Tag Archives: Houston

Filming on the Texas Gulf Coast

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It has been a couple of months since I last posted a video of our progress in filming for Planning to Turn the Tide. That last article summarized our film efforts in Jacksonville, Florida, in September 2023, but we had another trip in the offing then, to the Texas Gulf Coast. In between, as noted in a January 1 post, I underwent prostate surgery on September 29, which required at least a month of rest and inactivity at home before venturing out again, in order to ensure successful recovery. But on November 7, I met up with videographer David Taylor at Houston Hobby Airport and we drove to Corpus Christi, where the annual conference of the Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association was getting underway. The new blog video presented here was filmed there but edited and produced later.

Devastation in the Bolivar Peninsula from Hurricane Ike, 2009

Despite my own challenges, what compelled this schedule was that conference at the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi because it allowed us to interview eight Texas planners who have been prominently involved in efforts to confront and address resilience issues along the Gulf Coast, where coastal storms and flooding remain major concerns. Hurricane Harvey, which struck in the fall of 2017, may be the most famous, and famously expensive, disaster of recent history in the area but is certainly not unique. People with a longer memory can cite Tropical Storm Allison, which struck Houston in 2001, and Hurricane Ike, which devastated Galveston in 2008, as part of the long parade of such events.

It is easy enough to cite shortcomings of the past that made destruction in such storms worse than it needed to be, but it is also important to note the resources that Texas has created to tackle those problems, including Texas Target Communities, a program at Texas A&M University that aids resource-challenged communities. These groups were present at the Texas APA conference, and we interviewed both Jaimie Masterson, the director of Texas Target Communities, and Shannon Van Zandt, a professor of urban planning at the Texas A&M School of Architecture, who has long researched and advocated for better affordable housing solutions in disaster recovery.

Tornado impacts in Van Zandt County, Texas, April 2017. Seven tornadoes struck the area in one evening.

I should also note that disaster resilience has been a consistent theme of the Texas Chapter. Back in November 2017, I spent time in Texas at the behest of the chapter, which asked me to facilitate and keynote a recovery workshop in Canton, Texas, following a series of tornadoes there, but I also worked with their Harvey Recovery Task Force well into 2020. The film trip grew out of that partnership, which extends even further back to my speaking at chapter conferences in El Paso and Galveston after Hurricane Ike. We want to thank the Texas Chapter for their logistical and promotional support during the conference.

Peer exchange workshop in Rockport, February 2020, involving Harvey and Sandy recovery planners. Kim Mickelson, of Houston, with microphone, is moderating this session.

Following our time in Corpus Christi, we drove up the coast to Rockport, the site of the first landfall of Hurricane Harvey, where we interviewed four community leaders, including a city council member, the local newspaper editor, the public works director, and a former president of the local chamber of commerce, about Rockport’s experience in recovery. I have learned a great deal in recent years about Rockport, in large part because of my work with Amanda Torres, the former city planner there, now working for the Corpus Christi Planning Department, and Carol Barrett, a veteran planner now living in Austin, who led APA’s Community Planning Assistance Team in Rockport in 2019. They helped me design the Rockport case study for an interactive workshop, including both graduate students and practicing planners, that is part of a course I teach for the University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs.

We ended our trip in Houston, which included a tour of largely Hispanic neighborhoods in the shadow of the city’s huge petrochemical complexes, where they face ongoing racially disparate environmental impacts. We were hosted on that tour by TEJAS Barrios, a local environmental justice advocacy group. We hope to return to Houston, but our challenge for now is to raise substantial money to try to complete the film project in the coming year. Fortunately, our core team has grown, with more hands on deck focused on fundraising. If you are willing to help, you can donate here or use the QR code below to contribute online at the APA website.

 

Jim Schwab

Taking Stock of Recent Disasters

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Photo by Jeff Clevenger

We learn from disasters as we recover from them, but each disaster teaches slightly different things. Sometimes the lessons are significant and historic; in others, one community is learning what others already know or should have learned from their own past events. Some years are relatively quiescent, as 2018 so far seems to be. And some become relentless slogs, like 2017.

