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Harvey should be the turning point in fighting climate change

Vernon Loeb is managing editor of the Houston Chronicle.

I’ve covered the news in Houston for 3½ years and have already seen two devastating floods and now what is being described as a one-in-800-years flood brought on by Hurricane Harvey.

That suggests to me that something is happening here that’s way bigger than the largely made-up tiff between Texas Gov.?Greg Abbott (R) and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner (D) about whether Houston should have been evacuated before Harvey dumped trillions of gallons of rain on the nation’s fourth-largest city.

There’s no denying Texas is politically polarized, with all its major cities liberal and Democratic, and the rest of the state, and all its statewide elected officials, conservative and Republican. So there’s no end of discord and rancor if one wants to find reasons for blame and finger-pointing.

Houston, meanwhile, can be its own worst enemy when it comes to flood control. A big part of its freewheeling, entrepreneurial identity is its lack of zoning, which has produced more than 600 square miles of subdivisions, strip malls and concrete prairie. It’s not hard to wonder whether this vast expanse of what was once coastal plain was really the best place to build a major city.

But anyone who has lived through four straight days of torrential rain that may surpass 50 inches knows perfectly well that no zoning code, infrastructure improvements or flood control regulations could have done anything to deal with this much water inundating a major metropolitan area this quickly.

And it is an unbelievable amount of water. Not wanting to risk my car on Sunday morning, I started toward our newsroom on foot and found myself waist-deep two blocks from my home.

On Monday I ventured a mile north to Buffalo Bayou, a bucolic urban park remade thanks to $25 million from a leading local philanthropist who once worked for Enron. The park was gone, its meandering bayou now a roiling, fast-moving river that had engulfed parkways on both sides, flooded a television station and badly damaged much of the city’s theater district.

On a stretch of Kirby Drive in River Oaks, Houston’s toniest neighborhood, the water was chest-deep, lapping up onto mansion lawns.

Sometimes, even in our political and governmental bureaucracies, people say exactly what they mean. Not known for hyperbole, the National Weather Service tweeted after the first devastating day of rainfall, during which some parts of Houston got more than 25 inches: “All impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harvey-should-be-the-turning-point-in-fighting-climate-change/2017/08/29/21c53244-8cd2-11e7-84c0-02cc069f2c37_story.html?utm_term=.3f599d98f3dd