HOUSTON (AP) — Sharon Carr was frustrated. Like many people left without power after Hurricane Beryl slammed into the Texas coast earlier this week, she headed to a cooling center in Houston to escape the summer heat, even as the city’s power company warned that it could take longer than expected for everyone’s power to be restored.
“There’s a lot of wind, we have no power. It’s been raining for a long time, we have no power,” said Carr, who also was without power for a week after a derecho, a devastating storm that ravaged the region in May.
Carr, who works in the city’s transportation and sewer department, thinks more could be done to keep the lights on, or at least get them restored more quickly, if Houston and other urban areas hit by severe weather stopped focusing on immediate problems and looked at the bigger picture, including climate change.
“This can’t go on,” he said. “If it’s broken, let’s fix it.”
Hurricane Beryl is the latest in a series of devastating storms to paralyze Houston, highlighting the city’s failure to adequately brace itself for the weather events brought on by climate change. Past storms, such as Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017, made it clear that the city needed to remove trees, strengthen floodplain protections and bury more power lines underground, but those efforts fell short or were completely overwhelmed by the recent storms that flooded the city and knocked out power to millions.
As climate change warms ocean waters, triggering stronger and faster-intensifying storms, cities need to rethink how they prepare for and respond to such events, experts say.
“The game we play today is completely different,” said Michelle Meyer, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. She said the old playbook “doesn’t work anymore.”
If we rebuild it will flood again
Where and how developers build is an open issue, he said Craig RunawayHe was director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Barack Obama. He said it became obvious to him 20 years ago when he was working in Florida, a place where four consecutive hurricanes had not been enough to stop coastal development.
“You have to ask yourself: How many times do we have to rebuild something before we rebuild it differently? Either we don’t rebuild it in the same place, or we don’t rebuild it in the same place?” he said.
Fugate thinks taxpayers are increasingly shouldering the burden and supporting expensive insurance programs for at-risk areas, while developers may stop building in storm-prone areas and residents may move from floodplains.
“It’s the hardest system to implement because people resist,” said Jim Blackburn, co-director of the severe storms center at Rice University. “As a general proposition, people really like where they live.”
Purchases instead of insurance payments are one way to get people to move, but Fugate notes that such programs often take too long to kick in after a storm hits. Once such funds are available, convincing someone to make a purchase is “almost impossible,” he said.
Problems with known solutions
In many cases, authorities know what actions need to be taken to reduce the impact of severe weather disasters, but they have difficulty implementing them.
For example, the city of Houston prepared a report documenting how falling trees caused power outages after Hurricane Ike in 2008. But no one wanted to cut down the trees that were still standing. Today, utilities say they install underground power lines for every new construction project.
Meyer said upgrading the city’s electrical infrastructure could also be an important step in preventing power outages, noting that North Carolina did this after Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
“They were really forward-thinking, saying, ‘Okay, we’re not going to be in this situation again,'” he said.
CenterPoint Energy, which provides electricity to Houston, has partially installed a “smart grid” system that automatically routes electricity to unaffected lines during outages. A document on the company’s website says 996 devices have been installed as of 2019, less than half of the grid at the time. It’s unclear if further progress has been made since then. The company did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
A changing reality
As more Beryl-like storms are expected under climate change, cities must prepare for the worst, and the worst is getting uglier.
“The important thing is to learn to live with the water,” Blackburn said.
After Hurricane Harvey — the strongest hurricane to hit the U.S. in more than a decade when it hit the Texas coast in August 2017 — Houston passed a $2.5 billion bond measure to fund flood damage reduction projects in Harris County, which includes the city. Blackburn said that action resulted in “a lot of improvements” but was based on outdated flood forecasts.
Separately, a working group formed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in 2018 made dozens of recommendations in a nearly 200-page report, including exploring ways to strengthen public services and creating an inventory of mitigation and resiliency projects needed across the state.
But as weather becomes increasingly unpredictable, even cities that have made improvements could be caught off guard if they don’t plan for the future. The “devil” part of climate change, Blackburn said, is that the goalposts keep moving: As cities adapt to one increased risk, the risk increases again.
Scientists are better equipped than ever to make decisions about evacuations, development and other measures using computer systems that can predict the damage a given storm will do, said Shane Hubbard, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin.
And yet, he added, all the computing power in the world cannot match the unpredictability of climate change. Warming oceans are driving rapidly intensifying weather events that defy models and rapidly change conditions on the ground.
“That’s what I’m most worried about in the future,” Hubbard said.
Complicating matters in Texas is that some leaders still have not acknowledged climate change. A 2018 report by the governor’s task force said that Texas would experience more severe natural disasters due to a changing climate. But there was no mention of “climate change,” “global warming,” or reducing greenhouse gases in Texas, the country’s oil refining epicenter, which leads the U.S. in carbon emissions. Texas is a state where politicians are deeply skeptical about climate change, at least in public.
Blackburn says that for cities to truly improve their planning, they must first be willing to confront scientific facts.
When asked whether coastal cities in general are prepared for climate change, Meyer answered “No.”
He said precautions and mitigation measures need to be developed to the point where a Category 1 hurricane “will not cause problems in the future.”
A city like Houston “should not be exposed to a Category 1,” he 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: @MelinaWalling.
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