Adam Smith, lead scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information, noted in a plenary panel in July for the 2018 Natural Hazards Workshop, in Broomfield, Colorado, that the tally for 2017 disasters had exceeded $200 billion. This is more than 40 percent of the tally so far of billion-dollar disasters for the entire decade beginning in 2010. Simply put, with three major hurricanes—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—striking parts of the southern U.S., followed in short order by some of the most expensive wildfires in California history, it was a wild, taxing year in the world of emergency management.

But our attention fades quickly. Right now, there are no equivalent disasters seizing our attention, but in time there will be. The people who remain painfully aware that recovery is a long, slow process are those directly affected, and even many of them will not fully grasp the ways in which past location choices and patterns of development have brought them to this pass. Many had no choice anyway. Our communities are frequently full of social inequities that compromise the life choices of the poor and disabled. In other cases, the losses inflicted on neighborhoods are the result of hubris on the part of developers, city officials, and homeowners themselves. It does not hurt, approximately one year after these combined events, to look at what we know so far about the recovery following them.

Apparently, the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of Congress, agreed that the time was ripe for review because it has released a study, 2017 Hurricanes and Wildfires: Initial Observations on the Federal Response and Key Recovery Challenges. Because of the severity of challenges in Puerto Rico, one may note from the graph below, reproduced from the report, that Hurricane Maria by far entailed the largest federal expenditures.

In spite of that level of effort, Puerto Rico has engendered the most significant criticism of the performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Maria struck Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) after Harvey had already drenched and flooded coastal Texas, and Irma had swept through much of Florida.

FEMA teams managing the distribution of water, and meals for hundreds of semi-trucks at an incident Support Base in Seguin, Texas. Photo by Dominick Del Vecchio – Aug 29, 2017

The report notes that, as a result, FEMA resources were severely stretched by then, only to have wildfires in California add to the pressure, though the personnel assigned in the last case were small compared to the hurricanes (as is typically the case). Adding to the challenge, Puerto Rico and USVI are offshore and were also poorly prepared for a Category 4 hurricane. Puerto Rico had already suffered years of neglect of crucial infrastructure, was burdened with oppressive debts, and was by far the least prosperous target of the 2017 storms. All this, combined with some incredibly inept public relations from the White House, led to a perfect storm in which nearly 3,000 people have died directly or indirectly as a result of the disaster. To my knowledge, that is a number exceeded in U.S. history only by the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, which killed more than twice as many people. The difference is that, in Puerto Rico, most people died because of blocked transportation, loss of electricity, and similar problems with critical facilities that prevented adequate transportation or medical attention in many isolated communities in the interior of the mountainous island.

Exactly what we learn from Puerto Rico remains to be seen. It is worth noting, in my view, that far more prosperous Hawaii has coped well with admittedly less-challenging disasters in recent years, in large part because state government has practiced response and committed resources to the problem. I say this despite being aware of gaps in Hawaii recovery planning that merit further attention. But if Puerto Rico is a logistical challenge for mainland responders, Hawaii is even more remote but better prepared. The difference in economic circumstances, however, is a dramatic and powerful variable in this comparison, as is Hawaii’s statehood. It is also worth noting that Hawaii is a long chain of islands, and storms (or volcanoes) never affect all at the same time. Effectively, that has always meant that emergency resources in Hawaii have been able to be moved from one or more islands to another that has been hit by a storm. All of Puerto Rico was devastated almost on the same day, with internal transportation, communications, and electric power nearly brought to a standstill, making access to many villages nearly impossible.

