HOUSTON — Rising waters swallowed parts of interstates, turned lazy bayous into rapids, led to dozens of frantic water rescues and claimed at least one life as Hurricane Beryl battered this flood-weary city on Monday.
By Brady Dennis
and Clumps of trash along the pillars of an overpass marked the height of floodwaters along the White Oak Bayou in the Houston Heights neighborhood. Police barricades showed where a driver had abandoned a vehicle in fast-rising waters on Jensen Drive in Kashmere Gardens. In Meyerland, patches of water remained in the storm’s wake, but many homes in the stately neighborhood were elevated after Hurricane Harvey ravaged it in 2017, keeping Beryl’s damage to a minimum.
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.”
