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Hurricane History and Resilient Futures: Insights with Dr. Hal Needham
Watch with subtitles on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/-NqYMZiQ2Ww
Ever wondered how hurricanes have shaped the Texas Gulf Coast and our modern-day preparedness strategies? Join us as we sit down with the legendary Dr. Hal Needham, aka Hurricane Hal, and uncover the fierce history of storms from the catastrophic 1900 Galveston hurricane to modern-day challenges. You'll gain insights into how technological advancements, such as Dan Rather's pioneering coverage during Hurricane Carla, have revolutionized hurricane tracking and how engineering marvels like Galveston's seawall have stood the test of time.
Dr. Needham takes us through a fascinating journey, highlighting how historical storms have informed present-day mitigation strategies and how climate change is altering hurricane characteristics. We delve into the complex dynamics of rapidly intensifying hurricanes and the implications for evacuation plans in vulnerable areas like the Houston-Galveston corridor. Learn about the innovative Fortified Project by Smart Home America and how resilient building practices are becoming essential in combating coastal flooding.
We wrap up with inspiring stories of resilience from both local and international communities, drawing lessons from extreme weather events worldwide. Dr. Needham shares his vision for Galveston's future, emphasizing the city's potential to lead in flood resiliency and technological innovation. This episode is packed with valuable information, from historical engineering feats to modern flood data analysis, ensuring you walk away with a comprehensive understanding of hurricane impacts and the forward-thinking strategies necessary for disaster preparedness.
Here is Dan Rather speaking directly from Galveston. If evacuation of all islands and low coastal areas along Louisiana and the upper and central Texas coast has not been completed, evacuation should be hastened before it is too late.
Speaker 2:What the 1900 storm found? It found the second wealthiest city per capita in the US, but they had never seen anything like a direct hit from a storm like the 1900 storm. Dating winds were around 120 miles an hour. The reason it's the deadliest disaster in US history Pushed this almost 16-foot wall of seawater across the island.
Speaker 3:You mentioned something the surprise hurricane of 1943.
Speaker 2:The US government decided they're never going to censor critical hurricane warning information again.
Speaker 3:Welcome to another episode of Galveston Unscripted. In this episode today I sit down with Dr Hal Needham, also known as Hurricane Hal. First off, I would like to thank the Rosenberg Library for allowing me to host this live event. The turnout was overwhelming and demonstrated everyone's shared interest in history and natural disasters. Just a heads up this episode is a live recording at the Rosenberg Library and we were in a huge room with a lot of reverb, so the audio is not ideal. If you are listening on the podcast feed, you might want to head on over to YouTube and check out the video there. I've added tons of visuals and the audio isn't that bad, but I have added subtitles just in case.
Speaker 3:This interview with Dr Hurricane Hal is a very enlightening conversation of how hurricanes have affected the Texas coast over the past 124 years and our understanding and accumulation of innovative measures over time to help protect ourselves from hurricanes and natural disasters here on the Gulf Coast. This interview was part of the Rosenberg Library Conversation series that I held last year, but I held off on releasing this episode until closer to September 8th. And here we are, just two weeks away from the anniversary of the 1900 storm. 124 years ago, dr Hurricane Howell lays out some wonderful explanations and gives us some insight into almost every major hurricane from 1900 to 2023. Our focus of this discussion was the 1900 storm that devastated Galveston Island, the lessons learned from it and how our understanding and preparedness for hurricanes has evolved over the past century. We discussed the heroic efforts it took to rebuild Galveston and the impressive engineering feats that followed.
Speaker 3:And, of course, dr Hal Needham, being a renowned climate scientist, explains the remarkable advancements in technology since 1900. And he even highlights some groundbreaking research, spearheaded by experts in their field, to further mitigate the impact of these natural disasters. And be sure to stick around for the Q&A at the very end, so you do not want to miss this episode. And if you know somebody who lives on the Gulf Coast and that would enjoy this conversation and the information therein, be sure to share this episode. It's available on all podcast platforms and YouTube. If you live on the Texas Gulf Coast, chances are you've seen Hurricane Hal's tropical weather updates on social media. Without further ado, Dr Hal Needham recorded at our live event at the Rosenberg Library Welcome to Galveston. Unscripted.
Speaker 4:This is Hurricane Hal with your tropical weather update. Morning everybody. This is Hurricane Hal live from Galveston Beach. Hurricane Hal here on the Georgia-South Carolina border. This is Hurricane Hal live from Jacksonville, north Carolina, with an update live from Columbia, south Carolina. Hurricane Hal here live from Galveston Beach with your tropical weather update.
Speaker 3:Dr Hal Needham is an extreme weather and disaster scientist with 15 years experience conducting data-driven risk analysis for disaster-prone communities. He specializes in science communication to both professional scientists and the public and hosts the GeoTrek podcast, the number one podcast in natural disasters. An international expert on coastal flooding and directs the USURGE project, which provides the first comprehensive coastal flood data for the United States, australia, the Philippines, bangladesh and India. He is lead scientist for flood information systems, where he develops address-based flood risk tools. Dr Howell, thank you so much for joining me. All right, so a couple things I wanted to kind of talk about and cover today the 1900 storm, a little bit of history and things we've learned from the 1900 storm and storms we've had over the past 123 years along the Gulf Coast that lead us to how we essentially protect ourselves from hurricanes today. Let's dive right into it. Let's talk about the 1900 storm. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I'm sure a lot of people know about it because you've got this little background on the 1900 storm.
Speaker 2:Yeah sure I mean part of the background is what the 1900 storm found. They found the second wealthiest city per capita in the US. Galveston was a very vibrant, prosperous city, known around the world, and they knew that they had a hurricane problem. They had been hit by hurricanes before, not only from the winds but from storm surge to saltwater flooding. Back then they called them overflows and they were familiar with this, but they had never seen anything like a direct hit from a storm like the 1900 storm. It officially goes down really as a Category 4 hurricane that hit the Texas coast here in Galveston. Sustained winds were around 120 miles an hour. But the really deadly part the reason it's the deadliest disaster in US history it pushed this almost 16-foot wall of seawater across the island and if you've never seen a storm surge, it's like a raging river that just tore up much, I should say most of Galveston. I think a lot of the people that died the 16,000 people that died on the island mostly were travelers from the storm surge.
Speaker 3:A lot of people ask why didn't anybody know that the storm was going to hit Galveston?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question For mean. For one, we can take a bird's eye view of the Texas coast in that time in history. There were big hurricanes that hit down the coast in 1875 and 1886. There was a smaller community called Indianola, not as big as Galveston, I think, around 5,000 people, but still a vibrant city. When you go to Central and West Texas, a lot of the immigrants that went there came through Indianola.
Speaker 2:A lot of the materials that were imported into the US came through Indianola. Indianola was hit directly by these storms in 1875 and 1886. You can go down today to Matagorda Bay and see the steps to the old Indianola courthouse that are still in the bay. Indianola doesn't exist anymore. It's a ghost town and so, interestingly, both of those hurricanes flooded Galveston substantially. In fact the 1886 one put about nine feet of storm surge into Galveston. It would have flooded most of Galveston Island. Galveston homes were washed away in 1886.
Speaker 2:And so people started really talking after that. You know we really possibly need a seawall, we need some kind of protection. I think there was an urgency to it. But once you go a few years with weather like today where it's 82 degrees and sunny, you start forgetting about hurricanes. So on the bird's eye view picture, it was known that there was this vulnerability to hurricanes, for different reasons. I think they felt like Galveston would be protected and not really damaged. They had seen the fringe of hurricanes before but never really saw a direct hit like they did from the 1900 storm.
