Hurricane Harvey was not a catastrophe | Hacker News Reader

Hurricane Harvey was not a catastrophe

houstonchronicle.com

41 pointsangersock38 comments

This piece has value. This passage from it is a morass of cognitive dissonance and bad faith rhetoric:

"The claim that CO2 causes worse hurricanes is unproven and controversial, even to believers in climate change. Regardless, even if you believe that CO2 is causing climate change, you should be thanking the energy entrepreneurs in Houston for bringing cheap, clean natural gas to the nation. The increasing use of gas in power generation has led to a much-improved carbon dioxide picture in the U.S."

His comparison of wetland absorption and rainfall is comparing apples to oranges - if his numbers are accurate in the first place; which given the lack of citations and a piece that clearly is trying to prove a point, I think is an unreasonably optimistic assumption.

His scaling of the costs to a personal budget is also misleading (not terribly so, but still). Individuals have buffers that are proportionally much larger than those of large organisations; and if indeed you encounter a setback that's larger than you can absord you usually have a whole network of contacts to help you mitigate the effects. Conceptually: relying on your neighbors doesn't work so well when your neighbors were hit too. The comparison isn't crazy, but it's a little misleading nevertheless.

If the core premise of this piece really had value, then city of houston should be comfortably able to cover the bill without undue burden, and not need support from texas or the federal government. That does not appear to be the case.

Also: note that the estimates of damage almost certainly only include straightforward economic damage. That's of course an absurd proposition; much will have been damaged in houston that has value to various people but simply isn't trivially measurable. Losing family heirlooms, pictures... your house... does damage beyond the trivial value of the object.

Finally: even if it turns out the damage is merely 10s of billions and not hundreds (as he's implying), then it's still reasonable to assume it's worthwhile to mitigate that damage. Just because you can deal with the setback doesn't mean it's best to ignore the risk.

It's pretty wild, he seems to suggest that because wetlands wouldn't prevent the whole thing, they aren't worth having, or something like that.

And it's totally normal in dynamic systems for even tiny buffers to have huge impacts on how the whole system behaves. It's sort of like saying having a network stream buffer is pointless because the complete transmission doesn't fit into the buffer at once. Say what? That just doesn't follow. And again, I really wouldn't take this guy at his word as to the numbers anyhow.

He's not suggesting to ignore the risk; his claim (that I cannot really evalate) is that Houston's approach is not inferior to zoning.

"clean natural gas" should read as "slightly less dirty" but it would be much less dirty to leave it in the ground, as both raw and burned it is a greenhouse gas, and I'm pretty sure liquifying and transporting it is definitely energy intensive (and thus dirty) .

For every 1C degrees increase in atmospheric temperature, the air can hold 7% more moisture. While not proven, it's a sound theory that more CO2 in the atmosphere allows hurricanes to absorb more energy from oceans (which themselves are warming, creating a positive feedback cycle; warmer water fuels hurricanes).

...and there's no doubt that warm ocean temperatures are a requirement for hurricanes; so making the assuming that a warmer waters overall nevertheless won't affect hurricane frequency and intensity is at the very least weird enough that you'd want evidence of that.

Temperature differential creates hurricanes. If everything is warmer, it doesn't necessarily mean more hurricanes. Not really disputing what you're saying, just adding some precision.

Since outer space is still cold, that temperature differential always exists. But to transfer heat, the system uses water vapor, and that is not relative. If the whole system is warmer (and still firmly below absurd extremes such as boiling point), then even though the differential to the rest of the planet may be the same, that does not mean the system will behave identically.

Beyond the really fundamental and abstract "differential must exist" (which is true of any heat engine and is in any case always satisfied) I cannot find any reference to the notion that relative temperature (to the rest of the nearby weather?) is what matters. Various sources I find talk of absolute water temperatures in the 26-27 degrees centigrade range (of course these aren't 100% strict limits).

What's so controversial about this (other than perhaps the "if you beleve")? Seems like a pretty factual statement, the shift from coal to gas is currently the primary driver of CO2 emissions reduction. Particularly since he writes it as a response to a claim that Houston should blame its own industry for the hurricane.

Most important line in this article

Leo Linbeck III is executive chairman of Linbeck Group, a Houston-based institutional construction firm and vice chairman of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism.

I think you're suggesting that because Linbeck is associated with a construction firm, he views the property damage as an opportunity, and therefore less of a catastrophe than others would.

I think Linbeck has a good point - Houston did not suffer nearly the level of disaster that New Orleans did. I say this with utmost respect for the individual and cumulative loss in both events! But comparing the amount of the city flooded, the effect on the population, the number of deaths (especially relative to total population), and the ability of the cities to maintain order, services, and support, I think it's pretty clear that while Katrina was a "catastrophe", Harvey wasn't in the same class.

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/31/547568681/harvey-feel-like-kat...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/hurricane-katrina-harv...

It's somewhat remarkable to me that nothing sort of a complete decimation of Houston would get people to recognize what a serious business it was.

What's more, it impacted a lot of neighborhoods that were populated by people without a lot of monetary resources, so these personal impact numbers are quite misleading.

And of course, at the end we have this "even if you do believe in climate change" the country should be "thanking Houston" for bringing "clean" natural gas to the nation? What? Who even raised this point for rebuttal? This is like walking into a coffee shop and the barista suddenly shouting, "NO THERE CERTAINLY ISN'T A DEAD BODY BEHIND THIS COUNTER!"

Why is this political/economic spin job on hacker news?

Hey, less than 1% of global population died during the second world war, so I guess it wasn't a catastrophe either.

> "This is like someone who makes a salary of $60,000 having suffering loss of $6,000 to $12,000."

