Oh no, an agenda
Houston’s always been soggy. It probably wasn’t a very good place to build an enormous city, when you get right down to it.
No city could have withstood Harvey without serious harm, but Houston made itself more vulnerable than necessary. Paving over the saw-grass prairie reduced the ground’s capacity to absorb rainfall. Flood-control reservoirs were too small. Building codes were inadequate. Roads became rivers, so while hospitals were open, it was almost impossible to reach them by car.
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Harvey is a humanitarian disaster. Ordinary Texans were defenseless against rising waters contaminated by sewage and dotted with floating colonies of fire ants. The confirmed death toll, 20 as of Aug. 30, is expected to rise as rescuers discover more bodies. Residents will return to damaged homes vulnerable to the spread of mold. Much of the damage, which could run to $100 billion or more by one estimate, is uninsured. “This will be the worst natural disaster in American history” in financial terms, Joel Myers, founder and president of AccuWeather, predicted in an Aug. 29 statement.
Sprawling Houston is a can-do city whose attitude is grow first, ask questions later. It’s the only major U.S. city without a zoning code saying what types of buildings can go where, so skyscrapers sometimes sprout next to split-levels. Voters have repeatedly opposed enacting a zoning law.
No to zoning law, but yes to public money after a disaster.
Houston is suffering now from the lack of an effective plan to deal with chronic flooding.
Attitude is partly to blame. Michael Talbott spent 35 years with the Harris County Flood Control District trying to protect Houston, mainly by seeking funds for widening drainage channels and bayous. But he resisted the notion that more drastic measures such as preserving green space and managing growth were required. Shortly before retiring as executive director in 2016, Talbott gave an interview to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in which he disputed the effect of global warming and said conservationists were antidevelopment. “They have an agenda … their agenda to protect the environment overrides common sense,” he said.
Wait. Protecting the environment – the one we all depend on for survival – is “an agenda” but unrestricted building with no thought for the environment that we all depend on for survival is not? How does that work exactly?
Why do people insist on portraying “the environment” as some kind of whimsical luxury dreamed up by latte-sipping Gwyneth Paltrows? Without “the environment” we have no food, no water, no breathable air, no survivable temperature, no anything. There’s no such thing as doing without “the environment,” but there is such a thing as environmental degradation so extreme that only insects can survive. If city and state and federal officials don’t have “an agenda” of preserving a livable environment then we’re all in big big trouble.
The fight in Texas is a microcosm of a national battle. The International Code Council, a Washington nonprofit made up of government officials and industry representatives, updates its model codes every three years, inviting state and local governments to adopt them. Last year the National Association of Home Builders boasted of its prowess at stopping codes for 2018 that it didn’t like. “Only 6 percent of the proposals that NAHB opposed made it through the committee hearings intact,” the association wrote on its blog. The homebuilders demonstrated their power again this year, when President Donald Trump reversed an Obama initiative restricting federally funded building projects in flood plains. “This is a huge victory for NAHB and its members,” the association blogged.
Not all homebuilders are OK with the organization’s antiregulatory bent. Ron Jones, a member of the NAHB board who builds houses in Colorado, says that while the first priority now is helping the victims, he hopes the storm will force new thinking. “There’s no sort of national leadership involved,” he says. “For them it’s just, ‘Hell, we’ll rebuild these houses as many times as you’ll pay us to do it.’ ”
Let’s not do it that way. That’s a bad way.
I really feel for the people affected by this disaster. It has to be noted though, that this is not am act of God. We know events like this occur and sensible Government is to prepare for such events and take responsible measures to mitigate the worst effects.
Dangerous industrial facilities in close proximity to housing, sensitive environments and critical infrastructure is just plain dumb. Insufficient flood management in a flood and hurricane prone area, dumb. Etc etc.
Not to mention that anyone taking one glance at other cities that have relied on straightening, widening and concrete lining streams will tell you that works fine for ‘normal’ rainfall, but actually makes flooding worse in heavy rain. My city (built on a swamp) is now removing fast flowing drains and replacing them with swales and flood detention basins. It’s surprising just how big these need to be.
Publication of “Hell and High Water” (ProPublica, March 3, 2016) by journalists Neena Satija, Kiah Collier, Al Shaw, Jeff Larson followed academic studies by Prof. Sam Brody, Texas A&M, Galveston, “Rising Waters”, April, 2011.
Residents shattered by the environmental assault will remember local response, like the ‘Cajun Navy’, and the inconsistency of the ‘common sense’ of which they were involuntarily part.
“60 Minutes” repeated the segment on the involvement of FEMA in the insurance fraud following Sandy. Mike Pence used Katrina as an opportunity to advance a free-market agenda including vouchers for private schools, consistent with the agenda of Betsy DeVos.
“… ‘common sense’ of which they were involuntarily part.”
But that’s what they voted for, over and over, and with the example of Katrina right in their faces.
Capitalism and libertarianism are conventions and constructs, not discoveries, and as such, must bow to the way the universe actually operates, however much their adherents and practitioners wish it was the other way around. politics and economics work within the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. As soon as you need to operate outside of those constraints, your ideology is done. If your economy needs several Earth’s worth of resources to operate properly (or equitably, which is, arguably, something entirely different) then you have to come up with another way of doing things. Pursuit of that model, “staying the course”, is pathological, suicidal. I guess rugged individualism is supposed to be above all this, full steam ahead and consequences be damned. Why does this remind me of the continued playing of football in the face of overwhelming evidence of brain injury?
Beautifully said.
YNnB, I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately we (readers of this and similar Blogs) live in a world of facts. We accept inconvenient truths and change our world view accordingly. Unfortunately, the sort of people you’re talking about do not. As long as their personal wealth, safety and position remain largely unaffected they’ll ignore facts and carry right on. Right up to the point we would regard as suicidal, if not beyond.
I’m leaning toward BKiSA’s world view today.