SSPEED Center wins $1.25M for Ike study

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SSPEED Center wins $1.25M for Ike study
Houston Endowment will fund study to prepare for next big storm

With an estimated price tag around $30 billion, Hurricane Ike ranks as the third-costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Yet Ike delivered only a glancing blow to Houston, and it was just a Category 2 hurricane when it made landfall.

For researchers at the Rice-based center for Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED), the big question is, What would have happened had Ike not weakened and turned its full fury toward Bolivar Peninsula at the last minute?

“If you project the devastation at Bolivar taking place around NASA and the Clear Lake area instead, you can very quickly imagine a storm that’s more costly and deadly than even Katrina,” said SSPEED Director Phil Bedient, Rice’s Herman Brown Professor of Engineering.

Now, thanks to a new $1.25 million two-year grant from Houston Endowment, SSPEED experts can put real numbers to the damage estimates of a direct strike on Houston by a powerful hurricane.

“With hurricane season here, we can all appreciate the practical applications likely to be gained from the research that Houston Endowment has so generously funded,” Rice President David Leebron said. “Ike may have been a once-in-a-quarter-century event, but the entire region will benefit if we better understand and plan for these storms. There are dollars and, more important, lives to be saved by improving our ability to make effective responses to these massive hurricanes.”

Formed in 2007, SSPEED is a multi-institutional collaboration that aims to address deficiencies in storm prediction, disaster planning and evacuations for communities stretching from New Orleans to Brownsville, Texas.

“There’s no question that Houston dodged a bullet with Ike,” said Rice’s Jim Blackburn, professor in the practice of environmental law and co-principal investigator on the grant with Bedient. “It opened a lot of eyes to the vulnerabilities we face from a big storm. The reality is that we have developed this entire region without regard to the risks of a big hurricane.”

SSPEED’s partner institutions include the University of Houston (UH), the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Texas Southern University, Texas A&M University at Galveston, the University of Texas at Brownsville, Louisiana State University, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Houston-Galveston Area Council, southeast Texas’ largest council of local governments.

The Houston Endowment grant will allow SSPEED to compile all the lessons learned from Ike and make recommendations about what lawmakers, emergency managers, industry officials and homeowners should do to prepare for future storms.

Dozens of SSPEED experts will be pulled into the project, which will examine: