Imagine a hurricane, a hurricane like Matthew, aimed straight at the heart of the American petrochemical industry.
Isaiah whirls through the sky, gathering strength from the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters. Beach towns are evacuated. Citizens and companies in Texas’ petro-industrial enclaves from Bayou Vista to Morgan’s Point are warned: Prepare for the worst.
The huge cyclone gathers strength as it nears the barrier islands off the coast, intensifying to Category 4. Hours before landfall, 150 mile-per-hour winds begin pushing water over the Galveston Seawall, and by the time the eye finally hits, Galveston has been flattened by a 20-foot wave.
Isaiah’s monstrous arm reaches across the bay toward Houston, some 50 miles inland, adding water to water, and when it smashes into the Exxon Mobil Baytown refinery, the storm surge is over 25 feet high. It crashes through refineries, chemical storage facilities, wharves and production plants all along the Houston Ship Channel, cleaving pipelines from their moorings, lifting and breaking storage tanks.
As Isaiah passes inland, the iridescent, gray-brown flood rises, carrying jet fuel, liquid natural gas and sour crude into strip malls, parks, schools and offices. More than 200 petrochemical storage tanks have been wrecked, more than 100 million gallons of petroleum and chemicals spilled. Damages for the region are estimated at more than $100 billion. More than 3,500 are dead. It is one of the worst disasters in United States history: worse than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, worse than Hurricane Katrina, worse than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
The good news is that Isaiah hasn’t happened. It’s an imaginary calamity based on research and models. The bad news is that it’s only a matter of time before it does.
Any 50-mile stretch of the Texas coast can expect a hurricane once every six years on average, according to the National Weather Service. Only a few American cities are more vulnerable to hurricanes than Houston and Galveston, and not one of those is as crucial to the economy.
When the next big storm hits there, the effects will ripple across the globe. The Gulf Coast is home to roughly 30 percent of the United States’s proven oil reserves; The Gulf Coast and Texas hold 35 percent of its natural gas reserves. The refineries and plants encircling Galveston Bay are responsible for roughly 25 percent of the United States’s petroleum refining, more than 44 percent of its ethylene production, 40 percent of its specialty chemical feed stock and more than half of its jet fuel.
Houston is the second busiest port in the United States in terms of pure tonnage and one of the most important shipping points in the country for liquid natural gas. A hurricane like Isaiah would shut all that down.
There’s more: Future hurricanes will actually be worse than Isaiah. The models Isaiah is based on, developed by Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation From Disaster (Sspeed) Center, don’t account for climate change. According to Jim Blackburn, Sspeed’s co-director, other models have shown much more alarming surges. “The City of Houston and FEMA did a climate change future,” he told me, “and the surge in that scenario was 34 feet. Hurricanes are going to get bigger. No question. They are fueled by the heat of the ocean, and the ocean’s warming. Our models are nowhere close.”
I took a tour on the M/V Sam Houston to see the Houston Ship Channel, the densest energy infrastructure nexus in the United States. The boat slipped from the pier and spun east. Across the brown-black water, giant cranes shifted scrap from one heap to another with magnets and claws, throwing up clouds of metal.
Several industrial recycling companies line the upper reaches of the channel, all recognized emitters of one of the most potent carcinogens known to science, hexavalent chromium. Behind the cranes lies the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Magnolia Park, whose residents have long complained of mysterious gas emissions, persistent pollution and strange, multicolored explosions. I thought of the models Mr. Blackburn had shown me, imagining a wave of water sweeping toxic waste into playgrounds, shops and houses.
The tour boat’s engines thrummed beneath my feet. In the distance, gas flares flashed against the cloud cover.
A voice boomed from the boat: “First refinery to the right, this is Valero. This refinery began operations in 1942. It will handle 145,000 barrels of oil per day.” Directly behind Valero lies Hartman Park, with its green lawns and baseball diamonds — the jewel of Manchester, one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the United States. Manchester is bordered on the north by Valero, and on the east, south and west by a chemical plant, a car-crushing yard, a water-treatment plant, a train yard, Interstate 610 and a Goodyear synthetic rubber plant. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency found toxic levels of seven different carcinogens in the neighborhood.
Our tour boat was out and back in 90 minutes, but the Houston Ship Channel keeps going for miles. Rounding the San Jacinto Battleground, it bends south, cutting a trench approximately 530 feet wide and 45 feet deep through Galveston Bay all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. As you follow the channel south on I-45, strip clubs and fast-food franchises give way to bayou resorts and refineries. I-45 ends in downtown Galveston, once known as the “Wall Street of the South”: a mix of historic homes, dry-docked oil rigs, beach bars and the University of Texas Medical Branch. The gulf spreads sullen and muddy to the horizon, its placid skin broken by distant blisters of flaming steel.
Galveston Bay is a Texas paradox. One of the most productive estuaries in the United States, it offers up huge catches of shrimp, blue crab, oysters, croaker, flounder and catfish, and supports dozens of other kinds of fish, turtles, dolphins, salamanders, sharks and snakes, as well as hundreds of species of birds. Yet the bay is heavily polluted, so full of P.C.B.s, pesticides, dioxin and petrochemicals that fishing is widely restricted.
The bay is Houston’s shield, protecting it from the worst of the Gulf Coast’s weather by absorbing storm surges and soaking up rainfall, but hydrologists at Rice University are worried it might also be Houston’s doom: The wide, shallow basin could, under the right conditions, supercharge a storm surge right up the ship channel.
The fight to protect Houston and Galveston from storms has been going on for more than a century, ever since Galveston built a 17-foot sea wall after the Great Storm of 1900, a Category 4 hurricane that killed an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people. The fight has been mainly reactive, always planning for the last big storm, rarely for the next. The levees around Texas City, for instance, were built after Hurricane Carla submerged the chemical plants there in 10 feet of water in 1961. Today, Hurricane Ike, which hit Texas in 2008, offers the object lesson.
