Texas warns us that we’re unprepared for normal weather

Summary:  We get a lesson from the weather about America’s lack of preparedness for quite normal “disasters” (events). Our fascination with doomster scenarios is fun, as we thrill to op-eds asking if we will we start WWIII with Putin — or die in the deserts of 2100 or die in its flooding seas — but it distracts us from managing America’s routine operations.  {1st of 2 posts today.}

“We don’t even plan for the past.”
— Steven Mosher (member of Berkeley Earth; bio here), a comment posted at Climate Etc.

While we bicker fruitlessly about the weather in 2050 and 2100, we ignore the clear lessons from disasters of the past decade. Hurricane Katrina revealed a city with elaborate (and expensively prepared) disaster procedures, but totally unprepared to implement them. Hurricane Sandy revealed a city unprepared for weather that occurred in its area several times in the 20th C. The current flooding in Texas: showed State proud to have resisted Commie-lite land use regulation and high taxes — and so severely damaged by floods typical in its region.

Not only are we vulnerable to normal weather (“normal” by the usual 100-year standard), we’re vulnerable to less frequent but inevitable weather (e.g., a Category 4 or 5 hurricane hitting a major city, like Miami). It’s yet another example of our focus on theoretical future disasters while we ignore imminent dangers, such as our dying oceans (details in this post, and this one).

Today’s reading shows America’s vision in operation. Blind and dumb is no way to run a superpower, or even prosper in the harsh wilds of the 21st C.

“Texas And Oklahoma Floods 2015:
Flooded Properties In Central Texas Were Knowingly Built In Harm’s Way.”
by Maria Gallucci, International Business Times.
29 May 2015 — Excerpt

As torrential downpours ripped through San Marcos, Texas, earlier this week, the town’s two rivers swiftly burst over their banks and surged into homes and across roads. At the Woodlands of San Marcos, a new housing complex, thick brown waters flooded the buildings’ first floors.

Stephen Ramirez said he wasn’t exactly surprised to see the damage. The 306-unit development is being built in a floodplain and sits just steps from the San Marcos River. When city officials were mulling a zoning change in 2012 to allow the project to proceed, Ramirez and other opponents repeatedly warned about the risks of flooding.

… But the flooded complex in San Marcos and other damaged properties in the region point to the broader challenges facing America’s communities: As populations swell and urban development abounds, cities and towns are increasingly allowing developers to build squarely in harm’s way.

… Nicholas Pinter, a floodplain expert in Southern Illinois University’s Geology Department, said the case of Woodlands highlights the “inevitable tensions” between the rights of private property owners and the risks of building in floodplains. He said often developers and policymakers focus on the short-term benefits — rental dollars, higher tax bases — of building along rivers and in watersheds, rather than account for the long-term risks to homeowners and businesses. “Every single flood event shows the errors of our ways,” Pinter said. “This is mostly local development and political pressures against the widely agreed upon advice of floodplain managers and scientists.”

He pointed to the massive 1993 flood in the U.S. Midwest as an example. Flooding along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers caused $16 billion in damages, prompting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to buy out 7,700 properties in Illinois and Missouri at a cost of $56.3 million. The idea was to limit and reduce development in floodplains and leave certain swaths of land to Mother Nature. But less than a decade later, a boom of real estate and infrastructure projects began cropping up in the nearby St. Louis floodplain, once again boosting the population in risky areas, Pinter found in a 2005 policy paper. “Amnesia amazingly kicks in within just three to four years,” he said. “It leads people to a sense of complacency.”

———————————-  End excerpt  ———————————-

Putting the flooding in a broader context

(1) Recommended: A great article about our larger problems, which also provides an important contest to this event: “The Age Of Disinformation” by James Spann (meteorologist) at Medium — Excerpt…

Yes, the flooding in Houston yesterday was severe, and a serious threat to life and property. A genuine weather disaster that has brought on suffering.

But, no, this was not “unprecedented”. Flooding from Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 was more widespread, and flood waters were deeper. There is no comparison. In fact, many circulated this image in recent days, claiming it is “Houston underwater” from the flooding of May 25–26, 2015. The truth is that this image was captured in June 2001 during flooding from Allison.

Flood events in 2009, 2006, 1998, 1994, 1989, 1983, and 1979 brought higher water levels to most of Houston, and there were many very serious flood events before the 1970s.

(2) An analysis of the news media’s exaggerations and misrepresentations of weather: “NBC Continues Media Push Blaming Flooding in Texas, Drought in California on Climate Change” at Newsbusters. Especially note how alarmists have invented the “climate whiplash” to tie together unrelated forms of weather so that everything — no matter how normal — becomes climate change.Also, no mention of the IPCC.

(3)  “In Texas, the Race to Build in Harm’s Way Outpaces Flood-Risk Studies and Warming Impacts” by Andrew C. Revkin at the New York Times. It’s the NYT, so he opens with a statement of the revealed faith (no need to quote a scientists) …

“Somewhere, deep in the statistical noise, there is a contribution from the global buildup of heat-trapping gases changing the climate system. Among the clearest outcomes of global warming are hotter heat waves and having more of a season’s rain come in heavy downpours.”

This is quite false. Future warming will increase precipitation, but that does not mean the warming of the past 2 centuries has had such an impact — and certainly does not mean that the human caused warming since 1950 has had such an impact. Once Revkin has made his profession of faith, the rest of the article describes the mad development policies of Texas.

(4)  A clear demonstration of how fears of future climate change confuse the need to prepare for normal weather: “Adapting to climate change is going to be a lot messier than we think” by Brad Plumer at Vox. Plumer wants to use normal weather — for which we’re unprepared — to boost fears of future climate change. The result is a mess.

For More Information

See the 1993 classic book forecasting our present problems Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. For a down to earth look at climate change see The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton (1973), a novel describing the 1905s drought that re-shaped Texas as crops shriveled and livestock died.

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See these Reference Pages for other posts about climate on the FM sites:  The keys to understanding climate change and My posts about climate change. Also, see these posts about our lack of preparedness for the past…

1. Have we prepared for normal climate change and non-extreme weather?
2. Let’s prepare for past climate instead of bickering about predictions of climate change.
3. Hurricane Sandy asks when did weather become exceptional? (plus important info about US hurricanes).
4. Droughts are coming. Are we ready for the past to repeat?
5. Key facts about the drought that’s reshaping California.