
The U.S. Flooded One of Houston’s Richest Neighborhoods to Save Everyone Else - adventured
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-11-16/the-u-s-flooded-one-of-houston-s-richest-neighborhoods-to-save-everyone-else
======
losvedir
Something like this happened a few years ago where I live.[0]

Basically, the Army blew the levee to save a town, Cairo, IL, at the expense
of (a few) homes and (lots of) farmland on the MO side. Maciej (HN user
idlewords) mentioned it in one of his interesting blog posts[1].

The blog post asserts:

> _The farmers downriver got their fields fertilized with rich river silt and
> are wealthier and more resentful than ever. Like so many beneficiaries of
> big government, they remain its implacable foes._

which I've never been able to source, though I've been curious about it.
AFAICT most of the farmers left and never returned to the area.

[0][http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/pat-
gauen/saving-...](http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/pat-gauen/saving-
cairo-meant-choosing-between-
catastrophes/article_cd42495f-0237-5528-8d98-008a0e3d95da.html)

[1]
[http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid_part_2.h...](http://idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_madrid_part_2.htm)

~~~
tdb7893
Fun Midwest fact: The name of Cairo, IL is pronounced differently than the
city in Egypt. I've always heard it pronounced more like "Care-O"

~~~
jccc
And in Missouri we have New Madrid ("New MAD-rid") and Versailles ("Ver-
SAILS") among several other similar re-pronunciations.

Many locals pronounce Johnny Carson's teenage hometown Norfolk, Nebraska as
"Norfork."

I don't think it comes from ignorance though (and I'm not saying you're saying
it does) but instead just a way of taking local ownership.

~~~
kyleblarson
My grandfather in Kentucky pronounced Missouri 'Mizurah'.

~~~
jccc
I lived in the middle of Missouri from 1994 through 2014 and never once heard
a voice say Missour-ah that wasn't coming from a candidate for office on TV.

(To be fair, there might have been some people in rural parts of the state who
did talk like that. But usually it's coming from people who probably
shouldn't.)

~~~
jessaustin
The authentic pronunciation is more of a short "i" than a short "a". FYI,
linguistic prescriptivism sucks.

~~~
jccc
I didn't say that people should pronounce Missouri only as "Missour-ee" and
that other pronunciations are incorrect.

I offered my observation (intended with good humor) that it's not really true
that Missourians by and large say "Missour-ah" \-- or "Missour-ih" if you like
-- but rather it's pretty much only politicians trying hard to sound folksy,
and maybe a few older people in the most rural parts.

------
dcole2929
I'm sorry these people lost their homes, but it does seem pretty
straightforward that if you build in a flood plane your home might flood. If
there is any failure here it's that they weren't given adequate warning before
they flooded the neighborhoods. It sounds like they announced it for the next
morning but because of the pace of the water rising they had to blow it over
night instead. That's something you start announcing over loudspeakers if you
have to at that point.

The other issue I see is that for some reason Houston didn't require all of
these people to have flood insurance. I feel like if you live in an area that
gets hit with Hurricanes flood insurance should be a requirement period. This
would all be a moot point if these people were adequately covered by insurance

~~~
cmiles74
There was recently another article covering the construction of homes in the
flood reservoir area.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15472082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15472082)

According to the article, it sounds pretty bad. The city and county knew where
the flood reservoirs were. The developers knew, there were "small notices on
the plats" for these properties (which developers fought). Homewoner's never
saw these plats and had no idea they were in a flood zone.

"In the end, over significant opposition from developers, the county agreed to
put a one-sentence disclosure of possible “controlled inundation” for plots of
land in neighborhoods inside Barker. But the sentence was buried in the plat
documents, which are not typically shown to homebuyers."

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _the sentence was buried in the plat documents, which are not typically
> shown to homebuyers_

Sounds like the developers withheld material information from the homeowners.
If so, it seems clear who is liable.

~~~
cmiles74
It sounds like the city or county (it was unclear to me from the article) also
holds some responsibility. They agreed to this "compromise" with the
developers.