Speaker 3:As you read the book Isaac's Storm and talk about the man Isaac Klein, who was the chief of the National Weather Bureau here in Galveston, he did not receive, or he received a report that there could be a storm in the Gulf of Mexico, but they really weren't sure. I know there was an issue with Cuban relations as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is coming right just on the heels of the Spanish-American War, where there's a lot of tension between some of the Spanish-speaking areas in the US. And so the 1930s storm actually passed very near or over Cuba. And so the Cubans have a long history of not only forecasting but communicating about hurricanes. They really understand the hurricane science, and so their scientists and their meteorologists thought that this, based on the wind and the circulation that they were seeing in Cuba, they thought this storm was going into the Gulf. So they notified the US and let them know that At that time the US weather here was very centralized and so everything had to go through Washington DC.
Speaker 2:There was thought that there was probably a hurricane out there somewhere the best guess is that it's going up the eastern seaboard and so no one quite knew. They knew there was probably a storm somewhere, but no one quite knew what was going on or that this massive, major hurricane had developed and strengthened in the Gulf of Mexico. Really, one of the big technologies that's there today, that wasn't there at the time and this really developed, say in the 1910s, was ship-to-shore wireless communication. When the 1900 storm hit, really we had instruments that could record the weather on land and we had telegraph to communicate between land-based cities. But there was no way to communicate. If you were a ship in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, that you're observing winds 90 miles an hour, that wireless technology wasn't out there for another maybe 10 to 15 years. So a lot of our cities really were blindsided by a big storm coming in from the coast. Could you tell us a little bit about?
Speaker 3:Isaac Klein.
Speaker 2:Sure, he's originally from Tennessee. He came here well before the 1900 storm. He was a chief meteorologist. Something interesting about Galveston we have the weather bureau came here in 1871. So we have the longest continuous weather records west of the Mississippi River. So we have over 150 years of continuous weather records. Weather bureau was here. They were doing great work. They were making observations, telegraphing those in Washington DC so we could have national weather maps. So they definitely had a presence here. They were doing a lot of forecasting for maritime businesses, for agriculture for all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 2:Dr Isaac Klein isa well-respected and well-known scientist. He published a lot. He actually did a lot of studies as well in tropical medicine at UTMB. Actually I was like, oh wow he was like okay, I have the degree in meteorology.
Speaker 2:Now I, you know, medical doctor and he was a very fascinating person, very well-educated and diverse, and he was the chief meteorologist here that his brother Joseph also worked at their U S weather bureau at the time of the 1900 storm. They were located in the Weavey building, 23rd and market on the third floor of the weather instruments on roof and a lot of those weather instruments were very similar to what we find today and there's temperature and rain and wind and humidity. I think the big difference in detecting and forecasting hurricanes really the ship-to-shore wireless but also what we call remote sensing, collecting weather data from a distance through radar. That really exploded in the 40s and 50s and then eventually the satellite era, starting in the 60s where we could see these hurricanes coming off the African coast or see them in the Caribbean. We have a lot of technology in the past five decades that really helped us predict hurricanes.
Speaker 3:That leads me right to my next question, which is going to be how has our understanding of hurricane forecasting changed since 1900? But you pretty much covered it there, of course. 1900, storms slams into Galveston, one of the richest cities per capita in the United States, and nobody knew it was really going to hit Galveston. If you haven't read the book Isaac Storm, I highly recommend reading that book. It is really really cool. A few of those landmarks that are described in that book are still around. Just like you mentioned, what were the technological limitations in tracking and predicting hurricanes during the early 20th century, let's say after the 1900 storm, before 1943, let's say how have they improved over time?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, you know, obviously what they had at the time was a lot of land-based instruments that we got to ship to shore communication, which helped, and then eventually radar satellites, things like that, improving it. And actually now we have the hurricane hunters that fly into hurricanes and so they'll collect all kinds of data that go into our models. A lot of people don't know this. The first time an airplane ever flew into the eye of a hurricane was right over Galveston Bay in 1943 in the Surprise Hurricane. So we have a lot of firsts around here, a lot of things that happen, a lot of advances.
Speaker 2:I did want to say something too. You know the fact that they really had no way to detect a hurricane out in the Gulf in 1900. So the Galvestonians were blindsided, and I lead Galveston Hurricane Tour. In the first four years of the tour I used to tell people, you know these hurricanes would hit without warning as your house was collapsing. Often people would go to the closest sturdy building they could find to save their lives. And for the first four years of the tour I used to tell people this is how they used to live, but that'll never happen again. Now we can see these things coming out of Africa. We'll never be blindsided again.
Speaker 2:I believe that until two years ago. Two years ago, hurricane Ida hit down by New Orleans upper category four hurricane, maximum sustained wind 150 miles an hour. But this storm just blew up off the coast from a cap one to a cap four and it fits this trend. We've had six hurricanes rapidly intensified, just explosive growth in the last 84 landfall six times over the past seven years. It's only happened 11 times since 1950, but since the past seven years it's a huge trend because our water is so warm in the Gulf of Mexico. But when Hurricane.
Speaker 2:Ida blew up from a Cat 1 to a Cat 4 just south of New Orleans, it was too late to evacuate New Orleans. I drove into New Orleans to do field work the day before a Cat 4 hurricane hit southeast Louisiana. There was no evacuation. The emergency message signs all said seatbelts, vaccinations, those save lives Not one word of the Cap Four hurricane coming in. Because you need 72 hours to evacuate New Orleans and they didn't have that long. South Florida Metro, New Orleans and Houston-Galveston corridor there's three areas where you need probably 36 to 48 hours at least to evacuate. And if you get an explosive storm that just blows up off the coast without warning, it's too late to evacuate people. That's one of the things that really concerns me right now. We're talking about these technologies. We can see these things forming. We can see them forming off Africa, we can trap them through the Caribbean. But if something blows up right off the coast, even though we can see it and we have satellites, sometimes these storms in recent years have been giving us very little warning.
Speaker 3:Galveston's been really lucky not to have one of those, but if something blew, up off the toast, say Labor Day weekend, we'd be in a tight spot here. Yeah yeah, With hundreds of thousands of people down here vacationing on a busy weekend, that could be a big issue for sure. Before we dive into some of the work and data-driven risk analysis you're working on, you mentioned something the surprise hurricane of 1943. And I find it fascinating about the surprise hurricane. How can you not know in 1943, when you have radar and all this, how can you not know there's going to be a hurricane that's going to hit? So could you tell us a little bit about?
Speaker 2:that by that time we had the ship to shore communication wireless for about 30 years. But it's World War II and so the US government didn't want a lot of our ships out there telegraphing and possibly that being detected that they'd be a target for German U-boats, so that communication was all silenced. And then also the US government didn't want the entities to know that our major petrochemical corridor was going to be hit by a hurricane, so that hurricane warning and information was completely censored by the US government. So when a Cat 2 hurricane rolled across Bolivar Peninsula and came up the eastern part of the Houston metro area, it still wanted the strongest hurricane ever to hit that the Galveston Bay communities in the eastern part of Houston metro. People had no warning at all. Afterwards the US government decided they're never going to censor critical hurricane warning information again. But again we call it the surprise hurricane, because people literally woke up there's this hurricane bearing down on them. They had no idea it was coming.
