God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright Page A
Authors: Lawrence Wright
Tags: Politics
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police officer, observed that, when she first got to the center during the storm, “it was a sea of helpless, desolate victims.” Seventy-seven people had died, but that was a fraction of those who had been lost in Katrina and even less than the figure for Rita. “There are still people being evacuated, and the rivers keep rising. I’m living my life in twelve-hour shifts,” Wilson said. The night before she had finally gotten a chance to turn on the television, and she had broken down. Like other police officers, her badge was masked, in memory of their colleague Sergeant Steve Perez, who drowned in the flood while trying to report for duty.
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“THIS CITY SPRAWLS over six hundred square miles, an area so big that Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit could all fit within it simultaneously,” Manny Fernandez, the Houston bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote on Sunday, September 3, when the city was still partly submerged. “The nine-county Houston metropolitan region, covering more than ten thousand square miles, is almost as large as the entire state of Massachusetts.” Eighty-five percent of homeowners had no flood insurance.
Harvey calls into question the future of Houston. It has endured more flooding over the last forty years than any other city in America, and yet it continues to grow by four hundred people a day, building forty thousand houses a year to accommodate the influx, many of them in the floodplain, and continually paving over the grassland prairie that sponged up the deluges of the past. Harvey made the cost of the absence of zoning shockingly clear.
“Everybody got hit,” Judge Ed Emmett told me when I visited him again, this time in his county office in downtown Houston. “Geographically, demographically—it doesn’t matter whether you were rich or poor. If we’re going to continue to have this large urban area on the Gulf Coast, we’re going to have to deal with flooding.”
Houston had come into its own after the Great Storm of 1900 wiped out Galveston, then the major seaport in the state. “The Ellis Island of the West” was the point of entry for tens of thousands of immigrants, especially European and Russian Jews. Wealthy and complacent, Galveston refused to address the hazards of its location—for instance, by building a seawall. The city was only eight feet above sea level at its highest point. The weather bureau did not heed the warnings from Cuba that a major hurricane was on its way. When the storm arrived, it brought a surge fifteen feet high, drowning the island and wiping out the city almost entirely. The death toll was estimated between six thousand and eight thousand people. It is still the deadliest natural disaster in American history. The survivors rebuilt the city with great determination, raising it seventeen feet higher, but chastened investors wanted a safer port.
They turned to Houston.
The seeds of a great city had already been planted. Houston had streetcars and a railroad connection to New Orleans. A philanthropist named George Hermann gave a tract of land for a charity hospital, which would eventually become the foundation of the Texas Medical Center. The bayou had already been dredged to facilitate the lumber trade, but that work quickly expanded when Spindletop came in the year after the Great Storm. President Woodrow Wilson officially opened the Houston Ship Channel in November 1914 by pushing a button on his desk in the White House that was supposedly connected to a cannon in Houston.
But Houston had to face its own destiny in 1935, when downtown flooded. “That’s what got everybody spurred into action,” Judge Emmett told me. A flood-control district was established. Two large reservoirs were built to contain floodwaters; at the time, they were twenty miles from downtown. “They were out in the middle of nowhere,” Emmett said. Since then, some fourteen thousand houses have actually been built inside those catchments, a fact
----
“THIS CITY SPRAWLS over six hundred square miles, an area so big that Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit could all fit within it simultaneously,” Manny Fernandez, the Houston bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote on Sunday, September 3, when the city was still partly submerged. “The nine-county Houston metropolitan region, covering more than ten thousand square miles, is almost as large as the entire state of Massachusetts.” Eighty-five percent of homeowners had no flood insurance.
Harvey calls into question the future of Houston. It has endured more flooding over the last forty years than any other city in America, and yet it continues to grow by four hundred people a day, building forty thousand houses a year to accommodate the influx, many of them in the floodplain, and continually paving over the grassland prairie that sponged up the deluges of the past. Harvey made the cost of the absence of zoning shockingly clear.
“Everybody got hit,” Judge Ed Emmett told me when I visited him again, this time in his county office in downtown Houston. “Geographically, demographically—it doesn’t matter whether you were rich or poor. If we’re going to continue to have this large urban area on the Gulf Coast, we’re going to have to deal with flooding.”
Houston had come into its own after the Great Storm of 1900 wiped out Galveston, then the major seaport in the state. “The Ellis Island of the West” was the point of entry for tens of thousands of immigrants, especially European and Russian Jews. Wealthy and complacent, Galveston refused to address the hazards of its location—for instance, by building a seawall. The city was only eight feet above sea level at its highest point. The weather bureau did not heed the warnings from Cuba that a major hurricane was on its way. When the storm arrived, it brought a surge fifteen feet high, drowning the island and wiping out the city almost entirely. The death toll was estimated between six thousand and eight thousand people. It is still the deadliest natural disaster in American history. The survivors rebuilt the city with great determination, raising it seventeen feet higher, but chastened investors wanted a safer port.
They turned to Houston.
The seeds of a great city had already been planted. Houston had streetcars and a railroad connection to New Orleans. A philanthropist named George Hermann gave a tract of land for a charity hospital, which would eventually become the foundation of the Texas Medical Center. The bayou had already been dredged to facilitate the lumber trade, but that work quickly expanded when Spindletop came in the year after the Great Storm. President Woodrow Wilson officially opened the Houston Ship Channel in November 1914 by pushing a button on his desk in the White House that was supposedly connected to a cannon in Houston.
But Houston had to face its own destiny in 1935, when downtown flooded. “That’s what got everybody spurred into action,” Judge Emmett told me. A flood-control district was established. Two large reservoirs were built to contain floodwaters; at the time, they were twenty miles from downtown. “They were out in the middle of nowhere,” Emmett said. Since then, some fourteen thousand houses have actually been built inside those catchments, a fact
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