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Don’t blame climate change for the Hurricane Harvey disaster – blame society

Weather and climate don’t cause disasters – vulnerability does. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this means that the widespread discussion as to whether the Hurricane Harvey disaster was caused by climate change or not becomes a dangerous distraction.

The hurricane was born off the coast of South America in mid-August and then tracked through the Gulf of Mexico, making landfall in the US on August 25. The storm surge and winds devastated coastal settlements, after which the storm stalled, dumping immense rainfall over Houston. At the time of writing, the confirmed death toll had just reached 14 and there are expectations that this will soon rise.

A disaster involving a hurricane cannot happen unless people, infrastructure and communities are vulnerable to it. People become vulnerable if they end up lacking knowledge, wisdom, capabilities, social connections, support or finances to deal with a standard environmental event such as a hurricane.

This can happen if lobbyists block tougher building codes, planning regulations, or enforcement procedures. Or if families can’t afford insurance or the cost of alternative accommodation if they evacuate. Or if limited hurricane experience induces a sense of apathy.

Often, people with disabilities rarely have their needs met when away from home. Fear of harassment or assault could stop others from entering a communal shelter. Legal or undocumented immigrants might not understand warnings and might fear the prospect of detention if they seek help.

These possible scenarios represent reasons why people in Texas might end up and remain in harm’s way. Anecdotes point to all these issues having played a part during Harvey, but only careful research in the months ahead will be able to confirm or refute them. It is nevertheless such vulnerability issues that cause the disaster. None relate to the hurricane’s physical characteristics.

Harvey gathers power. NASA/EPA

Climate change

Yes, climate change can and does influence hurricanes. The ocean’s temperature – to a certain degree – drives hurricane intensity, especially the coastal flooding level and the amount of rainfall. If the Gulf of Mexico was warmer than usual, or if some atmospheric winds were weaker than usual, then part of Harvey’s strength might be attributable to human-caused climate change. Harvey stalling above Houston might also be linked to climate change’s effects due to changing wind patterns.

But climate change does not affect people’s vulnerabilities to the hurricane. Neither the climate nor the hurricane’s characteristics made Houston an industrial centre of 2.3m people (2017 estimate), an increase of 40% since 1990. They did not force Texans to build along the coast or in floodplains without adequate measures, as occurs around the US. They did not pave over green spaces leading to reduced rainfall absorption. And they did not create the ingrained racism and desperate social inequities prevalent across the state.

In fact, storms striking Texas represented problems long before human-caused climate change appeared. One of the deadliest storms in US history occurred in 1900, when a hurricane swept ashore over Galveston, killing more than 6,000 people – more than triple Hurricane Katrina’s death toll in 2005. We often do not know details about the strength of past hurricanes or the height of their floodwaters. But we do know that fewer people lived – and much less infrastructure lay – along the storms’ paths. Yet tragedies such as Galveston still manifested, irrespective of climate change.

These historical disasters – and more recent ones such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 – spurred the disaster prevention measures which saved many lives but which were not implemented fully in Texas. This left far too many people vulnerable and in danger.

‘Turn Around, Don’t Drown’

The first mandatory evacuation notice in Texas for Harvey was issued about 36 hours before the hurricane’s landfall. The ability to forecast hurricane tracks and traits, to communicate the necessary responses and to plan for masses of people moving have emerged from decades of dedicated science.

Compared to the 1900 Galveston disaster, thousands of lives were saved by scientists and government officials collaborating to serve those who were vulnerable. Many structures withstood Harvey’s 200+ km/h wind gusts with debris because engineers and lawyers wrote building codes while the government enforced the regulations. The “Turn Around, Don’t Drown” message to stay out of floodwater comes from combining research and experience on flood physics and communication science.

Strandedon the highway in Houston. Michael Wyke/EPA

But the news is not all good, especially since much of this lifesaving work is currently undergoing budget cuts.

And politics created further vulnerability. State and local leaders disagreed about evacuating Houston. Development in the city’s floodable areas had been encouraged to support the oil-fuelled economy, increasing both the population living in floodplains and the paved surfaces which augments run-off. As usual in disasters, poor and marginalised people seem to be bearing the brunt of the impacts, despite plenty of science showing the importance of social services for fostering self-help and for collectively avoiding disasters.

All this work prevents deaths during any hurricane, irrespective of climate change. Climate change might have augmented Harvey’s rainfall, storm surge, or wind. If not, Texas would still have implemented exactly the same measures to reduce the disaster’s effects. And Texas would still have had exactly the same political difficulties propping up the remaining vulnerability.

Disasters are not natural

Hurricane Harvey was an expected natural event, even if potentially modified or exacerbated by climate change. The Hurricane Harvey disaster was caused entirely by society creating and perpetuating vulnerability to these natural events.

Because vulnerability is not natural, many disaster researchers avoid the phrase “natural disaster”. Nor must hurricane disasters be our natural state of affairs, even though hurricanes have always happened. A hurricane need not become a hurricane disaster – but society let a disaster happen.

To help those affected recover quickly, Texas needed improved pre-disaster mechanisms such as more widespread insurance coverage and more widely available social services targeted at the most needy. Society must permit affordable insurance, without bankrupting the companies. Society needs regulators to ensure that payouts are reasonable and prompt while identifying claimant fraud. Society requires sufficiently skilled and resourced authorities to support everyone affected in helping themselves, no matter their background or abilities.

Many voting records in Texas are for lower taxes, for less government intervention, against tackling systemic inequities and against helping marginalised people help themselves. This choice actively creates the vulnerabilities which cause disasters. It is an ideological choice to vote for creating disaster vulnerability and voters have the right to do so. The consequences are known based on decades of disaster science.