If Puerto Rico, followed closely by USVI, is the direst case for long-term recovery, there nonetheless remain serious challenges in Texas, not only in Houston but in dozens of other counties along the Gulf Coast. A recent Washington Post article used the term “Harvey homeless” to describe thousands of Texas families living in whatever parts of their flooded homes they have salvaged while struggling to accumulate the resources to repair the rest. They live with mold, dust, and any other environmental contaminants that endure in essentially unusable parts of their homes. In all, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, at least 175,000 Texas homes were “badly damaged” by Hurricane Harvey, and 80 percent lacked flood insurance, thus relying on much smaller federal disaster payments (averaging $4,203) than flood insurance would have afforded. If there is one powerful lesson in Texas, it concerns public education on the value of flood insurance, particularly in the many areas outside the 100-year floodplain. Unfortunately, much of the public retains the illusion that flood insurance is either unnecessary or unavailable outside the legally defined floodplain. Yet Harvey’s 60 inches of rain in some parts of metropolitan Houston left vast areas beyond the regulatory flood boundaries under water because water does not care about such artificial boundaries. It goes where gravity compels it to go. Moreover, years of loose land-use regulation over the past half-century of rapid growth have expanded the floodplain and put numerous neighborhoods in greater danger than they faced in the past.

Moreover, as John Henneberger, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Texas Housers, noted in his keynote at the Natural Hazards Workshop, Texas does not have a noteworthy history of attention to social equity in disaster recovery. Henneberger called for a new model of disaster recovery in which we seek to use recovery planning to overcome racial and economic inequities, stating that “the legal framework already exists” in federal programs like Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) to “overcome inequalities,” but the rules are not always followed. Thus, his top recommendation for reform was simply to “obey the law” regarding the conditions that apply to state and local use of CDBG-DR funds.

Finally, Bloomberg Business Week chose recently to examine the questions surrounding rebuilding after the California wildfires. With a population already approaching 40 million, the state is under intense pressure to build adequate housing amid rising housing costs. California has repeatedly toughened its building codes in response to wildfire threats but faces a legacy problem of homes built under earlier standards. Not often known outside wildfire research circles is the fact that the average home contains seven to eight times the density of combustible materials as the surrounding forest in the wildland-urban interface. That means that every home that catches fire or explodes is a huge matchstick endangering every other home in its immediate vicinity. When one considers that California is unquestionably the most progressive state in tackling wildfire problems, one understands that the problem of retrofitting older homes built to lower building code standards—or none at all in some other western states—is a lingering and potentially very expensive problem. The dilemma serves to illuminate the value of pre-planning for recovery, learning how to seize the “teachable moment” for reform, to reduce the scope of the problem. The article also notes that, if California is to reduce pressure to build in the forest, its cities must be prepared to allow greater density to relieve the housing crisis in a state where a shortage of affordable housing has yielded a concomitant problem of growing homelessness. And so, we see why urban planning needs both to be holistic in its approach to social problems and guided by wise state policy with supporting resources. We all still have a long way to go.

This blog post can never be long enough to explore all these issues in depth. But in coming weeks and months, I hope to delve into specific issues more deeply, share interviews with individual experts, and explore what needs to be done. I am also watching intently for new books that will shed light on new solutions. One just arrived today. Stay tuned.

Jim Schwab

Flood of Events in Just Two Weeks

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Life can produce very sudden turns of events. The turmoil and destruction dished out by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma may have been predictable in the abstract, that is, events that could occur at some point someday, but that means little when the day arrives that a hurricane is bearing down on your shores.

More than three months ago, I retired from the American Planning Association to move into a combination of activities I had tailored to my own skills and interests, which I have previously announced and discussed. Over the summer, I began setting the stage for introducing these new enterprises, but my wife and I also took time for a long-awaited excursion to Norway to celebrate this new phase of our lives. I began to share that story in August with blogs about our journey.

Meanwhile, I began work on the creation of Jim Schwab Consulting LLC, my solo planning practice. Just two weeks ago, with the help of a web designer, Luke Renn, I unveiled a business website that is a companion to this one. You can find it at the link above. But when we began to construct the site in mid-August, I had no idea what would ensue. By the time we had completed the new website, Harvey was making landfall on the Texas coast and dumping unimaginable amounts of rain in the Houston metropolitan area, and then on Port Arthur and Beaumont, Texas.

As Harvey was losing steam and moving inland, Irma, initially a Category 5 hurricane, devastated the small island of Barbuda, the smaller part of the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda. Officials estimate that 95 percent of the island’s buildings were damaged or destroyed, and residents have been evacuated to the larger island of Antigua, partly in advance of an anticipated second attack by Hurricane Jose, following in Irma’s wake, that mercifully did not come to pass. That would have been bad enough, but the storm also badly rocked St. Thomas and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, sideswiped Puerto Rico and the northern coast of Cuba, and finally passed through the Florida Keys, demolishing much of the community there, and sped up the western coast of Florida through places like Naples and Tampa. Irma was so huge that its waves and winds also buffeted numerous coastal communities in eastern Florida, no doubt shaking many people in Miami Beach to their core.

I will soon complete the tour of Norway on this blog, but it seemed more important to offer some insights, in some small way, into what is happening and will be needed in the recovery in Texas. Irma has been too large an event for me yet to absorb its totality and even begin to understand how I can possibly enhance what people know from the daily news barrage that has accompanied it. I am sure emergency management personnel at all levels are already weary but patriotically staffing their posts.

Planners like me must prepare for the much longer endurance test known as long-term recovery planning. While it is far too easy to say what, if any, role I may be asked to play in this drama, there have been conversations. Recovery, unlike emergency response, will take months to unfold. I will do my best to share what I learn. It is important because long-term recovery provides the opportunity to hash out major questions of the future and the resilience of the surviving communities. It has always been possible to learn from experience and to improve so that we lose fewer lives, suffer fewer losses, and rebound more quickly in future disasters. But possible is not certain. It is up to all of us to decide that we will rebuild with a resilient future in mind.

Jim Schwab

Map of Irma as of 9/12/17 from NOAA website.

Hurricane Harvey Interview on CBC

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For those who have been reading the posts I have recently done since Hurricane Harvey made landfall, I thought it might be of interest to see this video clip of an interview I did with Canadian Broadcasting Corp. two days ago: https://youtu.be/UFslrKPd04s 

Jim Schwab

The People Affected by Harvey

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A few days ago, in my last post, I wrote that Hurricane Harvey would last a few days, but the recovery would last years. However agonizingly long Harvey appears to be taking to inflict its misery on the Texas Gulf Coast, and now parts of southern Louisiana, it will go away. And then the real marathon will begin. People will have to face the necessity of reconstruction, both as individuals and as whole communities.

In writing about this now, I am crediting readers with a longer attention span than seems to be assumed of most Americans on social media today. I truly hope, however, that the news media does not forget about Harvey or the Gulf Coast as the recovery process grinds on over coming months and years. Certainly, most residents of the Texas coast will have little choice but to bear with the process, and ideally, they will participate. Recovery needs to be as participatory as possible to succeed fully.

FEMA teams managing the distribution of water, and meals for hundreds of semi-trucks at an incident Support Base in Seguin, Texas. Photo by Dominick Del Vecchio – Aug 29, 2017 (from FEMA website) 

It will not always be a pretty picture. The news media in recent days have been full of photographic and video evidence of the best aspects of humanity—people in boats rescuing neighbors and strangers alike, public safety personnel risking personal safety as they save people from flooded homes and transport them to shelters, and other heroic acts away from cameras and too numerous to count. People from other states and nations will contribute to disaster-related charities to help people they have never known and may never meet. Politics and race and religion will all take a back seat to saving lives and reducing suffering. For just a brief moment in history, we can stop shouting at each other long enough to care for each other and be proud of one another.

Several years ago, Rebecca Solnit produced an intriguing book, A Paradise Built in Hell, that explored many of the positive community-building relationships that emerge when people are challenged by adverse circumstances such as major natural disasters. It is a journalistic journey through the informal alliances and communities created by people under what seemingly are the worst possible conditions, but which challenge our humanity and force us to consider how we value those around us. It is an optimistic book that forces readers to rethink what it means to live through a disaster. I have always hoped that it would spark similar efforts among academic researchers, particularly in the social sciences, to study this phenomenon more closely. I think that is happening to some extent, but perhaps not nearly enough.