------
philjohn
Zeeland (and other parts of the Netherlands) now have a similar strategy in
place - they've spent billions over the years on sea defences, which are
absolutely stunning to behold, but have now done the sums and realised they've
entered diminishing returns. It's cheaper to let certain areas flood and
compensate than it is to build ever more expensive defences.

~~~
dgritsko
There was an interesting story a few months back about how the city of
Nashville has a process where they buy homes in flood-prone areas at a "fair
market price", then demolish the homes and convert the property to "green
space" (preventing new buildings from being constructed). The main idea was
that this is cheaper in the long run than the continuing cost of disaster
recovery, emergency services, etc. for people in these areas. I don't think
Nashville is the only city doing this sort of thing, but it was news to me
when I heard about it.

[http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/09/08/nashville-
ma...](http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/09/08/nashville-makes-push-
buy-flooded-homes-and-replace-open-space/645566001/)

~~~
chiph
Austin has done that to homes along Onion Creek. Like you said - it's cheaper
in the long run to buy the property so that people's homes don't get flooded,
with all the knock-on effects afterwards.

------
mortehu
Looks like a variant of the trolley problem, with the water playing the part
of the trolley.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem)

~~~
lostboys67
When I worked in London near London bridge years ago one of the reasons we had
two datacentres (with a whopping 10Mbs link) was they where worried about the
Thames flooding our building - that was before the barrier was finished.

------
Ajedi32
Interesting. So it's like a real-life version of the trolley problem, but with
property damage instead of human lives.

~~~
an_account
Had a damn failed there would have been far more loss of human life. Army
corps definitely made the right call. They were getting sued either way.

------
jasonmaydie
This happened to us too (different country). They intentionally held up water
using the dams and caused flooding in places that haven't seen a flood in 50
years to prevent downstream flooding. It really sucks.

~~~
yardie
Sorry that happened to you but I believe the corps made the right call. The
choices were release into a high density downtown or low density suburbs. I do
believe this happening in a rich suburb with the means to rebuild makes the
victims less sympathetic than if they were lower middle class and had to
bootstrap from measly FEMA checks.

------
Spooky23
My first house had flooding problems every spring and heavy rain.

Lesson learned: live on a hill.

~~~
jcranberry
Good luck finding one of those in Houston!

~~~
junkcollector
When a proper developer builds a home or sub-division in Houston, they bring
in fill dirt and do compactions until the houses rest on small hills. You get
frequent flooding (about once a year) but it rarely reaches the house before
the flood prevention systems have a chance to divert and control it. The
problem here is two-fold, as discussed in the article, these people built
there homes INSIDE the flood diversion systems and never did due diligence on
their home purchase to find out that they were in homes literally designed to
be flooded and unscrupulous developers who improperly built or ignored the
creation of new flood control when up-building developments that made
previously safe areas at risk like the HP plant that flooded. Of course this
implies that the city code/design/inspectors/etc. were not doing their jobs as
well.

~~~
pyre
As others were saying, the developers actively wanted to exclude disclosure
the flood status of these plots to potential buyers. Eventually the city
"compromised" with them to hide a one-sentence warning deep in the paperwork.

Now granted, this did _not_ prevent the homeowners from doing their own due-
diligence, but I really think that the city officials that agreed to this, and
the developers that lobbied for it should _all_ be taken to task for their
actions (and I think this regardless of what happened during the hurricane).

------
rurban
I don't understand what's there to litigate. If they wouldn't have done the
controlled release, the dams would have broken, and the very same homes
wouldn't not only have been flooded even more, most of them would have been
gone. Nada. Plus 10x more homes. Plus broken dams, without protection for the
next storm.

When there is a storm in Houston, streets do flood for 30 minutes and traffic
has to wait. Without the canals and the dams the city would stand still much
longer, the damage would be intolerable.

Government did the right thing, but they should have warned them more timely.
At 10pm, not 1am. With some acoustic alarm.

------
ars
It's really disturbing reading comments cheering the destruction because the
victims are rich, or because they work for energy companies.

If hate is a necessary part of believing in climate change I'm not surprised
people want nothing to do with that.

~~~
maxerickson
I wonder, is your comment intentional or is it just a failure of critical
reasoning?

It's become a common tactic in public discourse to pretend as if issues are
cleanly split between two coherent sides, with all action and words associated
with the issue fully ascribable to one side or the other. But of course this
is ridiculous, yahoos should get full credit for their yahoo ideas without it
being necessary for anyone with even a vaguely similar position to denounce
them.

------
ocschwar
The only real problem is that this was a decision made ad hoc.

People whose neighborhoods are likely to be flooded by such a decision should
know years in advance that they are designated for it.

