Beryl probably will not go down as one of Houston’s more crippling floods — not even of this year. Still, the hurricane offered the latest reminder that the nation’s fourth-largest city has a serious flooding problem.
It is one that persists despite billions of dollars of investments and years of flood control projects. And the challenge could grow more severe as climate change supercharges storms and brings more intense rainfall to a flat, low-lying and sprawling metro area.
“As far as our streets are concerned, it is important to remember that our primary drainage mechanism throughout this city is our streets,” Houston Public Works Chief Operating Officer Randy Macchi said at a news conference this week. “For better or worse, that is the reality of the situation.”
The fact that Beryl’s flooding was not especially remarkable highlights how incessant the problem is, said Ben Hirsch, a co-director at West Street Recovery, a disaster recovery and environmental justice organization that works across five Zip codes in northeast Houston.
“I think if this storm had happened in almost any other part of America, people would be describing it as catastrophic flooding,” Hirsch said Wednesday. “There’s a kind of numbness that sets in; people get used to it. But at the same time, people have this sort of trauma from it.”
The Biden administration on Wednesday finalized a policy to ensure that taxpayer-funded projects such as bridges, schools and other public buildings take into account not just past flooding, but the worsening floods that are likely to lie ahead.
The goal, officials said, is to make the nation’s infrastructure more resilient in an era of climate change and to avoid the cycle of repeated floods and rebuilding that has happened in the past.
“Climate change has exacerbated flood risk across the country, especially when it comes to sea-level rise,” Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell said in announcing the new policy.
But in Houston, the flooding woes are hardly new, and they partly are the result of decisions that stretch back generations.
“Even before the growth, we’ve always lived in a swamp. The folks that came before us knew we need to build this flood infrastructure and we don’t, by any stretch, have the infrastructure we need,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, chief executive of the jurisdiction that includes Houston, told The Washington Post this week. “This is another kick in the pants for everyone to really prioritize this.”
As Beryl blew through, local authorities conducted 56 rescues of people caught in high water, acting Houston police chief Larry Satterwhite told reporters Tuesday.
Russell Richardson, a 54-year-old Houston Police Department employee, died after his vehicle got caught in fast-rising floodwaters Monday on Houston Avenue, near Interstate 45, as he headed to work, officials said.
Flooding is the region’s No. 1 disaster, according to the Harris County Flood Control District, created by the Texas legislature in 1937. Despite what the agency says is a “$4 billion network of flood damage reduction infrastructure in the ground,” Houston faces enormous flood risks, some of which Beryl exposed once again.
There are myriad reasons Houston is so prone to flooding. One is its landscape: relatively flat and slow-draining, which makes it difficult to move the massive amounts of water that can fall during hurricanes, tropical storms and other heavy rains.
Those are the types of events that are expected to become more intense and frequent in a hotter world, in which warming air carries more moisture.
But when Harvey hit, it was the third time in three years that rainfall exceeded a level that, based on historical climate patterns, could be expected once every 500 years.
There were major floods on Memorial Day and Halloween in 2015, and on Tax Day and Memorial Day in 2016. More floods hit on Independence Day in 2018 and in September 2019, when Tropical Storm Imelda poured on Houston.
Beryl’s rainfall was less extreme than some of those storms, but the hurricane still dumped about a foot of water across most of the region. And it came after a more recent spate of severe weather: In May, heavy rains inundated homes and prompted the rescue of some 400 people. Weeks later, a damaging windstorm known as a derecho blew through Houston.
The repeated floods, plus the influence of sea level rise, mean water tables are higher and the ground is often more saturated, said Richard Rood, a professor emeritus of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan.
“You’re getting to the point where you just have no place to put the water,” Rood said.
There is also the issue of feverish development. A 2020 study by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University found that the Houston metropolitan area’s footprint increased by 63 percent from 1997 to 2017 — a period in which almost 187,000 football fields of impervious surfaces such as concrete and asphalt were added to the area.
“Impervious surfaces do not soak up heavy rainfalls the same way that natural landscapes do, not to mention the ways in which changing elevations and rerouted waterways rework watersheds,” the researchers wrote. “Without nature’s super sponges, water can run roughshod.”
In the wake of Harvey, voters in Harris County overwhelmingly passed a $2.5 billion bond measure to finance numerous flood-control projects around Houston.
The bonds have funded drainage systems and water retention basins and projects to improve natural flood prevention, including planting vegetation along bayou banks and trees across the city. Houston has even taken the step of buying some residents out of flood-prone homes, turning those vulnerable lots into open space.
The work has helped alleviate flooding in some of its most notorious spots, but even officials acknowledge that it is all but impossible to prevent all flooding in a landscape that is slow to drain and an area that can see massive amounts of rain.
There is talk and study of building massive tunnels to carry floodwaters, of adding a third flood control reservoir in the prairie west of Houston, or of digging Buffalo Bayou wider and deeper so it can safely drain more water from existing reservoirs. But those projects are complicated, expensive and controversial.
Even the relatively short-lived flooding from Beryl, which caused less damage than many past storms, led the Houston Chronicle this week to run an editorial arguing that tackling the city’s long-term water challenges and other priorities will require even more investment — and possibly additional taxes.
Under the headline, “Beryl is a reminder we can’t have good drainage without paying,” the paper wrote that despite the fact that voters in the past have approved a “lockbox” for a dedicated drainage funding, rising costs and other factors mean that it will take more than that.
“When our bayous top their banks, when the ditches and gutters overflow and what shouldn’t be a waterside view from our living room windows suddenly is,” the paper wrote, “the mayor should seize the opportunity to lead and get voters ready to approve tax increases to build the infrastructure we need to withstand bigger, stronger and more frequent storms.”
Only then will the city be better prepared for what lies ahead, the paper argued.
“The best use of tax dollars, and our own dollars, isn’t on cleanup and recovery but on preventing damage in the first place. That’s money not just spent in squall-like bursts, but consistently, over decades, even during periods when the skies are merciful.”
Molly Hennessy-Fiske contributed to this report.