The Texas Gulf Coast communities stricken by Harvey will need as much of that spirit as they can muster to produce successful long-term recovery. Recovery takes years because, while no one wants to delay rebuilding unnecessarily, hasty rebuilding that fails to consider the failure points that allowed destruction to occur is even more undesirable. Under considerable time pressures, which researchers Robert Olshansky and Laurie Johnson, both wonderful friends of mine, have notably referred to as the problem of “time compression” in disaster recovery, planners and local and state officials will need to meet with constituents, hear their concerns, explain both the obstacles and opportunities involved in reconstruction, and ideally, inform the public process to help lead to a better outcome. During this time, minor and modest repairs may go forward while the bigger decisions, like where to buy out damaged properties, how to rebuild infrastructure and to what new standards, and how to produce a stronger, more resilient community to handle future disasters may need to undergo vigorous debate.

I point this out because, inevitably, and despite Solnit’s rosy scenarios in the context of community building, tempers will rise and people will need to iron out significant differences and widely varying perceptions of the causes of, and solutions to, the damage that occurred. There will surely be some debate about Houston’s sprawling development patterns and relative lack of development controls. There may be debates about strengthening building or zoning codes or, in Houston, the absence of zoning. If there is any echo of Hurricane Sandy, there may be discussion of a greater role for green infrastructure in mitigating hazards, though that alone would have made only modest difference in the flooding from Harvey, but it might have helped.

More importantly, people will have undergone trauma that will make them deeply and justifiably emotional about the disruption of their lives. They will bring that trauma, and a need to vent and share their fears and anger, to public meetings. Public officials will need to exhibit patience because, as Christine Butterfield, another good friend who served as community development director in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, during and after the 2008 floods, has noted, those public gatherings will be therapeutic. People may cry, they may yell, they may accuse. Most of all, they need to know that someone else wants to hear and share their pain. They want to know that someone cares. Once most have achieved that comfort level, they may be ready to move forward and discuss options for recovery. But first, community leaders must build trust.

Some people may never trust, and the rest of the community may need to move on. Life is not perfect. Human beings are not perfect. Recovery cannot wait forever, but it must demonstrate compassion and a commitment to social equity.

In a few weeks, the entire process will begin, and people will decide what role they want to play. Leaders will arise in unexpected places. Just last week, my students at the University of Iowa School or Urban and Regional Planning, during a field trip with which I launch my course on “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery” every year, heard from United Methodist pastor Clint Twedt-Ball, a co-founder and executive director of Matthew 25, a community organization that arose from almost nothing after the 2008 floods in Cedar Rapids to help rebuild 25 blocks of downtrodden neighborhoods in the city, raising money but also making tough decisions about what would work and what would not. Nine years later, his organization is still working to make a difference. Before 2008, Clint would confess, he knew next to nothing about floods or community development. My guess is that now he could nearly write a book. Who knew?

Watch Houston, and Rockport, and Corpus Christi, and all the other cities on the Texas Gulf Coast for both surprises and struggles, and mostly for deep human engagement in solving massive redevelopment problems the likes of which most of us will never have to confront. And be ready to cheer them on when good things happen. They are likely to need the encouragement from time to time.

Jim Schwab

Initial Observations on Harvey

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Map from National Weather Service. http://www.weather.gov/akq/Harvey

For the people of the Texas Gulf Coast, the rain and winds of Hurricane Harvey are just the beginning of a long journey. The storm will last a few days. The recovery will last years.

Destruction in the Bolivar Peninsula after Hurricane Ike in 2008

I am not there, so I can only surmise, based on the news coverage I have seen, the full extent of the damage and suffering that people are enduring in Corpus Christi, Houston, Galveston, and hundreds of other communities in a wide arc that has fallen under the impact of this storm. I do not even expect that people there will read this, certainly not right now. Nonetheless, it may be worthwhile to offer some insights to people elsewhere. I have never lived or worked in Texas, but I have been there numerous times and visited Louisiana more often than I can remember. I saw first-hand the devastation wrought in the Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston after Hurricane Ike. I have worked with people in Texas, including those at the Texas A&M Hazards Reduction and Recovery Center, over many years. They have educated me greatly on the vulnerabilities of their state.

With all due humility, therefore, but also with experience from other disasters over the past quarter-century, I offer some observations that may enhance what readers of this blog may learn from the news.

