What if Ike had gone west?
Hurricane’s impact analyzed at first of two RDA forums

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

What if Ike had been a Category 4 hurricane instead of a Category 2 and had hit the Texas coast 10 or 15 miles farther west? How would it have impacted Houston’s infrastructure, economy and people?

	BILL READ

That was the theme of a post-Hurricane Ike planning forum sponsored July 15 by the Rice Design Alliance. Using charts and graphs drawn from sophisticated modeling methods, four hurricane experts defined the questions that should be asked in Ike’s wake in the first of two events at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, moderated by Houston Chronicle science writer Eric Berger. The second event, planned for Aug. 19, will focus on the answers.

Near the end of the forum, the panel was asked when such a storm might hit. “In the next 30 years. I would put that in the probable range,” said Gordon Wells, program manager for the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas-Austin.

Bill Read, director of the National Hurricane Center and former chief of the Houston-Galveston weather office, warned the gathering, “Don’t be caught by surprise.” He said recent studies show people “begin to forget within five years how bad some other event was, even if they went through it — but especially if they didn’t.”

Citing statistics on the rising costs of hurricane strikes, Read noted people have moved to the coast in greater numbers since the ’70s. “The storm-surge risk is there because we’ve put ourselves in harm’s way.”

He said one of his pet peeves is the way flood insurance relies on models of the 100-year flood plain to set rates. People on slightly higher ground assume they’re protected, “and then they’re surprised when they’re flooded (by a storm surge). Something like 40 percent of the people flooded on the islands during Ike did not have flood insurance.”

Satellite imagery shows Hurricane Ike before making landfall on the Texas coast.

Wells displayed an animated model of Ike’s landfall and how the one-two punch of shifting winds and surging waters spared much of Galveston while devastating the Bolivar Peninsula. He said being able to model the impact of an incoming storm helped rescuers place assets in advance of Ike. Many of the 634 people rescued from the flood, most of them by helicopter, might otherwise have died.

Wells said grade-raising Galveston again shouldn’t be considered beyond reason, especially when compared with notions of an “Ike Dike,” a proposed 55-mile seawall that would protect the Gulf Coast. His models of Ike’s actual consequences and what a stronger storm might have done demonstrated the dike’s limited effectiveness.

“It’s a notion that doesn’t seem to be current today,” he said, displaying a “fantasy” postcard showing Galveston rising above the old seawall after the deadly 1900 hurricane. “There’s a lot of emphasis on large-scale infrastructure, but not so much on large scale grade-raising, and I would point out that might be an important thing to consider.” Wells said post-Ike analysis showed the areas of Galveston that suffered least were those that had been raised early in the last century.

Col. Len Waterworth, retired commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, talked about the risk to Houston’s people, environment and economy a major storm presents. Hanadi Rifai, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Houston, addressed the environmental consequences of Ike, which she said are not yet fully understood.

Wells and Rifai noted the importance of work by the Rice-based Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center, which will hold its annual conference at Rice Sept. 14, Ike’s first anniversary. The meeting will focus on recovery and renewal efforts.

The SSPEED Center recently won a $1.25 million Houston Endowment grant to estimate the effects of a direct strike on the city by a powerful hurricane.

For more about the RDA forums, visit www.ricedesignalliance.org.