~~~
ynniv
Flood zones are meticulously mapped, and owning a property in them usually
requires Federally mandated flood insurance. [
[http://www.harriscountyfemt.org/](http://www.harriscountyfemt.org/) ]

~~~
ocschwar
The insurance mandate is what's kept those flood zone maps from being updated,
so it's not as meticulous as you might think.

And it's not so much the insurance as you having to build for the flood when
you ask for a building permit.

~~~
pabl0rg
Also, those neighborhoods are/were among the most expensive in Houston. Being
reclassified as a flood zone would change that (it's one of the standard
things a Houstonian looks at when buying land).

------
zzzeek
> total damages claimed could reach $10 billion or more, especially if the big
> energy and oil companies—whose presence in one section of West Houston gave
> it the nickname the Energy Corridor—sue over their flooded headquarters.

the irony that the home neighborhood of many of the worlds largest oil
companies would want to sue because the global warming they're at the core of
causing contributed towards the damage of their own buildings.

~~~
briandear
Crazy. All those oil companies forcing you to buy stuff that gets transported
by trucks that use oil. You’re blaming the drug dealers for people choosing to
shoot heroin.

Feel free to stop consuming oil. Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil
and uses power generated using oil. If you buy a single thing made in China,
you are buying products generally made using coal-fired electricity. Unless
you live in a grass hut, you are part of the “problem.”

~~~
vardump
The rest of the argument seemed kinda valid, but one nitpick:

> Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil

I think nearly all plastics are made out of natural gas, not oil.

~~~
libertyEQ
To elaborate further:

 _" Chemical plants produce olefins by steam cracking of natural gas liquids
like ethane and propane. Olefins are the basis for polymers and oligomers used
in plastics, resins, fibers, elastomers, lubricants, and gels."_

------
naturalgradient
Reader mode is not displaying the article, what kind of dark-pattern trickery
is this? (Safari)

~~~
brogrammernot
Works fine in Reader mode for me.

------
zeveb
It seems to me that flooding the neighbourhood to save the city was a
perfectly justifiable decision, but it also seems perfectly reasonable to
compensate those whose homes were thereby destroyed.

~~~
mbillie1
I agree, it seems exactly that simple.

~~~
Filligree
That's what flood insurance is for. In a socialist democracy you'd be right,
but in case of the USA, it seems more appropriate to require that homeowners
get insurance.

~~~
kodablah
I think in this case, you would actually require federal-government-decision
insurance. The downstream residents very well might not have flooded had the
federal government done nothing (of course we can agree that what they did was
probably best). We should not pretend that another entity directly causing
this shouldn't be held responsible, even if it was the right decision.

~~~
Filligree
They might have, sure, but the plan for doing so was in place before the
houses were built. They can't claim to be surprised about this.

------
danschumann
People are cheering at this, but what if we raise the stakes a little: The
government lined up 50 random people and executed them, to appease a foreign
government that was holding 500x people captive. We're talking houses vs
houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different? Scape goat.
Since it is property, the engineers probably assumed they'd be sued, and I bet
they knew exactly what they were doing, and it was still cheaper than the
alternative.

If you like this, then you should also support eminent domain, where the
government can take whatever it wants to make the neighborhood better.

It definitely irks me when people say "oh they're just energy sector
republicans", as if political disagreements makes anyone less deserving of
rights under the law. Equality, people, is something you must enforce
ESPECIALLY when you don't like the person receiving equality. This was a true
thing to say to racists in the past, and to republican haters of the present.

To really get side-tracked: Is it okay to hate haters? Are you justified to do
to them what they do? No, I would say love your enemy, if he is thirsty, give
him something to drink. Your gifts will be like hot coals on his head.

~~~
lostboys67
You could say it serves them right (rich people) for building in a flood plain
- it's normally the newer less nice areas that get flooded in the UK - as in
the past they where considered to risky

~~~
jasonmaydie
technically every location can become a flooding plane if you build a man-made
dam in that geographic location

~~~
freeloop3
technically not true because there needs to be water to dam for the plane to
be flooded.