Blaming climate change, or even just the weather, for the hurricane disaster distracts from individuals’ and society’s responsibility for where we live, how we live and how we support people who cannot help themselves. This vulnerability, not nature and not climate change, causes hurricane disasters.

Hurricane Harvey, and Public and Private Disaster in Houston

When Houston floods, it turns into a locked circular labyrinth. The city, my home town, is laid out like a wagon wheel: downtown sits at the center, surrounded by three concentric circles, which are bisected by highways in every direction. The first loop, Interstate 610, is thirty-eight miles long, and corrals the Inner Loop neighborhoods. Another round of suburban neighborhoods surrounds the Loop, and is bounded by the eighty-eight-mile-long Beltway 8. Then, the truly sprawling suburbs (Spring, Sugar Land, the Woodlands) surround the Beltway. All told, the Greater Houston Area is gargantuan—at over ten thousand square miles, it’s bigger than New Jersey—and, with upward of six million residents, it’s far more populous and diverse than outsiders tend to guess. Houston is also, famously, largely unregulated: zoning laws are minimal, and the unceasing outward development has, with official permission, drastically inhibited drainage. The freeway system holds the city together, keeping a huge, dispersed population connected. But in a storm this lifeline becomes a trap. Houston is flat, and it sits just fifty feet above sea level; after the bayous overflow, the rain collects on the roads. When a flood hits, driving in Houston feels like a video game turned real and deadly. There are sudden impasses everywhere; ingenuity can’t save you; once the spokes of the wheel go under, there’s nowhere to go.

Houston is the fourth-largest city in America, and right now much of it is underwater. Things will get worse this week. Tropical Storm Harvey, which made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, is sluggishly lingering, and will continue to pummel the flooded city. Forecasts say that Houston may get fifty inches of rain from this storm—which is the city’s average annual rainfall. Five people have died; many more will be injured. Houston’s safety-net hospital started evacuations on Sunday. The Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, closed its submarine doors, designed, after Tropical Storm Allison, to protect the facility from flooding. Local news crews have struggled heroically to report out the disaster; one newscaster saved a truck driver’s life on air. The National Guard saved between twenty and twenty-five nursing-home residents in Dickinson after a harrowing photo went viral. My dad, who got stuck in high water on Saturday night, is one of thousands who have been rescued by Houston police. Harris County has been calling for citizens to help conduct rescues. All over the city, the roads have turned into rivers. Much of what’s visible looks like a nightmare; what makes me even sicker is imagining all the fear that we’ll never see.

People have criticized Houston residents for not evacuating. Plenty did, and with more understanding of the context, you might excuse many of those who didn’t. Evacuating a city like Houston, on these interlocked freeways—where a one-way commute might take two hours on a normal day—can very easily turn into a secondary disaster. The majority of Hurricane Rita deaths in Houston occurred in the evacuation, and two-thirds of flood fatalities happen in cars. Without financial resources, evacuation is a uniquely difficult experience, and 22.5 per cent of the population in increasingly unequal Houston lives under the poverty line. Official messages have also been uneven: Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, advised evacuation; the mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner—likely warding off the worst-case scenario of a hurricane hitting gridlock traffic—advised sheltering in place. (In Rockport, the mayor pro tem issued a mandatory evacuation order, telling people who refused it to write their Social Security numbers on their arms.) President Trump, who has been tweeting about Harvey as if it were a thrilling reality-show finale, and who recently rolled back an Obama-era executive order that infrastructure projects be designed to survive rising sea levels, offered a helpful “Good luck to everybody!” on Friday, before the storm.

Eight years ago, I spent all summer driving around Houston’s endless looping freeways, passing picnic-table icehouse bars and stadium churches and the nondescript streets that birthed chopped-and-screwed. I was canvassing for an environmental nonprofit that was pushing for a long-overdue citywide recycling program, and we drove for hours to reach our neighborhood targets. The job was hard: we looked like scammers, and we were proselytizing about environmental responsibility in a city that at the time recycled less than three per cent of its own waste. But I liked the effort of trying to understand and appeal to a dizzying variety of strangers. I knocked on the doors of McMansions and decrepit bungalows, talked to immigrants and Texas-born white people, pitched liberals and conservatives and the politically averse. Houston, which is by one measure the most diverse city in America, took shape in my imagination as an enormous canvas of unpredictable, heterogeneous people who were connected, somehow, by a confusing combination of independence and generosity. As a state, Texas is fiercely individualistic—the land of bootstraps and no income tax and privatized solutions for all. Houstonians absorb this; they are loyal and responsible in a way that rarely extends across the city, which is, again, so big as to feel unfathomable—and those freeways, effectively, are our only public space.

And yet, this week I suspect we’ll mostly see another side of Houston: its scrappy sense of humor, and its extraordinary and very Texan largesse. Houston responds to disaster with fortitude: the city absorbed two hundred thousand Vietnamese refugees in the nineteen-seventies, and it currently resettles twenty-five of every thousand refugees that the United Nations resettles anywhere—that’s more than any other city in America, and more than most countries. After Hurricane Katrina, Houston took in a quarter of a million evacuees, and, aided by Mayor Bill White’s multimillion-dollar resettlement program, as many as forty thousand people stayed. Over the weekend, Houston teen-agers were out in the streets rescuing people via kayak. As Rebecca Solnit argues in her 2009 book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” disasters create a window into social desire and potential. We’re normally encouraged to think of private life as precious and public life as a nuisance, she writes, but “disasters, in returning their sufferers to public and collective life, undo some of this privatization, which is a slower, subtler disaster all its own.” Disasters remind us that ambitious, difficult things are not just possible but necessary; in Houston, Harvey is already showing how an individualistic work ethic and a spirit of collective generosity can and have to coexist.

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