Speaker 3:Well, that's interesting, you know, because when I dive into you know different aspects of history. I hear about Hurricane Carla I hear about the Nicene Storm, the 1915 hurricane Still today, because they don't hear much about the 1943 hurricane. Was there much damage in Galveston or did it really affect the Houston area?
Speaker 2:more. It kind of it came in. The direct landfall was around the Bollinger Peninsula. That came across Galveston Bay. Here we would have not been on the dirty side. We would have had more offshore winds, damaging. I mean, let's talk about a hurricane has this eye of relatively calm winds and sometimes clear skies. Sometimes you'll see the sunshine in it. The winds around the eye is called the eye wall. Those are the really strongest sustained winds but sometimes far to the right of the eye you get this banding and there can be tornadoes embedded in that. There'll be this long band and with Carlet really the eye came in down the coast, down by Port Lavaca and Matagorda Bay. We were far to the right, we weren't going to take a direct hit from the eye or the eye wall, but unfortunately really one of those squall bands came right across Galveston City and there were some very violent tornadoes probably the strongest tornado that's ever hit Galveston and it's probably the strongest tornado that's ever hit Dallas and there were several that were spawned and unfortunately it came across. We were just talking about it before we started reporting this evening. It kind of came in by pleasure of here. I know it took out what used to be the Ursuline Academy at 26 to then and kind of cut across the city, producing tremendous damage.
Speaker 2:From Hurricane Carla. I should say Hurricane Carla is interesting as well. It was a Category 4 hurricane, meaning the winds were tremendous, I think in the 140s. But usually those higher Category hurricanes Category 4, category 5, they tend to be compact and small. Carver was a Cap 4, but geographically huge it was just pushing tremendous amounts of saltwater. It produced the highest storm surge on record in Texas down closer to Matagorda Bay, a 22.5-foot storm surge, and here in Galveston really still getting about a 9, 9.5 foot storm surge. So a lot of coastal flooding as far, really all the way up through Bolivar Peninsula and even past High Island.
Speaker 3:There was a newscaster who kind of got his start here in Galveston, right yeah, so a lot of folks know about Dan Rather.
Speaker 1:He's one of the famous media people of the later 20th century that used to be the anchor of the CBS Evening News out of New York City. He got a start in the very Tim Carlin. Here is Dan Rather speaking directly from Galveston If evacuation of all islands and no coastal areas along Louisiana and the upper and central Texas coast has not been completed. Evacuationacuation should be hated before it is too late.
Speaker 2:He was a Texas guy, I believe. He was born in Wharton, texas, went to San Houston. He was a yell recorder working for KHLU in Houston when Hurricane Carla came. Well, this is before. Storm chasing was really a thing. Now, if there's everything, you have everyone out there with their smartphones. They're streaming to Facebook and TikTok and Instagram. People weren't doing anything like that.
Speaker 2:Dan Rather came up with the idea why don't we cross the causeway into Galveston before they close it and report from Galveston Island? He got a thumbs up, came down here to report from the ground and he stumbled across the US Weather Bureau. They were not in the Levy Building anymore. They were now at the Federal Building at 25th and Church and if you actually look at the old pictures of the federal building, it was a radar dome on top of it in 1961.
Speaker 2:They were shooting out these radars and they actually, for the first time, could see the eye of a hurricane coming towards the coast and Dan Rather was there with them and they broadcast that on the Houston News. Well, this was such a big thing. All of a sudden it's being broadcast by New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and next thing you know, the whole country is watching this Dan Rather guy show the first ever televised broadcast of a hurricane eye come into shore on radar. And today we see radar on the Weather Channel and the evening news. We don't think anything of it. Back then, no one had ever seen anything like that before, so that was another innovation that came right out of Galveston.
Speaker 3:Another Galveston first. I definitely want to get into your research and things that you're working on now because it really is fascinating. But before we do, before we move past the 1900 storm, kind of talking about the thing about the seawall and the grade raising, you know, raising the entire urbanized portion of Galveston at the time Besides the seawall and grade raising, was there anything else that came out of the 1900 storm that we learned to protect physically from hurricanes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, the seawall and grade raising were both tremendous. One of the world's longest seawalls and now the seawall. I know the sidewalk on the seawall runs about 10 miles. It's the world's longest continuous sidewalk. It's just a tremendous seawall and the pictures of the seawall actually show the 17-foot drop, you know. And that was all filled in by the grain raising. So imagine raising an inhabited island, 500 city blocks, 2,000 buildings.
Speaker 2:The feat of this, of what they did with the grain raising, was tremendous. They dug a canal on the inner part of the seawall, built four ocean-going ships in Europe called dredge hoppers, sailed them across the Atlantic, then over a six-year period, dredged up sediment from Galveston Bay, floated in on the canal and just were piping that sediment into the city. That was really the main thing they did. But it was a tremendous effort to raise not only a city but, you know, not only an island but an inhabited city. They raised the churches, they raised the buildings. It was a tremendous effort that they did. I think those are really the main things and it really has protected us a lot. When we look at Hurricane Ike, we see the high watermarks downtown as bad as Hurricane Ike was, and in downtown Galveston the Ike high watermarks are actually the highest on record. Still the seawall really protected us from the massive waves. I mean, a lot of Galveston would have been not just flooded but destroyed by storms like Parla and Ike had we not had the seawall and the grade raisings.
Speaker 3:Are there any other examples across the globe, essentially of other communities doing that building seawalls and raising the grade after hurricanes or was this one of the first places?
Speaker 2:Sometimes seawalls. Grade raisings are very rare. I think I've heard of some blocks like parts of the back bay of Boston that's been filled in and sometimes you hear small communities or neighborhoods in larger cities are maybe not raised as much as filled in by bays. You know we see that. But as far as actually raising the grade of an island as high as 17 feet with an engineered slope, I've never heard of anything like that. The effort was just tremendous to save Galveston.
Speaker 3:Okay, so let's move on a little bit. You know, past the 1900 storm, Talked about some of Galveston's major hurricanes, Hurricane Ike. How did Ike compare? You mentioned the storm surge. How did Ike compare to the 1900 storm?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Ike very different storm. It made landfall really right over Galveston Island. So we have this category system, a classification system called the Saffir-Simpson scale. Hurricanes are classified on a scale of one to five and that just has to do with the winds. The problem is most people die from water, from flood water, from storm surge and heavy rain. So when a lot of so I guess, just meteorologically Ike was a category two. The 1900 storm in Galveston was more like a category three. But Ike was geographically enormous. It was this geographically huge storm. So even enormous, it was this geographically huge storm. So even though it was a category two, it was pushing tremendous amounts of salt water.
Speaker 2:The 1900 storm destroyed so much of galveston and actually created this debris wall kind of around downtown. If you get east of 12th street you don't see too many storms. There's too many homes that survive the 1900 storm. You get south of avenue in not too many storm survivors. There was this wall of debris kind of around downtown. So the 1900 storm produced the highest high watermark on record in Galveston. I think it was 15.7 feet of mean low tide over around 8th and Ball. But if you look at the high watermarks at Tikiwell's Restaurant at 21st and Post Office. You'll actually see on that wall, ike is the highest. That's because this wall of debris kind of protected downtown while the storm surge in 1900. So there were different storms the 1900 storm much more compact, slightly stronger wind, definitely stronger in the city. But what's really interesting with Ike was just the tremendous storm surge. You get over to Bolivar Peninsula. It was pushing about 17 and a half feet of saltwater just moving incredibly fast, huge waves.
