Houston's 'Culture of Flooding'

Houston residents are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars fortifying their properties against future extreme weather, adapting in the short-term to the city's "destiny" to flood.

Some residents like Atul Vir have had their homes flooded multiple times and have spent more than $100,000 on whole home renovations to prepare for future events. “It’s the law of the jungle,” says Vir, “Survival of the fittest.” Currently, Houston uses Federal Emergency Management Agency's flood maps to dictate its own, despite the fact that 75 percent of flood damage from storms between 1999 and 2009 in the city's southeast region were outside of FEMA's 100-year floodplain. Quartz reports that the kind of computer modeling needed to accurately predict how development in the metro's nine counties affect each others' flood risk is "decades away," but for now, voters recently and overwhelmingly approved the funding of more than $2.5 billion in flood-control efforts, "[signaling] an unprecedented commitment to climate-change resilience among tax-averse, small-government-minded Texans," writes Ana Campoy.

Atul Vir is ready for the next Hurricane Harvey. As soon as floodwaters start rising, pumps will start channeling the incoming stream into the 60-bathtubs-worth of storage below his Houston property. Brick walls below the windows and doors will keep water up to 12 inches out. If breached, the cascading water will flow through his front door, down his dining room’s sloped, tiled floor, past the living room, and into an indoor pond that drains into the sewer. If all this fails to keep water out, the Virs will move to their rooftop deck, designed to accommodate a helicopter rescue.

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