Photo from NOAA. The NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite captured this infrared image of Hurricane Harvey just prior to making landfall along the Texas coast on August 25, 2017 at 18:55 UTC. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center has clocked Harvey’s maximum sustained winds at 110 miles per hour with higher gusts. Infrared images like this one can help meteorologists identify the areas of the greatest intensity within large storm systems, such as the areas with the most intense convection, known as overshooting cloud tops (dark orange), surrounding the eye and along the outer bands. https://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/MediaDetail2.php?MediaID=2086&MediaTypeID=1

First, this is apparently a somewhat unusual storm system. It approached the coast just northeast of Corpus Christi as a Category 4 hurricane, although it is now downgraded to a tropical storm. That does not make it less dangerous. The Saffir-Simpson scale that is used to rate hurricane strength deals only with wind speeds. Winds are certainly important, especially when they reach the 130 mile-per-hour range that was the peak for this event. Winds have, from all the visual evidence on the various news outlets I have watched, wreaked tremendous havoc along the coast, tearing apart buildings and overturning trailers and other vehicles. Moreover, hurricanes often spawn tornadoes, and some of the intermittent damage—that is, buildings ripped apart near others largely intact—suggests that this has occurred. In other words, if the more diffuse hurricane winds don’t get you, the tornado just might. It is no laughing matter. It is a wonder the death toll remains relatively low, although we almost surely don’t know the full tally just yet.

One specific impact that always accompanies coastal storms of this magnitude is storm surge, the waters pushed landward by the winds that in this case ranged from six  to twelve feet. These can do considerable damage in low-lying areas along the coast and may also exacerbate coastal erosion.

What makes the storm somewhat unusual also makes it dangerous even after being downgraded to a tropical storm. The storm system appears to have stalled a bit on Sunday and may even be backing out into the gulf for another landfall. At least two very serious consequences can flow from this. One is that the stagnant storm front will dump immense amounts of rain over consecutive days. The projected precipitation totals, even larger than what has fallen so far, mount up, so that projections for many communities range as high as 50 inches. Keep in mind that 30 inches is ample rainfall for an entire year in many parts of the country, and almost no city in the United States is prepared to absorb even half that amount in just a few days. The average yearly rainfall in Houston is just shy of 50 inches.

Moreover, as the storm moves back out over the Gulf of Mexico, it may regain strength that storms typically lose as they make landfall. Tropical storms draw their strength from the warmth of the water over which they pass until they make landfall, after which wind speeds begin to die down. The water of the Gulf right now is in the mid- to high 80s Fahrenheit, reportedly a full two to three degrees above average. That is the source of the strength of Harvey. Regaining any strength from the warm Gulf waters is not a good omen for the Texas coast, and as the storm moves slowly northeast, more of this will affect Houston than was originally the case. That is why we are seeing such intense scenes of flooding in Houston: The storm began with enormous amounts of moisture and has moved along the coast at a snail’s pace, at times just a mile an hour. As the week progresses, however, the storm is projected to move northeast over Louisiana and Arkansas, weakening along the way.

Of course, those warm waters raise questions about the influence of global warming, a topic that does not always receive a warm reception in Texas political circles. It is impossible to say that a specific storm like Harvey would not have happened but for climate change. It is also possible to say very credibly that warmer waters make stronger storms possible. Warmer waters can reflect seasonal and yearly variations, but over time they can also reflect climatic trends. For now, let’s leave it at that. People will have plenty of time later to debate this topic. In due course, as recovery proceeds, it should become a topic of reasonable, informed public discourse.

