An intense, immobile storm inundates America’s fourth-biggest city

THE images were disorienting, the reports were surreal. Vast swathes of Houston were underwater. The highways that encircle the city had become canals. Colonies of fire ants, having swarmed together, were floating around like rafts of live embers. Alligators appeared, seeking higher ground. At a nursing home south-east of the city, half a dozen women sat in several feet of water. A man caught a fish, by hand, inside his home.

Harvey was the first hurricane of category 3 or above (that is to say, one with wind speeds over 95 knots, or 176km per hour) to hit the United States since 2005, the year Katrina devastated New Orleans—a 12-year hiatus longer than any other in the historical record. It wrought most of its havoc, though, not through the strength of its winds but through the volume of its rains. “The breadth and intensity of this rainfall are beyond anything experienced before,” the National Weather Service (NWS) reported. Some weather gauges measured more than 50 inches (127cm) of rainfall between the evening of Thursday August 24th and the afternoon of Tuesday August 29th. If Harvey’s rain had been spread over the entire country it would have stood the best part of a centimetre deep.

The Houston floods make Harvey the most damaging weather event America has experienced since Hurricane Sandy, which walloped New York and New Jersey in 2012. As The Economist went to press the number confirmed to have died due to Harvey was just 31, though it is sure to rise. Hurricane Ike, which hit Galveston in 2008, claimed 113. In terms of property damage Harvey could well exceed Ike’s $30 billion.

Six crooked highways

A week before Harvey arrived on Texas’s Gulf Coast, it was a mere tropical wave—the spectral remains of a storm that had fizzled out in the Caribbean, en route to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. But then it reorganised itself abruptly and turned north. Sucking energy from the warm waters of the Gulf, it became a fully fledged hurricane on August 24th.

The next day the NWS was warning, accurately, that “Harvey’s forecast path is slow and meandering, meaning a long duration flood threat with catastrophic results.” In Corpus Christi, the city closest to the hurricane’s projected point of landfall, the mayor, Joe McComb, encouraged residents to evacuate voluntarily. The mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, did not. That afternoon the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, questioned the mayor’s decision. “Even if an evacuation order hasn’t been issued by your local official, if you’re in an area between Corpus Christi and Houston, you need to strongly consider evacuating,” he said at a news conference. “What you don’t know, and what nobody else knows right now, is the magnitude of flooding that will be coming.”

But that uncertainty was one of the reasons that local officials of both parties agreed with Mr Turner. For most of the cities in the path of the storm, including Houston, a sedentary stoicism seemed the most reasonable response. Two million people live within Houston’s city limits. More than 6m live in Harris County and the rest of the greater Houston metropolitan area. And by Friday afternoon, the storm was already bearing down on them. In 2005, when Hurricane Rita was hurtling towards Houston less than a month after Katrina had hit New Orleans, city leaders had ordered an evacuation on similarly short notice, with awful results. More than 100 people died in the attempted exodus and then the hurricane bypassed the city. That experience weighed heavily on the minds of Houston’s leaders, as did the fact that Harvey presented a different kind of risk. “We’ll have a lot of water,” said Ed Emmett, the Harris County Judge, on Friday afternoon. “But it’s not the kind of water that we would ask people to evacuate from.”

Hours later Harvey made landfall just north-east of Corpus Christi as a category 4 hurricane, with winds of over 110 knots. On Sunday morning Houston—the fourth-largest city in America, 300km away—woke up to catastrophe. The drama of the day was heightened by the fact that so many of the people affected turned to social media to send an SOS. Local officials and law-enforcement officers, similarly, used social media to co-ordinate their response. The tweets and Facebook posts that surfaced throughout the day asking for help were dispatches from a disaster that most Americans had not been expecting and struggled to imagine.

The city of Houston tweeted that emergency operators were overloaded: “If u can shelter in place do so, a few inches in your home is not imminent danger. Only call if in imminent danger.” The chief of police, Art Acevedo, warned people not to get trapped. “Have reports of people getting into attic to escape floodwater,” he noted. “Do not do so unless you have an ax or means to break through onto your roof.”

The sheriff of Harris County, Ed Gonzalez, relayed SOS messages between rescue attempts. “Got to use the kayak to pull out a family of 3 and their 4 cats,” he reported at one point on Sunday afternoon. Mr Emmett, the judge, called on locals with boats to step up. With the roadways flooded, he explained, “We can’t wait for assets to come from outside.” Hundreds answered the call.

Their efforts proved crucial over the next few days, as Harvey, having arrived, stayed put. Houston is flat and low-lying; its long-standing opposition to zoning has encouraged development that sprawls over an area larger than several states and pays little heed to the need for drainage. As the rain came down the streets filled up. Water had to be released from the two reservoirs built to cope with such contingencies into the Buffalo Bayou that runs through the centre of the city. One of them, Addicks Reservoir, overflowed for the first time in its history.

On Tuesday, the sun emerged over Houston, as Harvey continued to meander up the Gulf Coast. City officials warned that the crisis was not yet over; the recovery, certainly, has not yet begun. Tens of thousands had been displaced, all along the Texas coast, to inland cities like Austin and San Antonio; thousands more were still sheltering in Houston, waiting for the waters to recede from their homes.

The damages will be immense, with implications far beyond the Gulf Coast: the ports of Houston, Corpus Christi and Beaumont are among the largest in the country and the region is the heart of the nation’s oil and gas industry. By Wednesday morning, more than 3m barrels a day of refining capacity—roughly half of Texas’s total—was offline, including America’s biggest refinery, in Port Arthur. American petrol prices jumped. Antoine Halff of Columbia University’s Centre on Global Energy Policy notes that when Katrina hit New Orleans it was flooding that did most of the lasting damage to refineries. Since then flood readiness has improved, but Harvey’s extraordinary rainfall might overwhelm all such preparations.

As state and national officials have already recognised, the recovery from Harvey will take years rather than months. And while rebuilding, Texas will have to confront questions that its leaders have long preferred to avoid. The aftermath of the disaster will reveal whether the state’s investments in infrastructure have been commensurate with its pell-mell growth, and whether it has taken appropriate precautions in response to the projected impacts of climate change.

In the meantime, there may be something to say for Houston’s spontaneous and largely self-organised response to Harvey. The city’s approach to disaster relief was, in some respects, alarmingly ad hoc. But thousands of people were rescued as a result. It looks a far cry from Katrina, which led, directly or indirectly, to the deaths of more than 1,800 people, mostly in Louisiana. Roughly a million were displaced; the damage was estimated at $108bn. And some of its consequences were incalculable. No one was prepared for the levees surrounding New Orleans to break. For days, Americans watched helplessly as people drowned.

The deadliest hurricane in American history, though, was the one that hit Galveston in 1900, in effect wiping it out. Many of its survivors resettled in Houston, which was, at the time, more of a one-horse town. Their descendants, damp as they are, have fared much better.