Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Texas newspapers:
Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Sept. 1, 2017.
When to order an evacuation needs an urgent review
There is no such thing as too much second-guessing of Mayor Joe McComb’s decision not to order a mandatory evacuation ahead of Hurricane Harvey. There is much to learn from what could have been a disaster for Corpus Christi had Harvey made landfall 20 miles farther south.
And we all had better hurry up and learn it because residents who stayed, and who never felt in danger as the storm passed, already have had more than a week to indulge in ill-advised smug self-satisfaction.
Some have told us that they would have ignored a mandatory evacuation order. In the absence of scientific polling, our gut tells us that they speak for thousands if not tens of thousands. Some say they knew all along that Corpus Christi wouldn’t take the direct hit. Disputing their after-the-fact clairvoyance is pointless.
McComb knows this aspect of human nature. He didn’t want first responders’ valuable time or their safety compromised going door-to-door, getting into long, unwinnable arguments with residents refusing to evacuate and willing to resist removal by force. Whether his decision was right or not, he was right about this.
He also knew that the challenge was different for his city of more than 300,000 than for the small towns of Port Aransas and Rockport that could be cleared out without causing a gridlock nightmare on the roads to safety. McComb and other city officials were well aware of Houston’s miserably failed mandatory evacuation for Hurricane Rita in 2005, when hundreds of thousands were trapped in gridlock so long that some died of heat exhaustion. Corpus Christi is no Houston, but it’s big enough that turning all lanes of Interstate 37 northbound for a hurricane evacuation is an actual option.
McComb felt strongly that a decision to evacuate should be personal, not forced by the local government. But there are occasions when top-down management is called for, and a hurricane is one of those occasions.
The suddenness of Harvey’s development from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane also made a mandatory evacuation chancy.
McComb’s decision to urge evacuation strongly, but not make it mandatory, can be second-guessed as toothless. But he makes a strong case that a mandatory evacuation also lacks teeth. State law says law enforcement can use “reasonable force.” That’s too vague to be instructive in the heat of the moment, and it’s not interpreted to mean at bayonet point.
In sum, the decision to call for a mandatory evacuation, bolstered by bus transportation to out-of-town shelters, kept the evacuation safe and orderly for those who chose it. Each full bus to safety represented a lot of personal vehicles not clogging the roads out and making the evacuation less safe.
If McComb had ordered a mandatory evacuation, no doubt it would have been second-guessed mercilessly, especially by those who claim to have known all along that Harvey would spare Corpus Christi. Harvey’s outcome would not have made it a wrong decision.
The more difficult question is whether the voluntary evacuation would have been the right one had Rockport’s outcome been Corpus Christi’s. The answer is no, theoretically. But practically, if compliance with the order had been poor, the answer is not so clear.
So, let the second-guessing begin, let it be vigorous, and keep it constructive.
And here’s another wrinkle: Why is this decision left up to mayors and county judges? The state has the resources and authority to do a much better job of ordering, enforcing and coordinating orderly evacuations.
The governor and Legislature are quick to stick their noses where they don’t belong - in local decisions about tree protection, single-use plastic bags and such. Yet they leave this crucial life-and-death decision to municipalities of varying sizes. The smorgasbord of local decisions promotes chaos. The state could remedy it by being the final authority.
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Houston Chronicle. Sept. 4, 2017.
Time to clean up the San Jacinto waste pits: Recovery from Harvey should include cleanup of the San Jacinto waste pits
After Noah survived the great deluge, God placed a rainbow in the sky as an everlasting covenant with man, promising to never again punish the Earth with such a deadly flood.
Any rainbow sheen you may see today across the Gulf Coast floodwaters is no godly doing. Runoff from chemical plants, petroleum pipelines and at least a dozen Superfund sites risks transforming the destructive rain into a putrid stew filled with lead, arsenic and other toxic and carcinogenic chemicals.
So you can’t help but worry when looking at the pictures of the Vita Bella assisted-living center during Hurricane Harvey - an elderly woman calmly knitting in the Dickinson nursing home while the brown waters swirl around her feet.
They could have used an ark.
The image was shocking enough to hasten a rescue, but the damage may have already been done. After all, some of the worst flood hazards can’t be picked up by photograph.