Speaker 3:That's why most of Bolivar Peninsula is really white clean Essentially turns that entire peninsula into just a sandbar at that point because the water is so high.
Speaker 2:Essentially I think that's what would have happened here. More if you take away the seawall and the grade raising have kind of that effect. People often think worst case scenario you get hit by the eye. Actually, the worst case scenario for Galveston would be the eye hitting South of us. The eye came in at Jamaica Beach or down by Surfside places like that. That would actually be a worst case scenario for us here because we wouldn't get a break from the eye and get the strongest onshore wind without a break and we'd get the highest wind change. I hear that referred to as the dirty side of the storm.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's true, yeah.
Speaker 2:If you're on that side, you're just getting a strong, strong onshore flow and it's amazing how localized this saltwater flooding will be. If you're on that dirty side, you can get a 15-foot storm surge.
Speaker 3:You go 50 miles away, it can drop really quickly. So you spoke a little bit earlier about this rapid intensification over the past seven years of these or the past 50 years, but over the past seven years you've seen six hurricanes rapidly intensified right off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico. What are some of the things you see that are you know around the assume that everything going on in the weather is climate change?
Speaker 2:And I don't agree with that. There are always going to be floods, there are always going to be droughts and blizzards and all this stuff. So the models really, and the data are showing we're not necessarily seeing any more hurricanes, but the characteristics are changing. One of the characteristics are we do believe that the ocean water temperature is substantially warmer than it was even 100 years ago. That's leading to a lot of rapid intensification. Actually, how I help prove that and show that there's a physical process and I talk about this anywhere I travel in the world I dig down into the Galveston weather data.
Speaker 2:Galveston helps us decode this soaring. We don't have water temperature records going back before really the satellite era. We don't have water temperature records going back before really the satellite era. You know we don't have water temperatures from 100 years ago, but what we do have is Galveston's weather record, which is more than 150 years old. We have constantly hourly weather data. And so what I did and the other thing interesting about Galveston, if you've been here in the summertime, we don't get cold fronts in the summer, we get a constant onshore flow. So, if you think about it, at night there's no sunshine, there tend to be less showers and we're getting this constant onshore flow where, if winds are blowing over hundreds of miles in this really warm saltwater, I build an analysis going back 150 years plotting out the number of hot nights. A hot night is at least 84 degrees In the first 150 years, until 1927, actually we never had a hot night Then they start showing up in 1927.
Speaker 2:And then they start getting really a lot of hot nights by the 70s and 80s. Then in the mid-90s we have the first night that's 85 degrees and then those start increasing up. In the last five years we see the introduction of 86 and 87 degree nights which we never have seen before. I think that's directly related to the much warmer seas, ocean water temperatures we're seeing and that in part gives more moisture to hurricanes because a lot more fuel for the rapid intensification. So there are some characteristics of these hurricanes that are changing and this rapid intensification is scary because it gives you a lot less time to plan, a lot less time to evacuate. A lot of our evacuation plans are based on when the storm's 96 hours out. Do this when it's 72 hours out.
Speaker 2:We're sitting here watching this thing come from Africa. What if this thing blows up 300 miles off the coast in just 36 hours? That's one of my biggest concerns right now. Also, obviously, sea level's rising as the oceans warm, warmer water expands, gets more volume. It's called thermal expansion. We're seeing a lot of that and also there's a lot of land-based ice that's melting, especially in Greenland and Antarctica. So sea levels are rising. Galveston Island, along with the upper Texas coast in south Louisiana is sinking, subsiding, so in combination with that, we have very rapid sea level rise as well. So that's something that if Hurricane Ike hit today, it would flood a bunch of houses that didn't flood 15 years ago, just because we're sinking and the sea levels are rising. So that's another concern as well, related with climate change.
Speaker 3:Climate change can be pretty contentious, depending on who you're talking to. So you basically dive into this data. So I kind of want to get into some of your work today, which you did a great job covering. Now I understand you have a team that are working on gathering all this data and looking at data over the past 150 years or so and then, you know, trying to check out the trajectory. Where are we going to end up in 10, 15 years?
Speaker 2:For the past 15 years I've been running the US total flood database. So I couldn't believe in 2008, when I moved to the Gulf Coast, the storm surge, these saltwater floods from hurricanes the world's deadliest, costliest natural disasters there was no database. You couldn't look up how often did these happen? Where are the most vulnerable areas? There were no data. So for the past 15 years I've been building this database. So I build a comprehensive flood history for 26 Gulf Coast cities, 20 Atlantic Coast cities and I just keep building this. But it helps communities dig in, know their flood history, which we can also run statistics on that and get an idea how often a certain building should flood things like that. So FEMA obviously does flood mapping based on models. I'm coming from a different angle and actually looking at historically over the past 150 years. What do the historical data suggest? And a lot of times our analysis is quite different than what FEMA is finding. So again, we're building out these histories. I think every community should know their flood history, and then, on top of that, I'm leading a team of 29 analysts that we're doing the first project of its kind in the world, launched from a city named Galveston, texas. And of course, we have to come back to Galveston. We're actually developing a database that should be done around the holidays this year. It'll have the elevation of every building on Galveston Island and starting next year we're going to be able to do address-based flood forecasting. So this will, if there's a hurricane in the Gulf and the National Hurricane Center says we think there'll be an eight-foot storm turning Galveston we'll be able to map out which buildings should flood, how much water would be in each building and how people really decode that. Not only that, people come to me all the time they say my mom's interested to buy this house. Did it flood at night? We'll be able to take any house and say that house would have flooded twice. That house would have flooded four times. That house over there never flooded.
Speaker 2:I think it's terrible that people move here from different places. They've never been in a hurricane country. They don't really know the way around it. They want to buy a property and there's no way to know if that's flooded before. So I think those types of information should be well known. Galveston is a great place to launch this, because when my friends visit here my flood scientist, friends from all over the world they always say Galveston's so amazing.
Speaker 2:You chronicle all these high watermarks. We're proud of our history. Not very many cities do that, and so I think it's really we preserve this history. Walk in the East End Historic District. You go down some of these streets. All the houses have a Hurricane Ike high watermark. That's unheard of in the world that people preserve that history. But I think we need to know it, not only for knowing the past, but just for planning out how we want to be more resilient in the future.
Speaker 2:How are you getting the elevation data? Where are you getting all that? Yeah, so we can use elevation certificates. That's an officially surveyed thing, but we developed some innovative like technology that we can use. Uh, so there's something called lidar, where you fly over islands with airplanes and you get very accurate ground elevation data, and then we use other technologies like like gps units and street level imagery and things like that to to basically map out all of gallaston. So so it's funny today I just did like I don't know how many hundreds of buildings and then I rode my bike.
Speaker 2:That's how to work out. Then, on the way back, I had a ground truth. I was going down oh and a half and I'm, like you know, doing some, some stuff on the ground too. So it's just, it's kind of an excuse to have some fun and get on my bike, but people are really interested in this. There's never been anything like this where we imagine if a storm hit and you can say we think that storm flooded 15% of our buildings and here's where they are, and that can really help a community recover very quickly, and nothing like that that I know of has been done before, so I know this is a question we all would like to ask.
Speaker 3:What is the safest highest part on the island, based on what it is? Galveston is very easy because we have this engineered slope.
