Hurricane Laura’s Aftermath

Even though Laura’s wind speed reached 150 mph (surprising nearly everyone, including me), as expected the storm surge caused more damage than the wind. Laura was tightly organized, relatively compact. She came shore in southwest Louisiana, yet Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange in southeast Texas came through with modest damage. By Tuesday afternoon electrical power was restored for many in that area. Flooding was limited even though reportedly Laura forced the Neches River to flow backwards for about 12 hours.

Lake Charles, Louisiana is only about 60 miles east of Beaumont along Interstate 10. Lake Charles was inundated. At one point I remember hearing a local broadcaster say the city had 9 feet of water downtown, and that was as the storm began to hit.

Before-and-after satellite imagery shows a lot of buildings have been flattened or washed away. Cameron, just across the border from Texas, has been wiped off the map again just 15 years after Rita did the same. What happened there is painful. If you have ever been through a natural disaster, looking at those images brings back all the memories of how awful it is.

Texas got lucky this time. Officials in Harris County deserve praise for listening to meteorologists, holding their nerve and not evacuating all of Harris County, keeping escape routes available for people who lived close to the coast and needed to leave.

But such measures as the levees at Texas City and Port Arthur are looking more and more like necessities, and the levees already in place look like perhaps they need to be built up to take a higher surge.

We cannot simply expect everyone along the Gulf Coast to move inland. A huge proportion of the nation’s petroleum and petrochemical processing happens from Freeport, Texas to Lake Charles, Louisiana. It’s there because in the early years ships were the most practical way to move the crude oil in and the finished products out, and those immense plants can’t be readily relocated. So it’s time to get serious about building protective infrastructure for both the industrial facilities and the people who live around them to keep everything running.

It won’t be quick and easy. I grew up in Port Arthur. The levee started getting built in the 1960s and wasn’t finished until after 2000, but even when it was only a strip of levee on the seaward side, it mitigated damage to the town. As a complete levee, it held back the waters from Ike while the surrounding area was inundated. It isn’t easy to convince voters to fund a project of such size over such a long timespan. But it is so very much worthwhile.

The Gulf of Mexico is at least 3 degrees hotter than when I was growing up. That heat feeds the storms. It has not merely made them stronger. It has made them different.

We’re not helpless in the face of this. Do what NASA does. Don’t simply rebuild the way everything was before. Look at what has come through these storms best. Do more of that, or better yet, enhance that.

To some extent that applies to households as well as to communities. After Rita, houses at the shore that used to be on 8 to 10 foot pilings were elevated further. They’re on 16 to 20 foot pilings, often with a deck midway up, shaded from the sun and high enough not to be as plagued by mosquitoes as ground level. Storm surge passes under those houses and over their decks unimpeded. That doesn’t just apply to residences, either. The high school and Coast Guard station at Sabine Pass are up on pillars. The space beneath them is where people park their cars. Nobody stays there for a big storm, so when the surge rolls in, it passes beneath those buildings unimpeded too.

Other household choices are starting to come in, too. A portable power generator is a bother to operate, produces exhaust that becomes deadly in an enclosed space, and typically can barely power the fridge/freezer and a few lights. A permanent standby generator able to power the entire house, run on the natural gas supply, and turn itself on and off as needed costs a lot but turns a post-storm city power outage into no problem at all. The next door neighbor of a woman who has one looked at what it took to put his large family in a hotel until everything came back on again, and he asked what it would cost to put one in for his house too.

Putting in mitigation ahead of time means being able to do it on a tolerable schedule. Coping with post-storm consequences later hits whenever it hits, and delays in dealing with it only make the cleanup uglier. We can’t be stronger than Mother Nature. Sometimes she packs a wallop too big to fend off. But we can take steps to reduce the impact. And with the Gulf consistently so hot now, we’d better try.