A Costly Hurricane

There’s nothing more heartwarming than seeing strangers risking their lives to help their neighbors and fellow citizens after a natural disaster. It’s one of those rare moments when people put aside whatever differences they may have for the greater good. But now that Hurricane Harvey’s floodwaters are receding, it’s time to start focusing on the recovery efforts and their associated costs. And the costs are tremendous.

Natural disasters cannot be prevented, but their impacts can be reduced if cities like Houston would take the threat from these storms seriously and act proactively. Data from the National Weather Service show that Texas has been hit by 64 hurricanes and 56 tropical storms since the 1850s. So it’s not like Hurricane Harvey was an anomaly.

Worse, Ralph Vartabedian writes in the Los Angeles Times, “[Houston] has been deceiving itself for decades about its vulnerability to flooding, said Robert Bea, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and UC Berkeley emeritus civil engineering professor who has studied hurricane risks along the Gulf Coast. The city’s flood system is supposed to protect the public from a 100-year storm” that is “based on a rainfall total of 13 inches in 24 hours.”

Clearly, the system wasn’t designed to protect Houston from a storm the size of Harvey. Had various levels of government directed resources into Houston’s infrastructure, the costs incurred would have certainly been less than those the city is now facing. Another way the costs of these powerful storms can be reduced is to fix the flawed and bankrupt National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Government programs always sound good, but there’s always more to the story.

The editors of Investor’s Business Daily write, “[NFIP] owes close to $25 billion to the U.S. Treasury, which means it owes you, the taxpayer. How could that be? The fact is, as with so many government programs, the very name of the agency is false. It is not providing ‘insurance’ in any true sense, but rather a taxpayer guarantee. Big difference.”

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