My colleague Neena Satija and I went down to Houston on the Friday before Hurricane Harvey hit.
Harvey was not projected to hit Houston at any point.
As we all know now, Harvey became the worst rainstorm to ever befall an American city in modern history.
The moment that it really hit me of how intense and impactful this storm was going to be
was when we went to the George R. Brown Convention Center. They had set up a shelter there for several days.
It felt like images I had seen of Hurricane Katrina.
It was just really clear that it would have a huge sweeping impact on people across all parts of the city.
We've heard elected officials and meteorologists say this storm didn't discriminate.
It hit all parts of town, rich and poor, in all areas. Parts away from the coast, and parts close to the coast.
As we ventured out, we saw residents in canoes, and kayaks gliding through their neighborhoods rescuing
their neighbors who were trapped on the second story of their homes. There was a lot of heroism going on.
Part of a 2016 investigation, we examined you know why Houston is so vulnerable to flooding.
Scientists and hydrologists told us that, it was basically because of
unchecked growth and lax development standards.
After Harvey, local officials are taking really big steps to strengthen development rules,
they're looking at revising floodplains.
Preliminary data shows that floodplains in Houston are incredibly outdated, and inaccurate.
That affects everything from building codes to flood insurance.
So, we're looking at pretty sweeping changes, which experts say are long overdue.
Houston is home to the largest refining and petrochemical complex in the country,
and a lot of those facilities are concentrated on the east side of the city near the Houston Ship Channel.
Plants are required to report pollution when it exceeds their air permit limits, and they reported millions of
pounds of excess pollution that they emitted during Harvey when they had to
shut down plants in anticipation of flooding.
Those plants, they're full of toxic hazardous chemicals,
and presumably those leached out into water.
Scientists, I think, are still trying to gauge the environmental impacts of Harvey.
I think, that after this storm, people are more aware of how bad flooding can be in Houston.
There are a lot of new residents there who had never experienced anything like this,
and now people understand that local officials made these decisions that worsened flooding.
I think they will hold their local officials accountable for those past decisions,
and demand that they do things differently moving forward.
Since Hurricane Harvey made landfall along the Texas coast in late August as a Category 4 hurricane,
Texas leaders have been clear about one thing, the price tag for clean up, rebuilding, and putting the
infrastructure in place to prevent damage from future storms is going to be very, very high.
There are still tens of thousands of Texans who are in temporary housing paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
That means they're either in hotel rooms, apartments, or short term trailers or mobile housing units.
Almost four months in, reviews of state, local federal response to Harvey, they've been mixed.
I think at the local level, mayors, county commissioners
are getting a lot of heat for delays in just the clean up process.
And state officials have been hearing from local officials that
there have been unacceptable delays in getting temporary housing.
Governor Abbott and the Texas delegation in Congress have asked for about $61 billion to come to Texas.
They've received a very small fraction of that, about $4 billion, maybe a little bit more.
Most of that $61 billion focuses on infrastructure,
building things like bridges, dams, flood control projects.
No one at the federal, state or local level knows just how bad the extent of damage to housing is.
Nobody is keeping track of that in a central location
so any estimates of housing damage are based on cobbled together data from a few different agencies.
That's a problem because unlike with infrastructure where you can point to a single project and say,
"This is going to be the price for this,"
with housing you don't have that same clarity so it's easier for that to get lost
in the mix when you're competing for a limited number of dollars.
The state of Texas has never had to deal with the damage from a
natural disaster that's over such a shear large expanse of land.
You had just coastline alone, 300 miles and there's a real patchwork of local county,
state officials that all have to work together moving forward.
Then you throw the federal government into the mix to figure out how
Texas is going rebuild and how to prevent this from happening after storms in the future.
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