Some excerpts:<\/p>\n
Heavier, More Frequent Rains<\/strong><\/p>\n At the New Orleans conference, Emanuel laid out findings he\u2019d published a few weeks earlier in the scientific journal <\/em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Simulating mayhem in a computer program, he\u2019d released thousands of virtual past and future \u201cseed\u201d storms into the Atlantic Ocean and computed their tracks.\u00a0The likelihood of a storm about as rainy as Harvey has increased by a factor of six in the last 40 years, he\u2019d found. By 2100 the chance of such a deluge will increase another threefold. Then, a Hurricane Harvey will strike Texas once every 5 years. ….<\/p>\n Buyouts and Room for the River on Buffalo and Other Bayous<\/strong><\/p>\n Yoonjeong Lee, a researcher at the Center for Texas Beaches and Shores at Texas A&M University at Galveston, says Houston should build Dutch-style flood protection, and she knows where. \u201cBuffalo Bayou would be a perfect place to build a \u2018Room for the River\u2019 program.\u201d She says the city could buy up a relatively small number of plots near its banks and \u2013 after demolishing any structures on them \u2013 construct a riverfront park. The land would be engineered to capture water when the bayou rose, safeguarding remaining districts. Houston has previously installed patches of parkland along its bayous before, but she says the city has to think bigger.<\/em><\/p>\n Timon McPhearson, a professor in Urban Ecology at the New School in New York City, says that another way Houston should become more resilient to wetter storms is by controlling how much water rushes into bayous in the first place. He says too much of the rain that lands on the city drains quickly into waterways. \u201cHouston is an extremely paved city,\u201d he says. Replacing street and driveway surfaces with permeable materials will lower peak floods. He also suggests green roofs, covered with vegetation that could provide important ecosystem services that retain \u2013 and stall \u2013 some of the rainwater.<\/em><\/p>\n ….<\/p>\n Albert Pope, an architect at Rice University, doubts that adaptation through infrastructure fixes are sufficient to keep Houston safe from serious flood damage. He says that there\u2019s too little undeveloped land left to accommodate new reservoirs of sufficient capacity, and that further straightening, widening, and bank-hardening can\u2019t force bayous to carry more water. \u201cWe\u2019re at the limits to what we can do, engineering-wise,\u201d he says. His solution is more disruptive of the status quo, and Houston\u2019s fix-it-with-concrete ethos. He insists that Houston should do something more transformative and remove all the buildings in its flood plains \u2013 150,000 structures, including those on three-quarters of the acreage in Meyerland \u2013 and turn the acquired land into parks.<\/em><\/p>\n Read the article, “Lessons From Hurricane Harvey,”<\/a> published by Re.Think<\/em> on March 15, 2018.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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