A $31 billion plan to shield coastal communities around Galveston and Houston from deadly flooding caused by hurricanes has drawn extensive criticism. LongReads
Plans for one of the world’s biggest and most expensive flood barriers were born in a second-floor apartment here in this city on the Gulf of Mexico, as water 4 meters deep filled the street below. In September 2008, Bill Merrell, an oceanographer at Texas A&M University, Galveston, was trapped with his wife, daughter, grandson, and “two annoying chihuahuas” in the historic building he owns.
Today, that first brainstorm has morphed into a $31 billion plan from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the nation’s builder of mammoth water infrastructure. The state of Texas has embraced the idea, creating a taxing district to help pay its share. In July, Congress authorized the Corps to proceed—though it has yet to appropriate money for construction.
Oceanographer Bill Merrell, next to a statue memorializing a deadly hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900, developed a plan for protecting the region from storms.on a balance beam, Galveston perches on a slender ridge of sand, precarious and exposed. To the north, behind that barrier island, lies Galveston Bay, an estuary half the size of Rhode Island, teeming with shrimp and birds. The bay is so shallow, locals joke that if you fall out of a boat, just stand up.
Galveston got lucky. At the last minute, the storm veered east, sending the eye over the city and up the bay. In the Northern Hemisphere, where cyclones rotate counterclockwise, the most destructive winds blow on the eastern side, known as the “dirty side.” Sam Brody, a coastal planner at Texas A&M Galveston, calls Ike a “near miss.
Recently, standing on a 50-meter-wide beach in front of the houses that crowd Galveston Island’s gulf shore, Burks-Copes explained how the Corps adapted to the criticisms. In its final plan, the agency replaced much of the seawall with two parallel dunes built from sand dredged offshore, each roughly 2.5 meters tall. One dune would crest at 3.7 meters above sea level, and a second, farther up the sloping beach, at 4.25 meters—almost 1 meter shorter than the earlier proposed wall.
In 2008, winds and flooding from Hurricane Ike leveled shorefront homes along the Gulf of Mexico in Texas.The Corps has understated the risks posed by such storms, Merrell and his collaborators warn, because it overstates the protection the new dunes will offer.
That’s Jim Blackburn’s nightmare. Earlier this year, the veteran environmental attorney, co-director of Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education, & Evacuation from Disasters Center , pictured that scenario as he stood on a bluff looking across the placid waters of the bay near Buffalo Bayou. At his back, a concrete tower topped by a single enormous star marked the site of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, which paved the way for Texas’s independence from Mexico.
One obstacle is cost: Blackburn estimates building the islands would add $3 billion to $6 billion to the price of the plan advanced by the Corps. Another issue is the potential environmental damage caused by yet another huge engineering scheme. Regulators “are just not going to let some massive island be built in the middle of Galveston Bay,” says Bob Stokes, president of the Galveston Bay Foundation, an environmental group.
In Singapore, officials announced plans earlier this year to study the feasibility of storm barriers. Indonesia is considering a giant sea wall to protect Jakarta, its sinking capital, even as it builds a new capital city elsewhere. In 2020, Venice, Italy, after decades of debate and delay, finally inaugurated a system of 72 mobile walls to seal off its lagoon and protect the flood-prone city from rising seas and extreme high tides.
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