Houston Continues to Buckle Under Storms Like Beryl. Solutions Aren’t Fast Enough

HOUSTON (AP) — Sharon Carr is frustrated. Like many others who lost power after Hurricane Beryl slammed into the Texas coast earlier this week, she headed to a cooling center in Houston to cool off as the city’s power company warned that restoring power to everyone could take longer than expected.

“It’s too windy, we don’t have power. It rains a long time, we don’t have power,” said Carr, who was also without power for a week in May when a destructive storm known as a derecho swept through the region.

Carr, who works for the city’s Department of Transportation and Drainage, believes more could be done to keep the lights on — or at least get them back on more quickly — if Houston and other urban areas prone to severe weather stopped focusing on immediate problems and looked at the bigger picture, including climate change.

“This shouldn’t keep happening,” she said. “If it’s broken, let’s fix it.”

Hurricane Beryl is the latest in a long line of devastating storms to cripple Houston, highlighting the city’s failure to adequately shore up itself against climate-driven weather events. Past storms like Ike in 2008 and Harvey in 2017 made it clear that the city needed to cut down trees, shore up floodplain protections and bury more power lines underground, but those efforts have either failed or been completely wiped out by recent storms that have flooded the city and knocked out power to millions.

As climate change warms ocean waters, fueling more powerful and faster-intensifying storms, experts say cities need to rethink how they prepare for and respond to such events.

“We’re playing a totally different game today,” said Michelle Meyer, director of the Center for Harm Reduction and Recovery at Texas A&M University. The old ways “don’t work anymore,” she said.

If we rebuild it, it will flood again

Where and how developers build is an obvious problem, said Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Barack Obama. He said it became apparent to him 20 years ago while working in Florida, where four successive hurricanes were not enough to stop waterfront development.

“You have to ask yourself how many times you have to rebuild something before you rebuild it differently or not rebuild it in the same place?” he said.

Fugate believes taxpayers are increasingly shouldering the burden, supporting costly insurance programs for at-risk areas when instead developers could stop building in storm-prone areas and residents could move out of flood plains.

“It’s the hardest system to put in place because people resist it,” said Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University’s severe storms center. “People really like where they live, generally.”

Share buybacks instead of insurance payments are one way to get people moving, but Fugate notes that such programs often take too long to set up after a storm. Once those funds are ready, convincing someone to take a buyout is “almost impossible,” he said.

Problems with known solutions

In many cases, officials know what measures are needed to mitigate the effects of severe weather disasters, but struggle to implement them.

For example, the city of Houston commissioned a report on power outages caused by fallen trees after Hurricane Ike in 2008. But no one wanted to cut down the trees that were still standing. Today, utility officials note that they install underground power lines for every new construction project.

Updating the city’s electrical infrastructure could also go a long way toward preventing power outages, Meyer said, noting that North Carolina did so after Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

“They were really forward-thinking, like, ‘OK, we’re not going to be in this situation again,'” she said.

CenterPoint Energy, which supplies electricity to Houston, has partially installed a “smart grid” system that automatically redirects power to unaffected lines during an outage. A document posted on the company’s website shows that 996 of these devices were installed in 2019, less than half of the grid at the time. It’s unclear whether any progress has been made since then. The company did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

A changing reality

As more storms like Beryl are expected due to climate change, cities must prepare for the worst – and the worst is getting worse.

“It’s about learning to live with water,” Blackburn said.

After Hurricane Harvey, the strongest to hit the United States 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-reduction projects in Harris County, which includes the city. The measure resulted in “a lot of improvements,” Blackburn said, but it was based on old flood projections.

Additionally, a task force created in 2018 by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott made dozens of recommendations in a nearly 200-page report, including studying ways to strengthen public services and creating an inventory of needed mitigation and resiliency projects across the state.

But with increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, even cities that are working to do so can be caught off guard if they don’t plan for the future. The “evil” part of climate change, Blackburn says, is that the goalposts keep moving: As cities adapt to increased risk, that risk increases again.

Scientists are better equipped than ever to make decisions about evacuations, development and other measures by using computer systems that can predict how much damage a given storm will inflict, noted Shane Hubbard, a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin.

Yet, he added, all the computing power in the world cannot keep up with the unpredictability of climate change. Warming oceans are causing increasingly intense weather events that defy models and rapidly change conditions on the ground.

“That’s what worries me most” about the future, Hubbard said.

Complicating matters further is the fact that some Texas leaders still fail to acknowledge climate change. The governor’s task force report in 2018 noted that major natural disasters in Texas would become more frequent because of climate change. But it made no mention of “climate change,” “global warming,” or reducing greenhouse gases in Texas, the epicenter of the nation’s oil refining industry and the largest carbon producer in the United States. Texas is a state where politicians, at least in public, are deeply skeptical of climate change.

Cities must be prepared to confront the scientific facts before their planning can really improve, Blackburn says.

When asked whether coastal cities in general were prepared for climate change, Meyer simply said, “No.”

She said prevention and mitigation measures must evolve to the point that a Category 1 hurricane “will not pose a problem in the future.”

A city like Houston “should not be hit by a Category 1 hurricane,” she said.

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Melina Walling reported from Chicago. Associated Press/Report for America writer Nadia Lathan in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report. Follow Melina Walling on X: @MelinaWalling.

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