“There’s no need to test it. It’s contaminated. There’s millions of contaminants,” Porfirio Villarreal, a spokesman for the city of Houston Health Department told the New York Times as to the floodwaters.
Nowhere is the risk more worrisome than the San Jacinto waste pits, which sit between the communities of Highlands and Channelview. One of the San Jacinto waste pits, covered by a temporary armored cap, was partially submerged in the river even before Hurricane Harvey. Now they’re totally engulfed.
Last year, the Army Corps of Engineers predicted the protective device might not be reliable “under very extreme hydrologic events which could erode a sizable portion of the cap.”
Harvey - which has been called a 1,000-year-flood - would certainly qualify. Now we have to worry that the cap was damaged and the toxic mess has spread downriver to Galveston Bay.
As part of the recovery efforts, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt should make time to visit the submerged pits, which were designated a federal Superfund site in 2008.
Pruitt has said he plans to create a “top-10 list” of key Superfund sites and target sites where “the risk of human exposure is not fully controlled.”
The pits fit the bill: They’ve been ravaged by weather and contain dioxin, a highly toxic chemical that increases the risk for several cancers, including lung cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and has been linked to birth defects, liver damage and dermatological disorders.
The EPA actually proposed a solution to the pits last year: Remove about 202,000 cubic yards of contaminated material at cost of nearly $100 million. Of course, the cost and nature of the remediation may have changed depending on whether the armored cap has been damaged.
Regardless, Pruitt should cut through the bureaucratic red tape that has slowed the cleanup of this site and act boldly in holding companies responsible for past contamination.
This site has been unsafe for over 60 years - longer than many Texans have been alive. It is time to finally clean up our river. Any Harvey recovery bill must fund this sort of ecological repair alongside the economic and infrastructure needs.
“For years our communities and local government have told the EPA it is not a matter of if, but when, a storm devastates the pits,” Jackie Young, executive director of the Texas Health and Environment Alliance, told the editorial board.
The federal government bears responsibility for Superfund sites like the San Jacinto waste pits, and it falls on Pruitt to uphold his part of that covenant.
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The Victoria Advocate. Sept. 3, 2017.
What can we do better next time?
Crossroads residents are demonstrating a determination and grit that only people living in a hurricane-ravaged area can.
Many have persevered the past week with no power; some with no reliable shelter, limited water and food rations.
Along with our anxieties, Harvey’s impact will not drift away any time soon. God forbid, but storms swelling up in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea can swirl any time into another deadly threat.
With these concerns all-too-fresh in our minds, it would be wise to start asking now some tough questions of ourselves and of our leaders.
One of the first questions is about weather forecasting models. Nationally, officials have touted improved hurricane models, but no one predicted the severity of Hurricane Harvey in time.
Early forecasts described the storm first as a tropical depression or storm. Within about 24 hours, Harvey mushroomed into a Category 1, 2, 3 and, finally, a 4.
The rapid escalation led Victoria officials to issue a mandatory evacuation order at 5:24 p.m. Thursday - about a day’s warning for everyone to prepare and leave their homes. By then, most residents had made the incorrect decision to stay and ride out the storm.
Should the order have been issued earlier?
Did Crossroads officials properly prepare residents for a Category 4 storm? Why did weather forecasting models fail to provide an accurate prediction of Harvey’s strength?
Questions sprang up after the storm, too. One of the first wounds of Harvey was our above-ground power lines that could not withstand hurricane-force winds in the neighborhood of 100 mph.
Burying power lines throughout Victoria has been a recurring debate - with money at the center of that discussion. Many have argued the cost would be too expensive, but now we have to ask again whether its benefits are worth the investment. Across the country, in places much less prone to hurricanes, power lines are commonly buried.
Underground lines may not be a guarantee of power at the back end of a storm, but the shorter amount of time to restore power may be its biggest advantage. And we also must weigh the public safety factor and huge property loss caused by numerous structure fires related to downed power lines.
In terms of essential city of Victoria services, we need to look at why our water system failed because of the power outage. There may be no easy answers to this question, but it’s one our city officials must consider carefully.
Part of the solution is looking at best practices put in place by other comparable cities prone to natural disasters. How do they ensure a redundancy of power source to their water system? If the water system goes out, how do they most rapidly restore the service?
