The $30 billion barrier may fail to block climate-fueled storm surge—and won’t prevent other urban flooding in Houston.
that would line the interior of the bay with levees and artificial islands, providing a second layer of defense for downtown Houston.. Its dunes would only rise 14 feet high, lower than the peak storm surge during Hurricane Ike itself.
The reduced scale of the project means that bigger surge events could blow through the dunes or even overtop the central gates, pushing toward the city just as Hurricane Ike could have done. The Corps’ own analysis found that even with the project, the bay would still suffer an average of more than $1 billion in annual storm damage. And as sea levels rise, the barriers will grow less effective, ratcheting up the risk even more.
The agency’s cost-benefit constraints mean that the Ike Dike won’t do much to protect Houston itself, said Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer who teaches at Rice University. Coastal communities like Galveston will get a lot safer, but the existential risk to Houston will remain.“There will be some benefits to the ship channel [and Houston], but it only really goes until a certain size of storms,” said Blackburn.
In response to queries from Grist, a spokesperson for the Army Corps of Engineers defended the Ike Dike project, saying it would reduce damage from medium-size hurricanes by as much as 77 percent and prevent an average of $2 billion in damages each year, though “residual risk” will remain.
Even if the Ike Dike does become a reality, Houston is much further behind on addressing flood risk that doesn’t come from the Galveston Bay. When storms pass over the Texas coast, the rain they drop drains out into the Gulf of Mexico. As it moves toward the ocean, this water
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