Houston’s Flooding Underscores Disaster Management Challenges

As the Earth’s climate changes, many scientists predict that warmer temperatures could lead to intensifying hurricanes, with individual storms dropping more rain.

As such, the massive flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey in and around Houston may presage the challenges that disaster managers will face in the years ahead, says UB disaster researcher Chris Renschler.

Renschler, associate professor of geography in the College of Arts and Sciences, researches extreme events, including soil erosion and flooding.

“In Houston, the situation is absolutely devastating,” he says. “This is an unprecedented precipitation event, but it should give us the motivation to think about these unprecedented events, particularly in hurricane-prone areas.

“These kinds of floods are not wholly natural,” he says. “They are the result of both natural and human-driven processes. Humans can’t fully control nature, but we can control decisions such as where to build new residential developments, where and how to build temporary storages for flood water, and when to open the floodgates of a dam. We can also control how we communicate with the public about the risks of flooding.”

These quandaries are not unique to Houston — communities across the U.S. face similar challenges and should continuously revisit and adapt their emergency plans and communication procedures, says Renschler, who is teaching a class this semester that focuses in part on building community resilience against floods and other extreme events.

He says that to protect communities, emergency managers, public officials and other decision-makers must work together, training for worst-case scenarios and planning ahead so that people who may be affected by flooding understand the risks long before a crisis has begun.

Renschler notes that decisions made years in advance can have a huge impact on the severity of a disaster. Land use planning, for example, influences not only how water moves through a landscape, but also who will be in the path of a flood.

When it comes to water management, the challenge is “to anticipate changes and prepare and invest in realistic planning scenarios in time to not get in these situations with rather limited management options,” Renschler says. 

This Google Earth image series produced by Chris Renschler’s team shows land use and land cover transitions around Houston's Addicks and Barker reservoirs since 1944. The images show the location of the reservoir gates and how new developments have crept closer from the East toward and around the reservoirs as time has passed. As a consequence, thousands of homes that are now too close to the maximum reservoir level have reportedly been flooded and will likely deteriorate while sitting in floodwater for longer, as happened after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Renschler says. Image: LESAM.org/University at Buffalo/Images via Google Earth. 

Source: UBNow

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Taxonomy

• Flood management
• Flood damage
• Flood prediction
• Flood Risk Management
• Flood Modeling
• Flood Mapping