Speaker 2:So in general, as you go closer to the seawall, you're going up in elevation. It's backwards right, every other coastal community in the world. As you go up the beach, you go down Galveston's like no, we're going to to the seawall, you're higher in ground elevation. What I'm starting to see in this building elevation project is you actually see very similar? I was curious would we actually see higher houses closer to the seawall, or would people downtown just be elevating higher? It does appear like there's also a slope, and not only the ground elevation but the house elevations.
Speaker 3:One thing we spoke about a few months back on our first podcast that we did was just street flooding, and you mentioned climate change. One thing I wanted to ask you before we move on is street flooding and the frequency of street flooding on non-rainy days. You know, we'll see. When we get a high tide, our water has nowhere to go. When you do get a light rain, water has nowhere to go. Can you kind of elaborate on where it could be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sometimes it's called nuisance flooding, sometimes they call it sunny day flooding. It's this concept. Sometimes, when we get a higher tide cycle and a strong longshore wind, you're down by 57th Street in Saladia or some of these neighborhoods and you see water in the streets and it's a sunny day. That's really again Galveston Island subsiding, sea levels rising, the saltwater coming up through the drainage. The issue with that right now I don't think that's flooding any coals, but as Galveston continues to sink and sea levels continue to rise, the issue becomes something called compound flooding. What happens if there's a sludge to the forum that dumps 14 inches of rain and then you have a strong onshore wind, the water in the bay is three feet above normal. All of a sudden you have this saltwater in all of our drainage and then it rains 14 inches. Where's that 14 inches of rain going to go? It can't drain. So we call that compound flooding.
Speaker 2:That's a big concern with places like Galveston, that places may flood that wouldn't have if it wasn't for, again, the saltwater approaching and moving in.
Speaker 2:It's a concern, especially as we get towards the later part of this century. We're going to see even parts of downtown will start flooding from saltwater, I think later this century, just on sunny days with a strong winter wind, wow, and JR. If I can say one more thing, yeah, absolutely. When you go to Tequilas and you see those five high watermarks, we have five high watermarks above ground. If you could go three feet below ground you'd probably see 15 or 20 high watermarks Just once you. Once you Tequila's down there in post office, I think it's about six feet of elevation. We have a ton of storm surges around four and a half five feet. These hurricanes that hit Louisiana, they put four and a half feet of storm surge here. It doesn't show up yet downtown, but in 30, 40 years, all of a sudden, a little bit a foot or two of sea level rise, all of a sudden we're starting to flood way more frequently. That's a big concern as we move ahead.
Speaker 3:I understand you're studying innovative solutions in homes and in coastal areas that are prone to flooding and hurricanes. Can you tell us a little bit about the innovative solutions? What can we do with our homes? Can we retrofit them? Can we build new styles of homes if we want to continue?
Speaker 2:to live in these areas. I love all this stuff, but it doesn't do any good if it doesn't help us better prepare and better plan for the future. And so, with the GeoTrek podcast, with the work I'm doing at Flood Information Systems, it all comes back to how can we build better? And so there are two or three things people can do. For one, check out something called the Fortified Project. This is what Smart Home America. It's building to a better code and people are actually seeing return on investment. And this isn't some kind of program out of Washington DC, it's coming out of South Alabama. A lot of Texans are like okay, now we'll listen, it's not coming from the North, not coming from DC, it's coming from South Alabama, where they have tens of thousands of these fortified homes built to a much better standard.
Speaker 2:For example, one of the things they're doing if you do lose shingles in a store if you've ever been in a hurricane it's like a car wash. You lose 10 shingles. It's like a fire hose pushing all that water and saturating your roof and your ceiling. Then your ceiling collapses. Now you have $90,000 of damage. They're doing things like sealing the roof deck. It's just a simple thing. If you do lose shingles, and fortified shingles are better, but if you do lose some, then you have some layers of protection. It's a better built house. You can check it out. It's Smart.
Speaker 2:Home America is a nonprofit and they do a lot with education. They're really trying to expand now more into Texas. That's just a way you can better prepare for wind and things like that. But then what about water? Water, like, how do we prepare for flooding? Well, I mean the federal and Army Corps. They may end up doing some things. We've heard a lot about the Ike Dike and the Coastal Spine and there's been a lot of meetings. That's been in the media, a lot in general and in favor of putting things between us and the saltwater.
Speaker 2:That said, it doesn't really empower people to say, well, let's just sit around and wait for the government to maybe do something. So I'm a big fan of personal resiliency. People say, what can I do for my whole? And I'm hoping that there can be some ways that we can build better moving forward. One way I'm a big fan.
Speaker 2:Maybe this is because I'm such a history junkie but you walk down downtown Galveston and you see all this commercial space down below with flats and apartments above. It's how they used to build in the 1800s. It's how, when you go to Spain, you don't see a single family residential. Almost everyone lives like that. The US has been so addicted to single family residential since World War II, and when people are scattered and you sprawl, it's really harder to protect them. Should we start building the way Galveston did in the 1800s, where I have friends that live on post office above the Alphahouse? They're never going to flood. Your elevation's 30 feet right.
Speaker 2:It sounds crazy, but a lot of scientists are now saying we need to retreat from the coast, and I'm like have you been to the coast? Have you seen what a great quality of life we have? Have you seen the economic engine that's here? There are all kinds of reasons why we should live and be vibrant on the coast. We have to think about different ways to build. I'm not against single-family residential. You can do it, especially if you build up, if you have strong pilings, but perhaps urban space where we have mixed use with residential above commercial. And finally, then there's a bunch of crazy ideas that will go beyond this podcast. I love crazy ideas.
Speaker 2:In 2016, I was working with the Historical Foundation here and we hosted a workshop. We had Elizabeth English from the Boyd Foundation Project come down and she built an amphibious house in a tank in the old Sears building. We filled up with water. You have to engineer it. It needs a center point of gravity so it doesn't tip over An amphibious house like, for example, my dad's 81 years old. He doesn't want to walk up 35 stairs to get into a house An amphibious thing.
Speaker 2:Instead of elevating your house 12 feet, you elevate it maybe two feet with a buoyant foundation. So you can do this in historic districts and you're not really changing the curbside appeal. You do need either guy wires or you need pilings through the walls. You need to do something that your house doesn't flow down the street and you also need to detach your electrical. You need to detach your plumbing. You have to do a bunch of gymnastics, but you could do this in a historic community, not change the curbside appeal and essentially protect these houses that they will never flood again with a buoyant foundation.
Speaker 2:Been a ton of pushback in the US from FEMA and the federal government on this concept, but again it's an innovative solution that would work in Galveston, because you cannot do buoyant architecture, buoyant foundations, where you have wave action. We have a seawall. We don't get big waves in Galveston. They do in Bolivar, they do in the West End In Galveston City, in our historic communities. We could absolutely have buoyant blocks where we're taking. Imagine taking 20 historic homes putting a buoyant foundation. They look exactly the same from the curve but they're never going to flood again. Things like that. I started talking. Most people think I'm crazy. I think what's crazy is your house has flooded three times and you've done nothing to better prepare for the country.
Speaker 2:To me that sounds crazy. Boeing Foundation I'm like, okay, I'm open to anything. Again, you have to do a bunch of gymnastics to do that. But we need to start being more creative. Friends of mine that work in historic preservation say some preservationists are so entrenched that you can't change a thing. They're out in California fire country and they're like no, you cannot do fire resistant shingles, that's not what they had a hundred years ago. And then you just lose the whole community to a wildfire. So at some point we need to have it. So it looks very historic, it's as authentic as it can be. Maybe some slight adaptations that we don't lose these things, you know, to some of these climate hazards.
