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A plan to wall off Houston & industry from hurricane flooding will cost tens of billions of dollars.
Will it be enough?
The full article is in the current Science in the news section:
The full title: SHELTER FROM THE STORM
The subtitle from which the title of this post is derived:
A plan to wall off Houston and nearby industry from flooding caused by hurricanes will cost tens of billions of dollars. Will it be enough?
I believe the full article requires a subscription, so here's a few excerpts from it:
GALVESTON, TEXAS—Plans for one of the world’s biggest and most expensive flood barriers were born in a second-floor apartment here in this city on the Gulf of Mexico, as water 4 meters deep filled the street below. In September 2008, Bill Merrell, an oceanographer at Texas A&M University, Galveston, was trapped with his wife, daughter, grandson, and “two annoying chihuahuas” in the historic building he owns. Outside, 180-kilometer-per-hour winds generated by Hurricane Ike rattled windows and drove water from the gulf and Galveston Bay into the city.
As saltwater swirled through the shops and restaurants downstairs, Merrell sat in his office and sketched plans for a project he hoped would put an end to the storm-driven flooding that had repeatedly devastated this part of Texas.
It was an ambitious vision: Seventy kilometers of seawalls rising 5 meters above sea level would stretch the length of Galveston Island and beyond. Enormous gates would span the 3-kilometer-wide channel through which ships pass in and out of Galveston Bay. The defensive perimeter would seal off not just Galveston, but the whole bay, with Houston at its far end, protecting more than 6 million people and the country’s largest collection of chemical plants and oil refineries.
Though Merrell had spent decades studying ocean currents and storm surges, he had no engineering experience. But as he watched the murky waters soak the city, including his own carefully restored 19th century landmark, he decided there had to be a better way. “The Dutch would never put up with this,” he said to his wife.
Today, that first brainstorm has morphed into a $31 billion plan from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the nation’s builder of mammoth water infrastructure. The state of Texas has embraced the idea, creating a taxing district to help pay its share. In July, Congress authorized the Corps to proceed—though it has yet to appropriate money for construction...
...In Galveston, Merrell and some other scientists think the Corps hasn’t struck the right balance. Merrell warns that its plan—a scaled-down version of his original blueprint—is destined to fail, perhaps catastrophically. “It’s too weak—[the defenses] would only stand up to like a 30-year storm,” he says. “Essentially you don’t have any protection” against the more extreme storms that have already left deep scars on Galveston—and are likely, as climate change advances, to leave more...
... But Burks-Copes said the agency will be able to blunt some of the flooding by closing the Bolivar Road gates at low tide before a big storm arrives, leaving room in the estuary for some of the overflow. Most beachfront homes, meanwhile, are now less vulnerable than when Ike arrived, Burks-Copes noted, because they’ve been elevated on pilings. “Unless the surge is over the first floor,” she said, “they’re not impacted.”
EVEN UNDER ITS PLAN, the Corps estimates that damages from multiple storms over 50 years could still reach $30 billion or more in the Galveston Bay region. The agency’s estimate of how often a storm of a certain size is likely to strike is based, however, on historical patterns. It does not take into account how a warmer future might alter that equation...
As saltwater swirled through the shops and restaurants downstairs, Merrell sat in his office and sketched plans for a project he hoped would put an end to the storm-driven flooding that had repeatedly devastated this part of Texas.
It was an ambitious vision: Seventy kilometers of seawalls rising 5 meters above sea level would stretch the length of Galveston Island and beyond. Enormous gates would span the 3-kilometer-wide channel through which ships pass in and out of Galveston Bay. The defensive perimeter would seal off not just Galveston, but the whole bay, with Houston at its far end, protecting more than 6 million people and the country’s largest collection of chemical plants and oil refineries.
Though Merrell had spent decades studying ocean currents and storm surges, he had no engineering experience. But as he watched the murky waters soak the city, including his own carefully restored 19th century landmark, he decided there had to be a better way. “The Dutch would never put up with this,” he said to his wife.
Today, that first brainstorm has morphed into a $31 billion plan from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the nation’s builder of mammoth water infrastructure. The state of Texas has embraced the idea, creating a taxing district to help pay its share. In July, Congress authorized the Corps to proceed—though it has yet to appropriate money for construction...
...In Galveston, Merrell and some other scientists think the Corps hasn’t struck the right balance. Merrell warns that its plan—a scaled-down version of his original blueprint—is destined to fail, perhaps catastrophically. “It’s too weak—[the defenses] would only stand up to like a 30-year storm,” he says. “Essentially you don’t have any protection” against the more extreme storms that have already left deep scars on Galveston—and are likely, as climate change advances, to leave more...
... But Burks-Copes said the agency will be able to blunt some of the flooding by closing the Bolivar Road gates at low tide before a big storm arrives, leaving room in the estuary for some of the overflow. Most beachfront homes, meanwhile, are now less vulnerable than when Ike arrived, Burks-Copes noted, because they’ve been elevated on pilings. “Unless the surge is over the first floor,” she said, “they’re not impacted.”
EVEN UNDER ITS PLAN, the Corps estimates that damages from multiple storms over 50 years could still reach $30 billion or more in the Galveston Bay region. The agency’s estimate of how often a storm of a certain size is likely to strike is based, however, on historical patterns. It does not take into account how a warmer future might alter that equation...
I sometimes hear from dipshits here and elsewhere that nuclear energy - the only workable option to address climate change - is "too expensive."
Apparently in the little brains of these bean counting people who like to worship the products of Elon Musk, climate change isn't "too expensive."
They're going to spend $31 billion on this scheme, with no guarantee that it will protect Galveston Bay from accruing tens of billions of dollars of damage from climate change anyway, and like the expenditures on so called "renewable energy," it will do nothing to save the infrastructure of humanity.
A photo from the article:
The caption:
In 2008, winds and flooding from Hurricane Ike leveled shorefront homes along the Gulf of Mexico in Texas.SMILEY N. POOL/AP PHOTO
Have a nice weekend.
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