Houston Could Face Stronger Storms. Is the City Prepared?

Hurricane Beryl, which hit Houston last week, could be a ‘warning shot’ for more intense and unpredictable storm seasons, writes Dylan Baddour for Inside Climate News.

Beryl struck Houston as a category 1 storm, still causing damages and power outages for millions of residents. “For Matt Lanza, a meteorologist and managing editor of Space City Weather, it raised a disturbing prospect: what if the mild hurricane hitting Texas had been stronger?” According to Lanza, “This week’s experience suggests the city is ill-prepared to handle such a disaster.”

The region is taking actions to bolster its defenses against future storms. “Offshore, federal authorities are advancing plans to build an enormous, $57 billion system of barriers and gates, which has been called the largest civil engineering project in U.S. history and is expected to take 20 years to construct.” Meanwhile, the city of Houston is widening bayous and offering buyouts to homeowners in flood-prone areas.

Making Houston less vulnerable is a major undertaking, “backtracking, to some extent, on decades of booming development driven by the hubris of the energy age,” Baddour writes. “The transformation would entail making space for the water, pulling back from the edges of the bayous to create a giant network of wide greenways through the metro area.”