Speaker 3:Did they, you know, with that project? Did they do any type of cost analysis? What would something like that cost to put your home on a buoyant foundation?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you would need to talk to probably people with that project. Elizabeth English spends half of the year in Canada, half of the year in Louisiana, but I know this month they had an international conference in Germany. It's being talked about a lot in Europe. It's being done in Southeast Asia and Central America. This is being done around the world.
Speaker 2:In the US there's been a lot of pushback. I think FEMA and Elizabeth English, I think, were fighting about this for about 10 years and they actually said if a community gets one buoyant foundation, we will take away flood insurance for the entire city. So they were that much against it and I think they didn't want people building brand new houses next to a river and saying it's OK, it has a buoyant foundation. Elizabeth English and that was never my intention she walked through a place like Galveston and said look at all these old historic buildings that we could retrofit, keep them looking exactly like they did. But now you know we're going to flood again. So I think for retrofit it's a great idea, maybe not for new construction in a wide open area, but for some of our historic communities where these houses are six, seven feet above flood level, they got four feet of saltwater and hike, we need to do something to preserve them if we lost that is fascinating.
Speaker 3:Okay so we have a few more minutes left before we take questions. I do want to talk a little bit about your podcast and some of the experiences you've had. So the fun part about your podcast is that you get to travel all over the country and soon internationally. Can you talk about some of your favorite experiences you've had while recording this podcast?
Speaker 2:Oh man. So the GeoTrack podcast? This is like a dream come true. It's a podcast about extreme weather and natural disaster, these stories that are not covered by the mainstream. It's all about really learning about the people impacted by it, what they're doing to be more resilient, how they're building better.
Speaker 2:I mean I've had. My favorite experiences were the ones where I'm traveling. I mean, last year I didn't want any Everglades. This year I went out to California to document the 60 feet of snow. I mean I was like 60 feet of snow, I have to be there. This was crazy.
Speaker 2:I interviewed a bunch of people that engineer for heavy snow loads right after a meeting. They're like you want to come skiing with us. I was like I got to meet it. They're like we got a free pass to Tahoe. So two months later I'm up there on a sure lift with them. I'm like you know, after the meeting, canceled. So just places I get to go travel, meet people that don't for extreme weather. But then a lot of times they're out like in this case, they're out playing in it, they're out skiing in it, but then they're building for these heavy snow loads.
Speaker 2:So obviously going into hurricanes anytime that I'm seeing livesaving innovations, creative people, communities coming together. Just in Hurricane Adelia over in Florida last month, there was a business a hardware store, was just like almost sheared off. Their business was crushed by this hurricane and they're open the next day to serve in the community. We just document a lot of that as well. Just people coming together, anything related to resiliency, a lot of lessons learned, success stories, anything like that we're going to document. Last thing I should say I attended about the Corvette Museum in Kentucky last year. They had a sinkhole open up and gobble up all these Corvettes and stuff like that. I'm like I got it. I got to see what this is all about. So that's my favorite part is going to these places, hearing these stories about anything extreme weather, it could be natural disasters like sinkholes in Kentucky, anything like that. I want to be there. I want to kind of talk to people that were impacted and just what can we learn from that? How can we better prepare?
Speaker 3:I definitely want to ask you about that, because your nickname is Hurricane Hal, but you do chase natural disasters all over.
Speaker 2:You know, what we're seeing is some of the lessons we're learning in hurricane country we can apply to other parts of the world. I just did a podcast with Pete Athens. He's a Himalayan mountaineering expert. He climbed Mount Everest seven times and they found, in the 2015 Nepal earthquake, some of the older construction made out of wood, stone and brick and mud that actually survived better than some of the newer construction. I thought this is just like on the Gulf Coast, where you go to Galveston and Biloxi and some of these communities, people will tell you sometimes the older construction the lead of cypress and the older resilient materials often performs better than the new stuff. So what we're seeing in the Himalayas relates to Galveston. So these connections is something I'll certainly enjoy. I'm hoping to get the podcast more international. I haven't purchased the tickets yet, but I'm 98% sure I'll be going to Portugal, spain and Morocco over the holidays to record podcasts there and again trying to take lessons we learned there, apply it back to the States.
Speaker 3:Beautiful. I love it. So if you haven't yet listened to the GeoTrek podcast, it is great, it is awesome. So we have about 15 minutes left. I want to give plenty of time if anyone wants to ask any questions at all to this amazing meteorologist we have here who travels the country chasing natural disasters. So if you have any questions at all, yes, sir.
Speaker 8:So I'd like to first make a couple of comments and then ask a question. The first comment is about after the 1900 storm, during the grade raising, which is an engineering feat that could not be done today. I mean, it just couldn't happen. But St Patrick's Church I used to have this glass slide, a five by seven glass slide that was taken during the great raising. St Patrick's Church, just south of Broadway and 30th Street there were dozens of big screw jacks that were used to raise that structure and there were two people, one on each side of the screw jack, with someone with a megaphone telling them when to turn. And they all had to turn at exactly the same time or the building would collapse and each turn would raise it. You know this far, uh, and, and that was just kind of amazing to to see that and that's what was done all over the city.
Speaker 2:That generation just found a way to get really hard stuff done. I mean, imagine, talking about the great raising. You're like we're going to dig this canal and build four ships in europe and and we're going to build the 70-foot seawall and then everyone's going to raise their house and then, oh yeah, we're going to put dozens of men underneath the churches with jack screws and have a megaphone or beat a drum. I mean it almost sounds ludicrous, right, they did it. I mean, they just found a way to do really, really hard stuff.
Speaker 8:It's so inspirational really, really hard stuff. It's so inspirational. Hurricane Alicia in 1983, one of the reasons that it was almost a surprise hurricane is because it came. It sat in the Gulf. It was a relatively low category hurricane and it sat in the Gulf and it built and built and built until it came on shore in Galveston we felt. We actually felt the eye of the hurricane during the leachate. It did damage, but nothing like Ike or Carla before it. I understand that tide surge that did the damage in life, that when the water recedes quickly it does almost as much damage going out as it does coming in Great questions.
Speaker 2:Well, let's start with Alicia. My girlfriend Alicia is in the crowd tonight so she's gonna be super excited about this question. She was four years old when the actual Alicia hurricane came in and her dad said it was named after her. So she's super excited. You asked that question. She was four years old when the actual Alicia hurricane came in and her dad said it was named after her, so she's super excited. You asked that question.
Speaker 2:Starting with Alicia and this is very interesting there was a stalled out front in the Gulf of Mexico in 1983. Hurricane Alicia spun up from that, but Alicia also pretty rapidly intensified before hitting the coast. It hit the southern part of Galveston Island as a Cat 3 hurricane. When you go to see the high watermarks at 2021st and Post Office, you'll see Ike and then you'll see 1915, 1900, carla. At the very bottom you see Alicia and I always mention to people this is interesting. A Cat 3 hurricane produced a high watermark at the very bottom. The highest high watermark on that pole is from a Cat 2 hurricane. So people often think you'll hear people say we only evacuate for Cat 3 or higher, but you have a Cat 2 hurricane producing the highest high watermark and a Cat 3, the lowest and so we often say there's more to the story than the category.
