What Went Right with Harvey, What Didn’t, and Why

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Having written about Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as well as Hurricane Ike (the last to hit the Houston area) in 2008, I’d like to describe what about Hurricane Harvey went right for millions of people, and what didn’t.

Hurricane Harvey has claimed the lives of some sixty people to date. While awful, that’s much less than the more than 1,800 killed in Hurricane Katrina. Part of the difference is attributable to the nature of the storms. Katrina hit with massive force across the length of the populous Mississippi Gulf Coast and Louisiana bayous, killing hundreds immediately. The failure of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ levees in New Orleans led to a rapid deluge and more death.

Some 90 percent of the city had been evacuated before Katrina landed. The 10 percent left behind (and in adjoining parishes) were left to fend for themselves. With the city shut down by military roadblocks, the hollowing out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under George W. Bush, and much of the Louisiana National Guard off fighting in Iraq, available emergency resources were much diminished. No civilians with boats could return to the flooded city and the Coast Guard was left pretty much the only rescue force in those first critical days.

By contrast, when Rita hit western Louisiana a few weeks later, the “Cajun Navy” made up of local civilian volunteers did most of the rescuing. We’ve seen the same kind of efforts with Harvey and “Texans helping Texans.”

In addition, Harvey was mainly a torrential rain event. The hurricane’s wind damage paled compared to the impact of the gradual overflowing of bayous and rivers that flooded vast areas of east Texas. Citizens with boats and jacked up trucks mobilized to become part of a rescue operation that included not only the Coast Guard but other armed services such as the Army National Guard, and Army, Navy, and Air Force paramedics. FEMA was also functioning this time around, thanks to the Obama Administration’s rebuilding and a rare competent appointment by the Trump Administration of former Alabama disaster relief manager Brock Long to head the agency.

What hasn’t worked stems from the failure by local and Washington politicians to acknowledge how a natural disaster like Harvey becomes a human catastrophe when you refuse to accept the growing body of science that tells us about our role in climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency under climate denier Scott Pruitt has failed to do it’s job during the emergency by monitoring the flooding of Superfund sites, although the agency denies this. And while storm shelters and other support systems worked well for the most part, the cleanup is likely to top $180 billion, more than Katrina or Super Storm Sandy.

Climate science tell us we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that we need new coastal planning and zoning in expanding floodplains, particularly in developer-dominated sprawl zones not only in coastal Texas, but in places like Florida and Puerto Rico where—as I write this—Hurricane Irma appears to be headed. Denial of climate change plus bad (really nonexistent) urban zoning is why Houston has been hit by three “500-year floods” in the last sixteen years.

Denial of climate change plus bad (really nonexistent) urban zoning is why Houston has been hit by three “500-year floods” in the last sixteen years.

The week after Hurricane Harvey, California was hit with a statewide heat wave that broke temperature records in dozens of towns and cities across the state, including a 106-degree high in normally fog-shrouded San Francisco that was also shrouded in haze from nearby forest fires. The heat also sparked the largest wildfire in Los Angeles’s history. In fact, it’s been a record season for wildfire across the west, which has also seen record droughts.

“This is beyond our worst nightmare. No one ever thought we’d lose most of our pine forest,” a ranger in her 35th fire season told me, referring to the massive die-off of drought-ravaged pine trees in California’s Sierra Nevada. Those trees are now kindling for the next conflagration that could happen at any time.

We know what the solutions are, and they start with a rapid transition off fossil fuels. But we are still fighting to generate the political will needed to implement them.

What went wrong with Hurricane Harvey didn't have to happen. Welcome to the new normal.

David Helvarg is an author and executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean conservation group. His newly updated book, Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America’s Ocean Wilderness is about to come out as an ebook available on Kindle and Amazon.