Bolivar Pennisula damage after Hurricane Ike (Credit: NOAA)
By Dave Fehling, KUHF News for StateImpact Texas
HOUSTON – Next month, the US Army Corps of Engineers will consider proposals to reduce flooding when hurricanes hit a critical part of the Texas Gulf Coast. It’s the area that includes miles of refineries and petrochemical plants- and millions of people. But who should pay, and should everyone be protected when hurricanes hit?
It’s a sunny morning on Galveston Beach. Young kids are in the waste high surf, letting the waves knock them around.
BILL MERRELL: “That’s a banana boat. (Dave Fehling: “Very nice boat) It’s a very nice boat!”
Kids, speedboats…all part of the scene that Bill Merrell can see from where he works. Merrell is a marine scientist at at Texas A&M’s Galveston campus.
It’s right on the water. The water that Merrell thinks about…a lot.
MERRELL: “What you have down here is 364 days of beauty and one day of absolute terror. And that’s the day that we got to protect against.”
The terror from the tropics, hurricanes like Ike that caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. It was following that 2008 disaster that Merrell developed and began promoting the idea of building a massive dike. It would hold back the Gulf water pushed by hurricanes across Galveston Island and up the Houston Ship Channel. Called the “Ike Dike”, it would be 17 feet high and stretch 65 miles and be sort of like the existing seawall that was erected to protect part of Galveston after the massive hurricane in 1900.
MERRELL: “You would expand the protection afforded by the seawall, not the seawall itself perhaps, we would have sand dunes perhaps that would have a core in them, and to make it look natural much like the Dutch have.”
And like in Holland, the Ike Dike would have giant gates to allow ship traffic through but which could be closed before a hurricane’s storm surge hits the coast.
MERRELL: “We think that the concept works, we’ve been able to prove that, and we think it will have a very good cost benefit ratio.”
And that cost could be as much as $6 Billion dollars.
JIM BLACKBURN: “The biggest concern I have with the Ike Dike is it’s very expensive. And it is controversial.”
That’s Jim Blackburn, a Houston environmental attorney. He’s working with a collaborative of researchers headquartered at Rice University. That group has its own idea.
BLACKBURN: “It’s the Centennial Gate and it’s really named for the centennial of the Houston ship channel.”
The Centennial Gate would be much smaller than the Ike Dike, essentially only closing off the Ship Channel at a narrow point just north of Galveston Bay.
BLACKBURN: “And we could build for about a billion dollars, a 25-foot levy and gate structure that would protect hundreds of billions of dollars of investment.”
Blackburn says the billion-dollar cost could be raised locally without having to ask for federal help. It’s cost-benefit. Spend less, but protect the vital and expensive plants that provide tens of thousands of jobs. But therein lies a key issue in the debate over what sort of project would be best. Again, Ike Dike backer, Bill Merrell:
MERRELL: “You can protect the plants but you wouldn’t necessarily protect the workers’ homes…so to be socially just you want to protect everybody and all the studies show that hurricanes and surge really affects the elderly and the poor much more than anyone else.”
HELEN YOUNG: “It may be a combination of many smaller actions that are needed; it could be one big action or a couple of big actions.”
Helen Young is in charge of coastal resources for the Texas Land Commissioner. Her office is working with the United State Army Corp of Engineers to evaluate a number of proposals—big and small—to reduce coastal flooding. Next month, she says the Corp will consider which proposals make the most sense and then will study them for a year before making a picking one. Who would pay and how much will be a major factor in what actually gets built.
YOUNG: “In this climate it’s hard to count on federal assistance, period.”
The current climate for tropical storms is what it always is in hurricane season: un-predictable. The same might be said for what will eventually be built here to protect coastal communities.
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