Other factors are at work as well. The sheer extent of flooding reflects the inexorable fact that the ground in any area has limited capacity to absorb rain. The hydrological cycle allows much rain under normal circumstances to drain into the ground, depending on the types of soil present in any given location. Sand absorbs very well but does not provide a very solid building foundation. Clay provides a better foundation but does not absorb water as quickly. Soil types matter, therefore, but in urban areas we have complicated matters greatly with large quantities of impervious surface that absorb little or no water by design. Impervious surface includes buildings (with the limited exception of green roofs), paved surfaces like roads, parking lots, and driveways, and other structural impediments to the movement and absorption of water. Houston is a very large metropolitan area with the fourth-largest population among major cities in the U.S. Although it is making strides, it is also far from the greenest city in America. Like most major cities, the percentage of impervious surface varies widely, depending on density levels in specific neighborhoods and corridors. Flooding is also influenced by the quality of the drainage systems; Houston is challenged in this respect by low-lying, flat terrain. It is criss-crossed with numerous bayous and canals that provide paths for the movement of water but also have serious limits to the water they can absorb before spilling over onto streets and highways. Those water-filled streets are the main obstacle to evacuation for those who stayed behind. There comes a point where people are better off remaining in place than trying to move, which is why Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner chose not to recommend evacuation.

Some dangers of mass evacuation for 6.5 million people are self-evident: clogged highways that are rapidly filling with water, producing death traps for people in stranded vehicles. Pedestrians cannot see steep drop-offs in elevation as they wade through high waters and can trip and drown. In Houston, the bayous may also contain alligators, water moccasins, and other wildlife hazards that are more easily avoided in dry weather. Moreover, the sheer volume of water can produce eddies and swirls that catch people off guard, and not everyone will be strong enough to regain their footing. Finally, flood water is always dirty water, sometimes just plain filthy, posing a potentially serious threat to public health.

All that said, many other major cities suffer from similar problems. I can think of no city that is prepared for the sheer volume of water currently falling along the Texas coast.

The Texas Gulf Coast communities, therefore, will emerge from this storm with a widespread pattern of both wind- and flood-related damage that will vary significantly from one area to the next, but collectively the costs will probably skyrocket into tens of billions of dollars. It is impossible to know the full costs just yet, but this will almost surely rank as one of the most expensive disasters in U.S. history. The recovery will take years of planning and implementation. If done well, it will involve a great deal of reassessment of patterns of development along the Gulf Coast and of the quality and importance of building codes. Social equity considerations will demand a new examination of the location and quality of low-income housing and the adequacy of affordable housing. Development regulations have seldom been politically popular in Texas, a state that still has never empowered counties to enact zoning codes. Some coastal communities may also wish to look more closely at the prospect of undergrounding utility lines to protect them from hurricane winds.

Events can push public attitudes in new directions. Part of that may depend on new lines of thought gaining traction in the discussion of rebuilding after the disaster. That may require some degree of courageous political leadership. Some very significant changes occurred in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, including consolidation of levee district management, adoption of a statewide building code, and a charter amendment in New Orleans that gave a new master plan more control over development regulations. We should not make perverse assumptions about outcomes, just as we also should not be naïve about the obstacles. But in my time at the helm of the Hazards Planning Center of the American Planning Association, we certainly worked hard to create a thorough blueprint for those willing to advocate better planning in response to major and catastrophic disasters, and I assume APA remains prepared to further that discussion and provide technical assistance where it can.

There will also be plenty of help available from the federal government, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and other agencies. We can only hope that Congress will sidestep much of its partisan bickering to ensure rapid allocation of the necessary resources. And we can hope that those resources and personnel are managed well to advance the recovery process, which is complicated and daunting.

One encouraging factor in the response has been the emergence of both willing volunteers and the effective use of social media to expedite search and rescue operations. The number of boats driven by volunteers rescuing people from rooftops and the interiors of flooded homes reminded me of the so-called Cajun Navy that operated throughout New Orleans in the desperate days that followed Hurricane Katrina. Disasters have a fortunate tendency in most cases to bring out the best in people, but we are also at a point in history where our new technologies facilitate the ability of willing heroes to find the people who most need help. Even the elderly and disabled are largely capable of dialing 911, or tweeting, or posting photos of their situation on Facebook, sharing their location, and pleading for help—and then finding their guardian angel at the front door with a motor boat. That is a huge advance from only a decade ago because it enables the willing volunteers to become effective heroes. If those civic and humanitarian instincts carry over into the slower grind of recovery, perhaps a stronger, more resilient Gulf Coast can yet rise from the mud, the grime, and the shattered buildings we see now.

Jim Schwab