STORMS, FLOODS AND POLLUTION

Friday, May 19, 2006
Houston Endowment
600 Travis, Suite 6400
Houston, Texas 77002

SPECIAL PRESENTATION 1: Katrina - Storms and pollution

Ron Kendall introduced himself as a professor of environmental toxicology and director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University, sited at the 2500-acre, 150,000 square-foot Reese Technology Center in Lubbock. Dr. Kendall works there with his Texas Tech colleague, Dr. Steve Presley, a toxicologist who works on the transport and fate of contaminants in the environment, and their entry into and impact on humans. He feels that natural disasters such as Katrina are inevitable (he showed a map of the Gulf of Mexico depicting hundreds of hurricane tracts since 1851), and they are powerful forces for moving materials in the environment, including contaminants. For that reason, he believes that there are important lessons in environmental toxicology to be gained from studying Katrina.

He then introduced his other partners in the Katrina project: Duke DeWare, director of the Jefferson Institute in Jefferson and Carol Harring, former president of the Cypress Valley Alliance (the original organization that created the Jefferson Institute). The Alliance, and subsequently, the Institute, had been formed by Andy Sansom and a diverse set of local residents in the mid-90s as efforts to revive Jefferson, a small and poor community with huge historic and natural resources that were threatened by a proposal to build a navigation link through Caddo Lake and the Cypress Valley. The navigation project died, but the organizational effort survived and resulted in a 23,000-square foot distance learning and rural education center in downtown Jefferson that has been the forum for many collaborative efforts since.

In the weeks of September 2005 following Katrina, Mr. DeWare saw many people who had fled the flooding in New Orleans, and grew concerned about the effects of the storm on the Crescent City. His concern also grew from Jefferson’s long history as a steamboat stop on the Red River system, serving navigation to and from New Orleans. Still, he realized that he would need partners to make an impact, so he consulted with Rep. Ratliff, who suggested that he contact Texas Tech University. Texas Tech had extensive experience with monitoring and mitigating perchlorate contamination on the Longhorn munitions plant in the Caddo watershed, perhaps not too unlike the large-scale pollution problems that New Orleans might now face. Texas Tech’s Institute of Environmental and Human Health (IEHH) agreed to participate, and in the fall of 2005 sent staff and equipment to New Orleans, following a Jefferson EMS tech and ambulance into the barricaded city.

Ron Kendall then spoke and listed many of the skills that the IEHH brought to bear, including terrestrial and aquatic toxicology, biochemical and developmental toxiciology, advanced materials, high-performance computing, countermeasures to biological and chemical threats, molecular epidemiology, computer modeling and Geographic Information Systems, collaboration with the TTU medical and law school, and peer review from an external science advisory board. Dr. Kendall again emphasized how these multi-disciplinary talents would be needed to understand how a large city can be affected by a hurricane, a risk that many coastal cities face, especially as the climate warms, sea levels rise and storms grow more powerful. As examples, he was concerned by the health risks to first-responders, such as the histoplasmosis, a fungal lung infection that he saw in a Kentucky resident who came to help; and in risks to evacuees, such as the aeromanas bacteria, which was found in very high counts near the Superdome. As longer-term risks, he also said that much of the city is under a 1” layer of silt, heavily laden with lead and arsenic.

He also saw institutional risks in the inability of science-based organizations such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Centers for Disease Control to rise above the political pressures, which seek to resettle New Orleans as quickly as possible, possibly disregarding real risks to life in a rebuilt city. For instance, the CDC wanted to debate Texas Tech’s finding of a high aeromanas bacteria concentration, despite its flesh-eating dangers. Dr. Kendall also noted that EPA had been reluctant to recognize the city’s health risks in the aftermath of Katrina: on September 17, 2005, the agency hoped there would be no effect; on December 6, 2005, shortly before resettlement began, the agency said that there’d been little effect from the hurricane. Finally, EPA began to backtrack: on April 4, 2006, after reviewing Texas Tech data, EPA acknowledged that there were high lead levels; on May 12, 2006, EPA went further, warning of a health problem in New Orleans, recommending that children avoid playing in raw soil, that they wash their hands regularly, and avoid playgrounds. Dr. Kendall pointed out that EPA had earlier been relying on sparse data collected by unqualified technicians, and had been unwilling to consider information from outside the agency.

Dr. Kendall was concerned out that much of the contamination is in the 9th Ward, which had been submerged under 30 feet of polluted water and sediment following Katrina. The 9th Ward has long been black and poverty-stricken. He worries that resettlement of a contaminated New Orleans by poor and minority returnees may bring tensions with the white and largely unscathed areas of the city, such as the French Quarter and Garden District. He foresees large environmental justice claims in the future if we don’t “get this right”.

Looking forward, Dr. Kendall saw three major steps in cleaning up and resettling New Orleans: 1) an environmental risk assessment; 2) strategic planning; and 3) education and training. Beyond New Orleans, he feels that coastal cities need to learn from New Orleans’ experience, and prepare for similar threats. Some of the public health threats are not from hurricanes, but result from the same climate change pressures. For instance, he believes that global warming will bring more risk from vector-borne disease, such as West Nile viruses in mosquitoes, sylvatic (bubonic) plague in mammals’ fleas, and contagious tropical infections in human immigrants bringing tropical infections with them from southern countries.

