How to make a "man made" disaster

      It may surprise you to discover that Houston has no zoning laws.  The fourth largest city in the US values individual rights over the collective rights of the community.  Houston is a developers dream with development often requiring nothing more than a handshake.   Does that sound like an environment for political corruption?  Chemical and petroleum processing companies flock to the region where environmental regulations are non-existent.
      Houston is only 50 feet above sea level and once relied on wetlands and bogs to handle rainfall runoff.  Those areas have been developed over the past 40 years without much effort to mitigate the environmental impacts.    The two pictures below show the change in wetlands around Houston.  The first picture from 1980 shows the wetland area in green.



    The picture below shows the same area today and notice how much of the green area of the first picture is gone.



       The loss of these wetlands couldn't come at a worse time with the warming of the Gulf of Mexico by global warming.  Here is how that is impacting Houston:

"Long term, the sea surface temperature of that region has risen about 1 degree over the past few decades—from roughly 86 to 87 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State. Mann said in a Facebook post on Monday that a relationship known as the Clausius-Clapeyron equation tells us there is a roughly 3 percent increase in average atmospheric moisture content for each 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming—almost 1 degree Fahrenheit. That means 3 to 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere in the Gulf region near the south Texas coast. So Harvey has a big tank of tropical moisture that it has been dumping on land."
     I guess it is ironic and tragic that two weeks ago Trump undid an Obama-era rule to try and address this issue.  Here is what Trump did to the rule:

"The Obama-era rule gave federal agencies three options to flood-proof new infrastructure projects. They could use the best available climate change science; they could require that standard projects like roads and railways be built two feet above the national 100-year flood elevation standard and critical buildings like hospitals be built three feet higher; or they could require infrastructure to be built to at least the 500-year flood plain."

      How many times recently have we heard the term "a hundred year storm?"   With global warming that term seems to know longer hold true.   

       The population of New Orleans shrank from 450,000 to 250,000 after Hurricane Katrina.  What will happen to the population of our 4th largest city after this flood?  Time will tell.

P.S.
    Locally we face some of the same issues in Ellicott City although on a smaller scale.   With the development around Main Street we face a serious stormwater runoff problem that will be very challenging to mitigate.   With global warming a six inch rain storms may be a to regular occurrence in the future and threaten the continued viability of Main Street.