Speaker 2:A lot of my PhD research when I built this database I wanted to understand how hurricanes push saltwater and what we found is the hurricane intensity at landfall does not correlate very well with the storm surge. What correlates much better is the hurricane intensity about 18 hours before landfall, as well as the geographic size. So a storm that's rapidly intensifying right up to landfall, like Alicia, comes in at a cap three Because it was just intensifying right at the last minute. It didn't really. It wasn't pushing as much saltwater into Galveston. So you don't really hear about flooding that much with Alicia. Everyone talks about the ferocious winds, and so if we had a storm that kind of blew up off the coast, it might be more of a wind event actually and not as much flooding In October, if we ever got hit by an October hurricane. We have our cool waters along the coast. Imagine if you had a Cat 5 hurricane offshore, but then it hits that cool water right before landfall and it makes landfall as a Cat 2. It can still push a huge storm surge because pre-landfall it was a lot stronger. So sometimes what's happening about 18 hours before landfall. That's really driving the storm surge, as well as the geographic size. So, alicia, very much known as a wind event, not as much flooding, because it just wasn't as well developed farther out in the Gulf. And then you talked as well. A great point.
Speaker 2:Sometimes the water pushes in, but when it goes out, depending on the speed that it's going out, that can actually cause more of the damage. I've heard accounts like that, like down the coast where Hurricane Harvey hit down by Rockport at Port Ranzas. People often say when the water pushed out, that's when a lot of the damage happened. So you just have fast. The main thing to think about. With storm surge, it's not just water rising vertically. This is very fast moving, fast flowing water. It looks like a raging river and that's why it just tears up so many buildings. It's the deadliest disaster in the world. Great question.
Speaker 8:You were talking about the water level rising versus subsidence. Both contribute at the same time, but they're different phenomena, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, great question. So in general global sea level rise over the past century was about seven inches. So in general around the world the sea level century was about seven inches. So in general around the world the sea level came up about seven inches. But in Galveston it rose over two feet. You know, to parts of South Louisiana, south of New Orleans, like down by Hola, it rose more than three feet. Why is it so much more? It's because the land is subsiding or sinking.
Speaker 8:What would it be if you averaged it out per year? Right now for Daffodil and Galveston?
Speaker 2:Right in the past century the sea level here was rising, relative to land, about three inches every 12 years. But now it's more like four inches every 12 years. So I know of a high watermark on Wall Street. Between 17th and 18th A house was dry by three inches at Ike. If I hit today, 15 years later, that house will be flooded. So that's part of the concern when we hear about sea level rise. A couple inches or a foot of sea level rise doesn't seem like a lot when you're on the beach, but when you're in the build environment you're now adding that to all the high water marks, so it could be half an inch a year if you're combining subsidence with the ocean rise.
Speaker 2:Maybe not quite that much, maybe an inch every three years or so, but still that starts to really add up. And again, when you look at these histories, we have a ton of storm surges that were four and a half five feet, that never quite made it to inundate places like Post Office Street, but at a foot of sea level rise and all of a sudden no storms hitting Louisiana or flooding downtown Galveston that's what we're looking at. Places like post office street, but at a foot of sea level rise, and all of a sudden no storm sitting in Louisiana or flooding downtown Galveston that's what we're looking at maybe 20 years from now yeah
Speaker 3:so in talking about historic storms, you said a lot of cat, this, but then that right. Do you think it's time for the United States to change the rating scale? Is there any talk of that?
Speaker 2:you know so most people die from the flood water, but the rating scale is for the United States. To change the rating scale, is there any talk of that? You know so most people die from the flood water, but the rating scale is for the wind. I think it kills more people than it saves lives. Really, what the classification scale does? It tells you this is the wind risk on my house from the storm. It tells you nothing about the flood potential. So it's a major problem when we have this rating system a category one through five. It's a major problem when we have this rating system Category 1 through 5, category 1 starts at 74 miles an hour and Category 5 is more than 157.
Speaker 2:You'll hear meteorologists say things like the storm's been downgraded from a 3 to a 2. It's been downgraded, it's no longer a hurricane. And so people hear my risk is lower. Oh, by the way, like when Harvey Hurricane Harvey was a flood about five years ago dug 40, 50 inches of rain in Houston Metro. When most of that rain fell, it was a cat zero. The winds were not reaching force anymore. So you hear on the news Harvey's been downgraded, it's no longer a hurricane.
Speaker 2:When people hear downgraded, that sounds like my risk is lower. Oh, by the way, it's going to rain 40 inches in your community and you're going to have 12 feet of water in your house. So for us in the science communication field, I have to do a bunch of gymnastics and use a whole bunch of all those statements. Although it's been downgraded, the life-threatening flooding hasn't even started in your community, so it puts us in a hole we have to dig out of. I would love if they just discontinued the whole classification system. I know we use it a lot, even I use it a lot tonight. It's just the way we refer to storms, but the big caveat is that only talks about the wind and it's the water that kills most of the people. Great question.
Speaker 7:That was kind of on the same thing that I was talking about. So what are we going to look? At besides wind speed, when a hurricane is coming in. That more important, you know, if they downgrade a storm, what are we going to?
Speaker 2:be looking at. Yeah, so what I would do? The way I look at it, the hurricane really produces three major hazards wind, rainfall, flooding and storm surge flooding. There also are tornadoes. They can be bad, they're a bit freakish and they're geographically tiny. Truly, those first main three are the big ones, and what's really interesting is the Hurricane Center will produce information showing your probability of having hurricane force winds, your probability of getting saltwater flooding and also probability of rainfall flooding. So what I mean by that is I can communicate wow. Based on the latest model and the latest forecast, it is now probable that we'll see at least three feet of saltwater in downtown Galveston. So regardless of I don't care what category it is.
Speaker 2:So my girlfriend Alicia and I were just in Hurricane Adelia. We were talking to some people right in the path of this storm about are they concerned? Are they going to evacuate? They had no concern with flooding. They said we've been here since 1980. We've never flooded before. That's what I hear all the time. I've been here 30 years, we've never flooded. I've been here 40 years, we've never flooded. We pulled up the latest model. It showed a 30% chance that they're going to have at least four feet of saltwater in their home. They couldn't believe that. So, again, all those data are out there. So I often talk to people about the likeliness that your house will flood. It's now probable that these houses will flood. It doesn't matter what category produces that. All that matters is that there's going to be floodwater in homes. So great question yes, ma'am.
Speaker 7:So I manage a business downtown and our hurricane response policy is four days out from landfall. We have to make the decision to close and that gives us time to raise everything up from the first floor and give staff time to evacuate if that's so needed. But when I look at the spaghetti models and things four days out, they're all over the place. I can't tell you how many times?
Speaker 7:I mean, I've been here for six years now, I think four, and we made the decision to evacuate the night before. It's still supposed to hit Galveston. You wake up and it's hit Louisiana. So it's still supposed to hit Galveston. You wake up and it's hit Louisiana. So it's kind of this kind of two-part question Are those spaghetti models that unpredictable? Are storms that unpredictable? Or they can just go wherever they want, whenever they want?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question. Models are improving. The issue becomes.
Speaker 2:It takes a while to prepare a business and it takes a while to evacuate places like the Houston-Galveston corridor. So if we wait until the last minute we couldn't get everyone out. If we waited until the last minute you couldn't prepare your business. So unfortunately we have to do some of these plans, maybe two, three, four days out. By then the storm is maybe in the central Gulf, we're just coming off Cuba or Yucatan of Mexico, so there's still somewhat of what we call a cone. So it is a bit unpredictable.
