Hurricane HarveyHouston’s flooding underscores disaster management challenges of years to come

As the Earth’s climate changes, many scientists predict that warmer temperatures could lead to intensifying hurricanes, with individual storms dropping more rain.

As such, the massive flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey in and around Houston may presage the challenges that disaster managers will face in the years ahead, says University at Buffalo disaster researcher Chris Renschler.

Renschler, an associate professor of geography in UB’s College of Arts and Sciences, researches extreme events, including soil erosion and flooding.

“In Houston, the situation is absolutely devastating,” he says. “This is an unprecedented precipitation event, but it should give us the motivation to think about these unprecedented events, particularly in hurricane-prone areas.

“These kinds of floods are not wholly natural,” he says. They are the result of both natural and human-driven processes. Humans can’t fully control nature, but we can control decisions such as where to build new residential developments, where and how to build temporary storages for flood water, and when to open the floodgates of a dam. We can also control how we communicate with the public about the risks of flooding.”

These quandaries are not unique to Houston — communities across the U.S. face similar challenges and should continuously revisit and adapt their emergency plans and communication procedures, says Renschler, who is teaching a class this semester that focuses in part on building community resilience against floods and other extreme events.

He says that to protect communities, emergency managers, public officials and other decision-makers must work together, training for worst case scenarios and planning ahead so that people who may be affected by flooding understand the risks long before a crisis has begun.

Renschler notes that decisions made years in advance can have a huge impact on the severity of a disaster. Land use-planning, for example, influences not only how water moves through a landscape, but also who will be in the path of a flood.

“In the Houston metro area, which had some of the country’s fastest population growth over the past decade, development of residential and commercial areas in the watersheds of important flood protection reservoirs increased impervious surfaces. This exacerbated runoff by reducing the infiltration of water into the soil,” Renschler says.

“It also transformed a rural landscape into suburbs, worsening the emergency by putting more people and structures in potential harm’s way and limiting the options once such storms hit,” he says.