can't get Re, they'll go along.)

[Igel]

16. It's a good idea.

Rice University when they put in sidewalks made them permeable. (They chose a pretty material that you can skate on wearing running shoes when wet. Good idea, implementation needs some work.)

One thing Houston's doing out west is to look at preserved grasslands and scrublands and berm them. A lot of the land here is vertisol, a very old, very clay-y kind of soil that absorbs water slowly. It cracks when dry, so that helps it absorb some water quickly, but we got hit with some typical thunderstorms a day or two before Harvey's rains hit and they closed up. But if you could berm the open lands so that the water doesn't wash off them that would help save some flood-control capacity downstream. It has limits.

Barker Dam, they say, has reached capacity and water's spilling over the banks. It's west of Houston, but the 'burbs reach that far and it'll increase the chances of flooding there.

[roamer65]

11. Houston, 2050.

[LisaL]

14. After Ike, there was a proposal to build an "IKE DIKE"

They didn't do it. Too much money, I guess. How much is this flood going to cost?


http://abc13.com/weather/9-years-after-storm-ike-dike-still-under-discussion/2124355/

[hunter]

15. We must develop a system for relocating entire communities.

It will be expensive, but doing nothing is horrific and even more expensive.