Given the destruction of Hurricane Harvey – as well as Prof. Cherrier’s research interest in the human impact on aquatic environments – I tweeted a link to the article “Houston’s Flood Is a Design Problem” by Ian Bogost at The Atlantic. about Houston’s stormwater management and continued development (sprawl) offers both a basic introduction to Houston’s topography as a broad overview of factors facing city officials as the city starts to recover and eventually rebuild. I learned the definition of a bayou, a slow-moving river; moreover, the author explains if Houston had been left undeveloped, the natural bayous would have slowly absorbed the excess water from the Harvey’s storm. Houston, the nation’s fourth most-populous city, drained these bayous to develop the land and therefore had to design a system of stormwater management. What Harvey exposed was Houston’s chronic issues with flooding, the lack of historical models for the kind of rainfall sustained by Houston during Harvey, and the flaws in the city’s stormwater management system put into place when the bayous were drained. Bogost writes,
Houston poses both a typical and an unusual situation for stormwater management. The city is enormous, stretching out over 600 square miles. It’s an epitome of the urban sprawl characterized by American exurbanism, where available land made development easy at the edges. Unlike New Orleans, Houston is well above sea level, so flooding risk from storm surge inundation is low. Instead, it’s rainfall that poses the biggest threat.
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Many planners contend that impervious surface itself is the problem. The more of it there is, the less absorption takes place and the more runoff has to be managed. Reducing development, then, is one of the best ways to manage urban flooding. The problem is, urban development hasn’t slowed in the last half-century. Cities have only become more desirable, spreading outward over the plentiful land available in the United States.
The above excerpt showcases an effective aspect of the article, framing Houston’s flooding as a general conflict between Man and Nature and also specifically rooting that conflict between Texas development of land (often without zoning or land regulations) vs. nature’s stormwater management system, in this case, the bayous.
