
Hurricane Harvey was not a catastrophe - angersock
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Linbeck-Hurricane-Harvey-was-not-a-catastrophe-12174976.php
======
spenrose
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."

~~~
emn13
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.

~~~
sliverstorm
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.

~~~
emn13
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.

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jtmcmc
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.

~~~
kbutler
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...](http://www.npr.org/2017/08/31/547568681/harvey-feel-like-katrina-d-j-
vu-not-so-fast)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/hurricane-katrina-
harv...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/us/hurricane-katrina-harvey.html)

------
KirinDave
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?

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

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sjbase
> "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.

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fenwick67
"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.

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nvahalik
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.

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

~~~
aaron-lebo
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...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-
nation/wp/2017/08/28/houston-releases-water-from-two-dams-in-attempt-to-
prevent-uncontrolled-overflow/?utm_term=.9fb755c1e1aa)

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

~~~
liberte82
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?

~~~
ars
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.

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secstate
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.

~~~
liberte82
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.

~~~
StillBored
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.

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taylodl
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.

~~~
bfuller
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.

~~~
taylodl
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.

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

~~~
sliverstorm
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?

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russelluresti
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.

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p3nt3ll3r
"Ok Exxon we published your article, please make the check payable to...."

