Rain, Resilience and Expertise in Houston

• In Event: Assembling Resilience - I

Abstract

Three “500-year” floods have hit Houston in the last three years according to current Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) flood risk designations. There is broad agreement between scientists, policy makers, and the major oil and gas companies on the need for major flood mitigation infrastructure in the coming years. The Army Corps of Engineers has proposed a 31-billion-dollar sea wall. There remains significant disagreement on how much more and how much worse flooding will be in the next ten years, much less the next 500. At the heart of this disagreement is the storm related hourly precipitation rate that the city, county, state and federal agencies consider probable. The tension lies in different interpretations of scientific scholarship regarding the causal linkages between more and worse floods along the Gulf Coast and anthropogenic climate change. In Houston, the word resilience leaves intentionally vague the contours of the problem being addressed in order to reach political compromises large and small. People with high scientific fluency including engineers, geologists, chemists, and physicists working in industry and government have access to the same publicly available data and research on changes in intensity and volume of storm-related precipitation but come to consequentially different conclusions on the number of inches per hour of rain the city should be built to withstand and who should pay. The question of the projected precipitation rate is at once up in the physical composition of the atmosphere, filtered through statistical and economic models, and stuck in the everyday work of engineering drainage for a city with too much concrete for a rainy day much less a stalled hurricane like Harvey. My paper will trace how the financial and institutional responsibility of oil and gas companies towards flood mitigation infrastructure is determined or avoided in relation to differing explanations of causation underpinning differing predictions of hourly precipitation rates.

Author

• Nataya Friedan, Stanford University