How Houston was left to drown under Harvey

[pnwmom]

80. You don't appear to know what the sentence in bold means.

Houston doesn't have the zoning regulations that could have mitigated the problem caused by the heavy rainfall.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-31/a-hard-rain-and-a-hard-lesson-for-houston

Harvey Wasn’t Just Bad Weather. It Was Bad City Planning

Harvey is a devastating reminder to Houston that nature will have its due. The Category 4 hurricane that hung around as a stationary tropical storm punished greater Houston with rainfall measured in feet, not inches. No city could have withstood Harvey without serious harm, but Houston made itself more vulnerable than necessary. Paving over the saw-grass prairie reduced the ground’s capacity to absorb rainfall. Flood-control reservoirs were too small. Building codes were inadequate. Roads became rivers, so while hospitals were open, it was almost impossible to reach them by car.

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Houston’s clay soil doesn’t absorb water quickly, so when a hard rain comes, much of it runs off to pool elsewhere. Authorities have made matters worse by allowing developers to pave over much of Harris County and beyond; it’s spent its flood-control budget on culverts, canals, drains, levees, berms, pumps, and other “gray” (as in concrete) infrastructure to flush the water away—but that hasn’t been enough. It builds new roads with curbs and gutters designed to channel water away from buildings. Roads make good sluices in an ordinary storm, but in Harvey they couldn’t shed their water fast enough and became rivers.

Samuel Brody, a resident of the west side of Houston who says the flood waters crept up “into the freak-out zone” of his house, argues that Houston and the region should make better use of green solutions, such as preserving wetlands and digging more detention ponds, which are normally dry but fill up in storms. New buildings—and even old ones—should be elevated on piles so water flows under them, not into them, says Brody, who has a doctorate in city and regional planning and teaches at Texas A&M University’s Galveston campus. And, he says, builders should be prohibited from raising the heights of building lots with fill, which merely diverts more water onto their neighbors’ property.

The acreage of metro Houston that can’t soak up rainfall increased by 32 percent from 2001 to 2011, according to U.S. Geological Survey data.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/31/us/houston-harvey-flooding-urban-planning/index.html

Throughout the Houston metro area, decades of virtually unplanned growth has resulted in thousands of square miles of paved streets, parking lots and other hard surfaces covering the ground. According to the city's website, its metro area measures nearly 9,000 square miles -- an area larger than New Jersey.

All this concrete makes it harder for stormwater to be absorbed naturally into the ground. And Houston is more spread out than many other cities, said Bruce Stiftel, who chairs Georgia Tech's School of Regional and City Planning.

"When you have a less dense urban fabric, you're going to have more impervious surface and you're going to have more runoff," Stiftel said. "That's clearly an important consideration in Houston."

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"Houston is somewhat legendary for having no real zoning," said Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. "That's important because zoning allows local agencies to say, 'look these are inappropriate uses for building in these areas.'"