Houston, we have a problem

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Houston has been my home for all but a handful of years of my adult life. I see Hurricane Rita (hard after writing Katrina so many times in the last few weeks) barreling towards H-town with category 5 fury, and I can only hope that it does diminish before landfall, as meteorologists predict due to the cooler temperatures near Galveston. I was in Houston during tropical storm Allison in 2001, and a mere tropical storm leveled unprecedented damage, such as lifelong research in the Texas Medical Center (dense hospital network, including MD Anderson Cancer Center, two medical schools, Hermann Hospital), gone forever. The real damage came not from winds but from never-ending floodwaters from a TS that simply would leave the area (backtracking, even), dumping her contents to a city not below sea level, but not really that much above it either.

Houston has a man-made “ship channel,” allowing it to receive barges from Galveston Bay directly. In addition, there’s a man-made “drainage” (I say almost facetiously) system of “bayous,” basically, large canals to redirect water. Houston is full of them. My last address was literally on one of them, and let me tell you, it floods BAD when heavy rains come. I even made video of one day of unusually heavy rain totally stranding motorists for hours on our street…we were taking bottled water from our apt to a van full of kids, all because of Houston’s volatile weather.

I can’t help but think that so many parts of the city are going to be unquestionably flooded, but Houston is the 4th largest city in the US; it has some huge-ass skyscrapers in its downtown. How does 130 stories of pane glass fare in 130+ MPH winds (prediction for downtown if eye goes through Galveston at current speed of 165)? Not well. Neither do offshore oil rigs outside Freeport, Texas City, etc. People don’t realize how many petrochemical plants/refineries there are in southeast Texas. Even without a direct strike to Galveston/Houston, this will impact the gas prices for a long time.

Lots of lessons were learned from Allison, but the best of those lessons will be put to the test in the coming days. When I was working at UH, we set up our emergency IT infrastructure (mail, web essential services) to be hosted by Texas Tech in Lubbock and reciprocally, us for them. I was third in line for any catastrophic web server failure. As usual, you just shrug it off thinking “it’ll never happen.”

Houston will make it through, but I wonder at what cost. I’ve talked to almost all my friends and family by now, and I’ll be keeping a close eye on things.