Hurricane Ike was a lucky hit with unlucky timing. Forecasts had the hurricane landing at the southern end of Galveston Island, and if they’d been right, Ike would have looked a lot like Isaiah. Instead, in the early morning hours of Sept. 13, 2008, Ike bent north and hit Galveston dead on, which shifted the most damaging winds east. The sparsely populated Bolivar Peninsula was flattened, but Houston came out O.K.
Still, Ike killed nearly 50 people in Texas alone, left thousands homeless, and was the third costliest hurricane in American history. It would have been the ideal moment for Texas to ask Congress to fund a comprehensive coastal protection system. But on that Monday, Sept. 15, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in United States history, and the next day the Federal Reserve stepped in to save the failing insurance behemoth A.I.G. with an $85 billion bailout. Nature’s fury took a back seat to the crisis of capital.
Since then, two main research teams have led the way in preparing for the next big storm: Bill Merrell’s “Ike Dike” team at Texas A&M Galveston, and the Sspeed Center at Rice University, led by Phil Bedient and Jim Blackburn.
Dr. Merrell’s Ike Dike has the blessing of simplicity, which softens the sticker shock: It is estimated to cost between $6 billion and $13 billion. The plan is to build a 55-mile-long “coastal spine” along the gulf. The plan’s main disadvantage is that a strong enough hurricane could still flood the Houston Ship Channel, because of what Dr. Bedient calls the “Lake Okeechobee effect.”
“The Okeechobee hurricane came into Florida in 1928 and sloshed water to a 20-foot surge,” Dr. Bedient explained. “Killed 2,000 people. But Lake Okeechobee is unconnected to the coast. It was just wind. Galveston Bay has the same dimensions and depth as Lake Okeechobee in Florida. So imagine we block off Galveston Bay with a coastal spine, and we have a Lake Okeechobee.”
Dr. Bedient worked on the Murphy’s Oil spill in St. Bernard Parish, La., where flooding from Hurricane Katrina ruptured a storage tank, releasing more than a million gallons of oil and ruined approximately 1,800 homes. One of Dr. Bedient’s biggest worries is what a storm might do to the estimated 4,500 similar tanks surrounding Houston, many of them along the ship channel. If even 2 percent of those tanks were to fail because of storm surge, the results would be catastrophic.
The Sspeed Center advocates a layered defense, including a mid-bay gate that could be closed during a storm to protect the channel. On its face, the plan seems unwieldy, but Sspeed’s models show it could stop most of the surge from going up the ship channel, with or without the Ike Dike, at an estimated cost of only a few billion dollars.
In April, Dr. Bedient and Dr. Merrell met with other organizations, lobbyists and government officials to testify before the State of Texas Joint Interim Committee on Coastal Barrier Systems. The session was inconclusive but hopeful: Despite the fact that no clear path was laid out for deciding on a project or funding it, the political will to do something was palpable. The problem is that political will might not be enough.
According to Mr. Blackburn, “Even a locally funded project would probably be three years in the permitting and another six to eight years in construction.” But most local politicians seemed to prefer the Ike Dike, necessarily a federal project. “I have heard more than one person say our plan is to wait until the next hurricane comes,” Mr. Blackburn said, “then depend on guilt money from Washington to fix the problem.”
Dr. Merrell said much the same: “We see local politicians in general content with doing nothing. The do-nothing option is pretty gruesome. It gets you a storm, sooner or later, that’s going to kill thousands of people and cause at least $100 billion in damage.”
We’ve known that climate change was a threat since at least 1988, and the United States has done almost nothing to stop it. Today it might be too late. The feedback mechanisms that scientists have warned us about are happening. Our world is changing.
Imagine we’ve got 20 or 30 years before things really get bad. Imagine how that happens. Imagine FEMA trailers and martial law, toxic waste and flooded hospitals. Imagine politics in a world on fire.
Climate change is hard to think about not only because it’s complex and politically contentious, not only because it’s cognitively almost impossible to keep in mind the intricate relationships that tie together an oil well in Venezuela, Siberian permafrost, Saudi F-15s bombing a Yemeni wedding, subsidence along the Jersey Shore, albedo effect near Kangerlussuaq, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the polar vortex, shampoo, California cattle, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, leukemia, plastic, paper, the Sixth Extinction, Zika, and the basic decisions we make every day, are forced to make every day, in a world we didn’t choose but were thrown into. No, it’s not just because it’s mind-bendingly difficult to connect the dots. Climate change is hard to think about because it’s depressing and scary.
Thinking seriously about climate change forces us to face the fact that nobody’s driving the car, nobody’s in charge, nobody knows how to “fix it.” And even if we had a driver, there’s a bigger problem: no car. There’s no mechanism for uniting the entire human species to move together in one direction.
There are more than seven billion humans, and we divide into almost 200 countries, thousands of smaller sub-national states, territories, counties and municipalities, and an unimaginable multitude of corporations, community organizations, neighborhoods, religious sects, ethnic identities, clans, tribes, gangs, clubs and families, each of which faces its own disunion and strife, all the way down to the individual human soul in conflict with itself, torn between fear and desire, hard sacrifice and easy cruelty, all of us improvising day by day, moment to moment, making decisions based on best guesses, hunches, comforting illusions and too little data.
But that’s the human way: reactive, ad hoc, improvised. Our ability to reconfigure our collective existence in response to changing environmental conditions has been our greatest adaptive trait. Unfortunately for us, we’re still not very good at controlling the future. What we’re good at is telling ourselves the stories we want to hear, the stories that help us cope with existence in an wild, unpredictable world.
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