Houston's tryst with destiny

In what reporters at the Weather Channel said on Sunday morning is the worst flood disaster in US history, two feet of rain had fallen on Houston since Hurricane Harvey came on shore along the Texas Gulf Coast on Friday night, with another two feet of rain in the forecast for Houston by Wednesday. The weather services in Europe, whose models are often more accurate than the ones in the US, are indicating just as much as a foot more of rainfall than that.

As of Sunday morning, the water is rising to the height of the city's elevated highways and people are heroically making their way around Houston in rafts, trying to rescue the stranded, among them stand children, seniors and their pets, many of whom are trapped in the rising water. The Houstonians, black, white and Latino are struggling together to save one another's lives on a weekend when their president, Donald Trump, busies himself pardoning a racist sheriff and kicking transgender Americans out of the US military.

Houston has always dealt with tropical storms because it is located on the path along which storms frequently travel as they come out of the Gulf of Mexico. The city is only about 40 to 45 miles off the coast, depending on the neighbourhood involved. The city is also in Bayou Country, where drainage is generally poorer than in most other US cities. Although not as low-lying as New Orleans, it is only about 50 feet above sea level itself. As an article in The Atlantic noted, the city has seen four 100-year flooding events since the spring of 2015, according to meteorologist Eric Holthaus. The city also sees a 167 per cent increase in heavy downpours from what it did in the 1950s. Studies documenting the threat of climate change to cities like Houston are not new. A recent one, published in 2016, connected the worsening of extreme amounts of rainfall to man-made climate change, which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, like coal, gas or oil and filling of the air with greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2). "It may have been a strong storm, and it may have caused a lot of problems anyway—but human-caused climate change amplifies the damage considerably," said Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Huge amounts of CO2, which account for the overwhelmingly largest amount of greenhouse gas, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, causes a rise in the ocean temperature. CO2 also raises air temperature simultaneously, which turns the atmosphere into a sponge that can absorb more and more water. That sponge is being squeezed out now over the city of Houston. When it is squeezed out over the ocean it causes sea level to rise, in turn increasing the flood threat to cities like nearby New Orleans. "The climate is changing. In Galveston Bay, the sea level is rising. We know the area is experiencing more heavy downpours," flood impact expert Sam Brody told The Guardian in one of his interviews with the press. "It is something that keeps me awake every night when June rolls around with the hurricane season. Because it's not if, it's just when – and every year we put more people and critical assets in harm's way," he added. "We keep rolling the dice and the stakes become higher."

Even before the current ongoing catastrophe, there have been at least 26 events that flooded homes in the Houston metro area since the mid-1970s, according to Houston-based Weather Research Center (WRC) and National Weather Service records. Then, in Houston, as elsewhere, there is the problem of capitalism worsening the impact of natural disasters like the current flooding. The refusal of GOP, the right-wing lawmakers, and politicians to grapple with climate change, including their attacks on the EPA and regulations imposed on lower carbon emissions, are only part of the problem. Last year, a group of Houstonians formed Residents Against Flooding and filed lawsuits against the city and a local infrastructure authority. The group alleges that developments put in place by the city have caused hundreds of homes to flood. The real estate industry, greedy as ever, has pushed massive development in Houston. The standard for these developers is a total lack of concern for any issue other than their need to make more money.

Posts on the Residents Against Flooding website point out numerous problems including the way in which a rush to propel development results in inadequately planned construction, lacking, for example, mechanisms to prevent water runoff from new developments from flowing into other neighbourhoods, including neighbourhoods that were not flood zones before the new construction.

Capitalism's propensity for worsening any natural disaster is, of course, nothing new. In the post Katrina period in New Orleans, for example, the city was used almost as a laboratory for every right-wing social and political experiment conceivable. Regardless of how things end up after this latest round of catastrophic flooding the people of Houston, as always, will be on their guard. IPA