This line had the opposite of the intended effect, for me. Someone with $60k salary, a $12k loss could take years to recover from if they have expenses like college debt, rent/mortgage, and kids.

I dunno, some might say that's poor financial planning, but it's reality for a lot of people. And de-referencing the analogy: most US cities are not exactly financially rock solid either.

"Tales from 'narrative spinners' are trying to change our city's formula for success"

No offense, but I don't necessarily trust a local paper to be a no-spin-zone about the disaster either.

I agree that Harvey was not nearly as bad as it could have been. In fact several people that I spoke to (who themselves could document) would likely argue that the Army Core of Engineers caused more damage than Harvey did... that is, their home didn't flood until after the water releases from the dams.

That said, the amount of fellowship and effort being put together by the communities in Houston is a most definitely a picture of what it looks like to confront challenges head on. Seeing a flooded neighborhood filled with people working together to strip homes and start the repair process (even if they didn't have insurance) was downright amazing.

Kudos to Houston for sticking together and being good neighbors to each other.

> Army Core of Engineers caused more damage than Harvey did... that is, their home didn't flood until after the water releases from the dams.

The water was released because without that, the dams were in danger of overtopping and catastrophic failure.

Blaming the Corps and not the storm for that is justified if, and only if, there is evidence that the assessment of danger was made irresponsibly given the available facts. (And the opposite seems to be the case here.)

>In fact several people that I spoke to (who themselves could document) would likely argue that the Army Core of Engineers caused more damage than Harvey did.

Where do they think the water came from? Where would it have gone without the dams and associated water works, and when?

The Corps released water presumably because they were afraid that the dam might fail if they didn't.

During the height of the storm the spillways came in use (due to so much water). That happened at 108 feet and the top of the dam was 118. This happened in spite of the engineers releasing water for hours. Had they not done this those dams would have catastrophically failed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/2...

The person you are replying to should make fewer assumptions about the work of engineers outside of their domain.

I still don't understand how water can raise an extra 10 feet over the spillway. Isn't a bathtub only as high as its lowest side?

It can happen if water is entering the lake faster than it can exit.

That's why a river can crest much higher than the water lower than it - it's a dynamic level, not a static one.

Inflow minus outflow rates determine the height of a reservoir.

On the upstream side you have a big river basin. On the downstream side, pipes and a spillway. If the basin is catching a lot of rain, you'll need all the pipes and spillway to keep up with the inflow. That's part of the dam's design.

The spillways can only transport so much water. If inflow is greater than that, you can build up above that point. Even a fast moving channel 10 feet deep is dwarfed by the flux of water that can be deposited by a heavy storm over a large area.

Edit: for some concrete numbers, the reservoir was rising 0.5 ft/hr!! For reference, it appears the Addicks Reservoir has an area of 26,000 acres around this depth. That's 157,300 ft^3/s of inflow. Outflow was only 4,000 ft^3/s!

Edit 2: Here's a visualization: http://i.imgur.com/usZAici.jpg

It also just takes a wave (due, for example, to terrain movement) to go overboard and it drastically erodes the crest of the dam, starting a chain reaction between erosion of the crest and more water going through.

I find it ironic that he lauds the Houston sprawl for keeping housing prices low. He makes some very excellent points about how the rest of the nation has perceived or had the storm presented to them. But his "efficient use of land" argument for paving over huge tracts of wetlands is absurd.

"As a result, it's easier to develop real estate than most cities, which keeps real estate prices - especially housing prices - low relative to the rest of the country."

Easier development != intelligent, sustainable or ecologically friendly.

The most egregious example of sprawl and lack of zoning that I learned from Harvey was that there are residential neighborhoods built inside the reservoirs. There were homes being flooded well before the reservoirs reached even the spillway points as it was assumed they just wouldn't fill up that high.

Its TX, zoning laws don't cover things like building apartments next to fertilizer (explosives) plants or anything else that infringes on peoples right to make a buck.

I live near a TX lake, and full is defined at some level less than the spillway height. So, there are houses that are built above the full line, but below the spillway. Every dozen or so years those houses get flooded when the dam authority prioritizes flooding those houses over flooding the downstream communities.

Meanwhile Trump has signed a $15B disaster aid package for Hurricane Harvey. And while most Americans, myself included, don't mind the financial aid to those in need it is money that could have been spent on other things rather than the replacement of existing capital. This spend represents a lost investment, a lost opportunity. As such, this article makes light of a serious matter and really isn't helping in driving the policy discussion forward.

I argue that the 15b isnt just replacing lost capital but is an investment. I think you underestimate how much houston contributes to our economy.

Let me put it this way: would Houston's mayor prefer to receive a check for $15B to invest where needed for the future and growth of Houston or to replace stuff damaged by a storm? That's what I mean by this spend being a lost investment, a lost opportunity.

Maybe you're trying to point out it's not totally lost: the spend will make Houston incrementally better at withstanding storms of this magnitude in the future. If so, there's still a huge portion of that spend that's simply replacing lost capital.

With so many cars destroyed, maybe Houstonians will try taking the bus.

It certainly seems like an opportunity of some kind. I was thinking about this the other day. It's not often you have such high changeover of vehicles on the road. Could you incentivize everyone to go electric together? Start up some kind of city-wide transit co-op with auto insurance payouts as seed capital?

Can’t tell if you are being sarcastic, because from what I’ve been reading that’s the problem: millions of cars out of commission, and there is no practical public transit option for a large number of folks.

This is simple, then. If it's not a disaster, it doesn't need federal relief funds. Let Texas pay for this damage through their own taxes.

"Ok Exxon we published your article, please make the check payable to...."

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