Questions, answers and comments:

There was a suggestion that it would be worthwhile to look at a web-based map compiled by the New Orleans Times-Picayune that showed Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans in slow-motion, step-by-step, images. The map can be seen at:

http://www.nola.com/katrina/graphics/flashflood.swf

SPECIAL PRESENTATION 2: Allison – Storms and flooding

Dr. Phil Bedient spoke next. He is an environmental engineer and has served as a professor at Rice University for 30 years, where he has long been interested in flooding problems. His interest stems from Houston’s recurrent and serious flooding. In 1935, Buffalo Bayou’s floodwaters reached the second floor of downtown buildings; in 1992, Buffalo Bayou flooded and submerged Interstate 10; in 1994, a 25” downpour brought major flooding to the city; in 1998, Tropical Storm Frances flooded White Oak Bayou, and trapped many school busses loaded with children; in 2001, Tropical Storm Allison brought $5 billion in damages to Harris County, ranking as the worst U.S. storm cost to date; and in 2003, a 7” storm caused major street flooding throughout the city.

There are a number of reasons why Houston floods so regularly and seriously, and why it has made a good test bed for Dr. Bedient’s flood research. First, the city has some of the most intense rainfall in the world, caused by the collision of cool Rocky Mountain air with Gulf humidity. Secondly, there is very little slope for drainage, typically less than 1 foot in a mile (the 300-acre Rice campus drops only 18” from one side to the other). Third, Houston is underlain by clay soils that allow very little infiltration. Fourth, the city has seen rapid development and addition of paved, impervious surfaces, speeding runoff. Fifth, very little detention storage was set aside to catch rain runoff, before it could clog drainage routes and streets. Much of the investment in flood control was focused instead on channelizing streams and lining them with concrete, only speeding runoff, and moving flood damage farther and more rapidly downstream. Finally, the last ten years have seen an increase in storm activity.

Accepting that flooding is a part of life in Houston, Dr. Bedient’s interest has been focused on how to predict floods and give extra time to prepare for them. His major focus has been on flooding in the 129-square mile Brays Bayou watershed of southwest Houston, in part due to the fact that he lived and worked in this area and could easily observe it, but also because the Texas Medical Center is located there, with its many critical-care patients, hundreds of thousands of staff, and valuable equipment and research programs at risk. His goal has been to build a real-time flood alert to give 2-3 hours’ warning for EMS, road and parking garage closures, and notices to public works managers and water supply providers (for instance, the City of Houston water treatment plant is split by Hunting Bayou and is very vulnerable to flooding).

The results of his flood-alert research to date can be seen at fas2.rice.edu, which shows a warning system for the Texas Medical Center. The system uses NEXRAD Doppler radar (http://www.roc.noaa.gov/) to monitor the location and intensity of rainfall with the resolution of having 250 rain gauges (there are only 5 real and breakdown-prone rain gauges in the Brays Bayou basin, so this is a great step forward from the system currently used by Harris County Flood Control District). Dr. Bedient hopes to add rain data from the Quantitative Precipitation Forecasts (QPF) that are distributed by the Federal Aviation Administration to warn aircraft away from dangerous storms. He’s also working on increasing the resolution of the computer models for predicting rainfall and flooding, to a level of a 120-meter grid, so that flooding of individual street intersections could be foreseen. As well, he’s developing a library of data describing actual historic storms, showing their intensity, duration and location. This library of historic storms will add to the standard, uniformly-distributed 100-year and 500-year storms that are typically used in flood planning, and that may not represent actual experience. Finally, his team is looking at how to predict flood velocities, since a 6 to 7” rain storm can generate deadly 8-mph stream currents.

Like Dr. Kendall, he sees unique risks in tropical storms and hurricanes, since they compound the flooding from rainfall with the storm surge of Gulf waters. These storm surges can be dramatic and rapid: 15 to 22’ surges are possible, and can rise as fast as 8’ per hour. Further, rain associated with an incoming tropical storm or hurricane can block escape routes and expose residents to both flooding and wind risks. For example, the 1979 Tropical Storm Claudette brought 30” of rain within 48 hours to the upper Texas coast and submerged both the primary coastal escape route (IH-45) and the secondary route (State Highway 288).

Looking towards the future, Dr. Bedient is excited about the potential for rain sensing from the CASA project (http://www.casa.umass.edu/), a radar system originally designed for tornadoes, but recently revamped to include use for major rainstorms. CASA, Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts (radar), University of Oklahoma (weather prediction), Colorado State University (radar testing), and Rice and the University of Houston, which are providing the test-bed for real-world flooding.

Dr. Bedient is also working, through Rice, with the University of Houston, Louisiana State University, University of Oklahoma, University of Texas, Texas Medical Center, the City of Houston, and the Houston-Galveston Area Council on SSPEED, a severe storm prediction and warning system. He hopes that this system will help bridge the disconnect between the academic understanding of storms and the need of first-responders for practical warnings and other timely support. He feels that NOAA and FEMA have had little effective impact on the real-life needs of these first-responders: for instance, FEMA spent $12 million on flood mapping, but failed to consider the role of storm surges in floods. He also hopes to get high-school students involved, since science education is often too abstract and text-oriented, and leaves out real and immediate issues. This SSPEED project would cost $350,000 to start, and $50,000 to run per year.

Questions and answers:

Q: What effect does subsidence have on Houston’s flooding problems? Dr. Bedient said that it was a factor, but likely less important than the intensity of rainfall, and extensive paving and impervious cover in the area.

Q: How long and strong has interest persisted in flood problems following the severe storms and floods of recent years in Houston? He said that there is always a fast, exponential die-off in interest a short while after floods, as people get distracted with more current issues.

Q: How might high schools be improved either through the SSPEED project, or more generally? Dr. Bedient thought that schools would prepare students better if they gave them more multi-disciplinary lessons, and fewer courses that were rigidly kept within the bounds of math or physics or chemistry.