Houston has a problem. It has been badly flooded in the past (notably, by Hurricane Harvey) and likely will be flooded in the future by a hurricane that follows a path similar to Hurricane Ike. However, damage could be even worse if a major hurricane floods the shipping channel that leads to the major petrochemical processing plants near the city.
The US Army Corps of Engineers is planning a huge flood protection system to protect the city, but as this article points out, it may not be enough.
Despite the massive scale of the project, there’s one big problem: Experts say the Ike Dike won’t reliably protect Houston from major storms. The barriers may not actually be tall or strong enough to handle extreme storm surge, especially as climate change makes the rapid intensification of hurricanes more likely. And even if the barrier does hold, it won’t do anything to stop the kind of urban flooding that occurred when Hurricane Harvey dropped 30 inches of rain on Houston in 2017. The Corps has long preferred to fight hurricanes with large coastal engineering projects, but such projects only protect against one type of flood risk.
Though the Ike Dike would be one of the largest hurricane defense systems anywhere in the world, the Corps’ own designs suggest it might not be able to handle storm surge from Category 4 and 5 hurricanes. The original Ike Dike concept was the brainchild of a professor at Texas A&M University, who proposed a series of 17-foot-high barriers that would ring the entirety of Galveston Bay, sealing it off from the Gulf of Mexico. Another group of experts at Rice University later proposed a complementary project that would line the interior of the bay with levees and artificial islands, providing a second layer of defense for downtown Houston.
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