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“ON THE MEDIA"/SENIOR PRODUCER: KATYA ROGERS

     SEPTEMBER 1, 2017

   [PROMOS/MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Bob Garfield is away. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

Expectations based on historical precedent have been failing us all year. They failed again this week, as Hurricane Harvey  supersaturated southeast Texas. As the water rose in Houston and across Harris County, reporters and meteorologists struggled to describe a deluge of nigh on to biblical proportions.

  [CLIPS]:

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  They’re already calling Harvey “unprecedented” and “beyond anything experienced.”

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  In Harris County alone, a trillion gallons of rain has fallen over four days, which is more than flows over

Niagara Falls in two weeks.

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT:  Put this in perspective. The National Weather Service today added two new colors to its rainfall charts, including light pink, which signals 30 inches or more, and 40 inches have fallen in Dayton, Texas.

  [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  There is some precedent, however, to the whole country watching on in horror. Twelve years ago, nearly to the day, we were gripped by another disaster in the Gulf called Katrina. And, like Harvey, that disaster exposed a flaw in engineering. In New Orleans it was the levees, in Houston it’s the city itself.

Neena Satija is an investigative reporter and producer for The Texas Tribune and Reveal. Last year, she co-wrote a piece called "Boomtown, Flood Town” about unbridled development in Houston and what might happen if a big storm hit a city built on swamp and prairie. It was a hauntingly prescient piece of reporting.

NEENA SATIJA:  We can’t predict where exactly rain will fall, how much rain will fall and what rate it will fall, so all we could say in our piece is that Houston is going to see one of these catastrophic intense rainstorms. And that's certainly what happened this week.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And what was going on when you wrote it last year?

NEENA SATIJA:  Last year, we wrote our piece in the wake of a couple of other catastrophic floods Houston had seen that really crippled the city. There were the Tax Day floods in April of 2016, the Memorial Day floods in May of 2015. Those were also, at the time, considered very rare events.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You quote in that piece Sam Brody at Texas A&M University, a Galveston researcher, and he wrote that more people die here than anywhere else from floods, more property per capita is lost here, and the problem’s getting worse. Why?

NEENA SATIJA:  Number one, more people are moving to the area, so inevitably you're building more structures, you're putting more people in harm's way. Also, when they move here they're not educated about the issue. Their realtor doesn't tell them, for instance, that even if they don't live in that 100-year floodplain, where you're required to get flood insurance, they should probably get flood insurance because much of the flooding is happening outside of the floodplain. People are moving into areas like the reservoirs. They’re paving over prairie land that could have absorbed some of these floodwaters.

Now, I want to be clear, there was going to be damage from the storm no matter what, even if Houston had developed differently. This is an historic amount of rainfall. But things could have been different if Houston had developed better. And the final thing I'll say is climate change. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change is a factor in a storm like this, and it's been a factor in the other two storms I mentioned.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Three years before Katrina, the New Orleans Times-Picayune did a series looking at what would happen to the city if it were hit by a hurricane and didn’t make a big difference there. Is there some sort of resistance to this information?

NEENA SATIJA:  There absolutely is resistance. You know, a few years ago the state actually tried to put up signposts in Houston saying how high the water would go in a storm surge situation, so not the rainfall we’ve been experiencing but storm surge from a hurricane, and there was so much pushback from realtors and other businesses they had to take them down.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  In The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal spoke to an editor of a book of essays called Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South and there was a suggestion [LAUGHS] that there’s something about the culture of the Gulf region, in general, that resists being told what to do by pointy-headed experts.

NEENA SATIJA:  Local officials that we’ve talked to and statewide elected officials have a real pride being Texans. Texas has a long history of defying the federal government, being bothered by the federal government telling it what to do. Now, you know, there are many climate scientists, world-renowned climate scientists based right here in Texas who work at public universities that are funded by the state who are saying we need to be paying more attention to this.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  City officials there, though, in Houston have accused these experts of being antidevelopment, using climate change as a way to further their agenda.

NEENA SATIJA:  They have, specifically the former head of the Harris County Flood Control District, which is home to Houston, he told us he felt as though scientists and some what he called “environmentalists” are using science for what he called an “anti-development agenda.” They don't want to grow, they don't want their neighborhoods to change.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  If you don't have a consensus about what needs to be fixed, then you're never going to be able to fix it.

NEENA SATIJA:  Some of it is money. Scientists and experts have told us that we need very strong political leadership, both at the local level and at the state level in Texas, to go to the federal government and ask for an enormous amount of money, not just for recovery, and that’s going to cost a lot already, but also for prevention.

We’ve been experiencing the effects of climate change now, we know, for quite some time but even without climate change in the picture, some of the storms that Houston has experienced in the past 50 years, you know, the public would have to be willing to pay to try to prevent some damage from those storms, and it's probably not enough to prevent all damage. It’s a very, very difficult question. I don't think anyone would argue that Hurricane Harvey and the rainfall it brought to Houston is a completely man-made situation. Certainly, it's a, it’s a combination of nature and climate change and development that made the severity of that storm worse.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  In the piece you wrote last year, you talked about the county official Mike Talbott’s insistence that these were rare events. What’s it gonna take, do you think, to get the city to move?

NEENA SATIJA:  Maybe this is the storm. And you talked about Mark Schleifstein’s piece in the New Orleans Times-Picayune about Katrina. They knew that this was going to be a catastrophe were it to hit. The Army Corps knew about the levees problems, and nothing was done until they broke. People don't start to turn around their thinking until the calamity hits. It could be this storm that convinces some of the officials we spoke to that we maybe can’t start thinking about these as rare events anymore. And certainly, other cities are acting a little differently.

We spoke with climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. She’s consulting with a number of cities, including the City of Austin, Texas, the City of San Angelo, Texas, which is a much smaller city in west Texas, and cities all over the country. They are preparing for more frequent and intense rainfall.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Neena, think you very much.

NEENA SATIJA:  Thanks a lot for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Neena Satija is an investigative reporter and producer for The Texas Tribune and Reveal.