Down the highway is the coastal town of Port Lavaca, which lifted its boil water notice late Thursday. The town, which also took a direct hit from Harvey, already has water safe to drink.
The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority owns and operates a water plant on State Highway 316 South and sells the water to Port Lavaca, which distributes it to residents. In advance of Harvey making landfall, the city filled its two, above-ground storage towers, carrying a total of 1 million gallons of water, before the GBRA shut down the plant hours before landfall Aug. 25.
GBRA shut down the plant not because it worried about the storm surge but because it was worried about the high winds damaging the plant. The city didn’t use generators to deliver the water it had in its towers to residents. It just needed gravity.
Of course, Port Lavaca’s population is about one-fifth of Victoria’s so the comparison might not be apt. It is only one data point.
These questions should be asked in every Crossroads community, not just Victoria. In poor Bloomington, only 5 percent of the homes had electricity Friday while wealthier Port O’Connor on the coast had almost all of its power restored. Both towns are served by the same utility company.
These questions are not meant to criticize those who have worked tirelessly during the past week to serve our communities. All of our first responders, utility workers and officials did outstanding work. Most of all, our residents are safe. Incredibly, no one in the Crossroads died.
But whenever a natural disaster occurs, it behooves all of us to ask: What can we do better next time?
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Beaumont Enterprise. Sept. 1, 2017.
Harvey brings new focus to flood insurance program.
The timing of hurricanes is never good, but Harvey’s disruption could create a second problem in Washington, D.C., later this month. The National Flood Insurance Program expires periodically and must be renewed by Sept. 30. Renewal is always difficult because the program is mired in debt, in part because of a classic Catch-22: Not enough people who should buy flood insurance do, thus raising premiums for those who do … thereby making it less likely that more people will buy it.
First things first: The program should not be allowed to expire Sept. 30. That will further undermine public confidence in it. Congress must keep it functioning, even with temporary extensions, while it attempts to figure out how to fix it.
This is another reason why Texas congressmen should tell President Trump to rescind his threat to shut down the government later this month if his border wall isn’t funded.
The next step is the goal that has eluded the past few presidents and sessions of Congress: Making the program self-sufficient - or frankly, at least getting it close.
Critics say the premiums are too low, which is often true. That can be remedied by increasing participation so that a majority, not a fraction, of homeowners who need it have it.
One option is to make it mandatory for those who build or buy on property that is exceptionally vulnerable to flooding. That’s comparable to the mortgage insurance that some homeowners are required to purchase. The concept is the same - making sure that the property can be paid for if something catastrophic happens.
Congress also could reduce the 30-day period that must pass before new policies take effect. That goal is to prevent people from getting it just before a hurricane or river flood is forecast.
That’s understandable. But the waiting period could be reduced to a week or two with the understanding that the property owner must keep it for two or three years instead of just the standard one year.
Disasters like Harvey are going to strike our country periodically. Congress must make sure that more people have flood insurance when that happens.
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Galveston County Daily News. Sept. 2, 2017.
Harvey will change debate about surge protection.
One of the questions that will arise from Hurricane Harvey is exactly how, and by how much, the massive flood will change the debate about investing several billion dollars, mostly federal, into a huge civil engineering project to mitigate storm-surge flooding along this part of the Texas Coast.
Even this early in this latest disaster, however, it seems pretty likely the situation will have changed fundamentally and dramatically by the time elected officials and other interested groups are able to resume discussion about such a project.
It’s too soon to know what the consequences of Harvey will be for the Ike Dike plan, and it’s too soon even to ask about it, except in broad, informal ways, while every level of government is occupied dealing with this disaster.
All the same, there are things people interested in seeing the project completed probably should be thinking about already.
One is that there’s probably a much bigger constituency for flood control spending now than there was after Ike. The question is whether that constituency will be interested in surge flooding, or whether it will be focused exclusively on flooding caused by rain.
A complication for local advocates of the Ike Dike, for example, will be that much of the regional push behind the project was based on a what if; what if Ike had been a little different and devastated Houston?
There’s no what if in Harvey; it has devastated one of the largest cities in the United States. There will be huge political clout behind investing huge sums of money into systems to prevent that from happening to the same extent in the future.
The question for locals may be how to weld a surge-protection system onto whatever plan begins to form in the months after Harvey.
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