Speaker 2:With some of these things that we like evacuations, we have to trigger those before we have certainty of where the storm is going. The way Bill Reed, the former director of the Hurricane Center, the way he puts it, if you live in a beautiful place like the Texas coast, you just have to have in your mind in your lifetime you're going to have to probably evacuate four times, and three of the four were quote unquote unnecessary, but I can't tell you which of the one it's going to be necessary. So it's almost that way of thinking. Probably, if you live here long enough, you'll have to evacuate four times and three times and say it'll be a hurricane readout and say I didn't need to go, why did I do it? But there'll be that one that you say. It's a good thing. I took the precautions, so there is still quite a bit of uncertainty.
Speaker 2:Again, as I'm communicating on social media, I'm trying to use very normal language and communicate the probabilities of wind and flood damage I have created. It's the hazard area likeliness index. It's the HAL index. I tried not to use an acronym for my name. I didn't know what it was. Area Likeliness.
Speaker 2:Index, a HAL index. I tried not to use an acronym for my name. I didn't know what it was. It's just common language, though If you have a less than a 10% chance, it's unlikely. 10 to 50 is possible, 50 to 90 is probable, 90 or above is likely. So when I'm saying it's not probable that downtown Galveston will have at least three feet of saltwater, I'm not just randomly choosing a word, I'm very carefully aligning that with the latest statistical models. And again, as the storm gets closer, the certainty either ramps up or drops. But trying to use very plain language is sometimes the language is very confusing. People just just want to know, basically, how likely is it that my house is going to flood and, if so, when is it going to flood? That's all people really care about. At the end of the day, is my business going to flood's all people really care about?
Speaker 7:at the end of the day, is my business going to flood? If so, when? Yeah, so we call those hurricanes where I work um, but so is technology advancing at all, where those models are getting more realistic, or like is it truly that crazy?
Speaker 2:no, um for sure I I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but if you compare the models now compared to the year 2000, it it's much tighter than it was. There's still some uncertainty, though, in both the intensity and the track forecast. That's just inherent. If you think about any forecast. Anytime you're trying to forecast what's going to happen in the future whether it's economics, global geopolitical events, whatever it is there's always uncertainty involved, and so the models are definitely improving. But we still need a lead time in a place like Galveston for preparing our businesses for evacuating. Sometimes we do a bunch of work that we look back say we didn't need to happen. But, like you said, I always tell people take our occasion. I say the same thing Go out to the hill country, visit your family in Dallas, just get out early. It's the best thing you can do. You don't get stuck in the evacuation traffic. If it was unnecessary you can always drive back.
Speaker 6:So the Coastal Barrier Resource Act just passed in the Senate and it's mainly to protect storm surge areas in the United States, specifically helping coastal birds and wildlife. Is there anything that could overlap between protecting wildlife and from like huge storms like that? And you know we talk a lot about protecting our homes and protecting where we live. Is there anything that we could, you know, vote for or ask you know our representatives for that would also benefit wildlife and us?
Speaker 2:Anytime you're building up dunes and building up the marshes, the grasslands, the coastal prairies, things like that, you're helping protect people and protect the environment.
Speaker 2:I'm in favor of anything like that. I was just in Alabama several months ago actually, I think back in the spring I noticed on the coast there were like hundreds and hundreds of Christmas trees that were put down. Anything like that's a great idea, right Like people have to dispose of their Christmas trees. Instead of throwing them out, why not collect them, put them on the coast? If you've ever spent time on the coast when the wind blows, you'll see sand piled up by a fence post right when there's a windbreak. The sand deposits. You put hundreds or thousands of Christmas trees. A lot of sand is going to develop around there and deposit. You're going to start building dunes. So things like that. I mean I would love to see more grant programs like that that build out the coast. That protects wildlife, but it's also putting some some natural barriers between our population and the salt water, which which provides some protection. So I'm a big favor of that two things, by the way.
Speaker 5:We did have um christmas trees down on our beach on the west end. I did have Christmas trees down on our beach on the West End. I bet they got out and it was building. And then my next question is we are not here. We are in the north. In the summertime, when it gets to be hurricane time, you know we're always hoping, okay, okay.
Speaker 5:And I listen to, or I get on the Space City Weather app and I kind of say, when they say, don't worry, I kind of leave a little bit of my breath out. Should we be doing that, or is Space City weather you?
Speaker 2:know I'm a huge fan of Space City weather. They're really. The thing is, a lot of times weather media has a reputation I'd say a bad reputation for hyping things. There's a reason why they put the weather at the end of the news. It's a hook. A lot of people are planning the weekend.
Speaker 2:If there's a hurricane, my goodness, everybody wants to watch and see what's going to happen. I've seen way too many times that I glance at something. It's going to dissipate in the Gulf or go to Florida, and then you'll see on network news. Local broadcasters say stay tuned, there may be a hurricane moving into the Gulf. There's already enough to worry about, right. So I'll just tell people on social media. You may hear about a storm. If it forms at all, it's going to Florida, nothing to worry about. Turn off your TV, turn off your social media, grab a book, take a nap. You know I just don't like hyping things, you know. So space city weather is the same way. They don't hype. So a lot of times they're telling people when the other media sources are getting people wound up. Space City is very, very direct and I like that because when you cry wolf enough times people tune you out. You know there's going to be a storm that people really need to pay attention to. If you're hyping up all these storms, people are going to listen when they really need to. There's a lot of different apps and websites that are coming out that are really doing a good job. It's just interesting. Well, I was talking to JR and some other folks too, about how people used it always used to be cable TV, right, and now it's amazing how just all these different apps and social media platforms are really coming. You're getting a lot more options. There are a lot of good options out there and it's just. It's interesting to me that people are turning more to their smartphones, to apps and websites, as opposed to cable TV. That's a good question.
Speaker 2:That gets into dune building. It has been out of my area of expertise. I know that there are some of these tubes that will protect, I think, and some of them you fill with water. Some of them, maybe, I know there're like sand capture tubes and things like that. I'm just, in general, in favor of innovations and experiments. I know, I think there were experiments with this thing that like trapped sand that was going to erode down the coast and it trapped sand to help build the beach. I think a lot of those things work really well. That gets into a field called geomorphology kind of how is the beach environment changing and what can we do to capture sand? A big theme. Barrier islands want to constantly move around. They're very dynamic and so a big theme is how do we capture the sand, how do we keep our sand from washing away? It's a big focus or in this part of the world is how do we, how do we capture the sand, keep it to build out the beach for tourism, but also to protect us from storms.
Speaker 3:So I did want to ask you one more question this will be the last one. We're going to clobber a little overtime here the Ike Dike Project and things that are happening. I know it's a 30 plus year over $30 billion project, so do you have any idea if that is actually going to happen and if it's actually going to be able to protect us from a crazy?
Speaker 2:storm surge coming into the day. It's in the news a lot. I mean, in general, I'm in favor of putting things between us and the water. I think we need to protect ourselves in some way. I personally liked, with the Ike Dike, when they put the ring levee around Dalveston, this concept of continuing the seawall that we'd be protected on all sides. We look at these high water marks downtown Post-seawawall. These are really coming in from the harbor. We don't have protection there.
Speaker 2:So, in general, I'm in favor of a lot of the ideas with it. You see it in the news. It's been approved. But then it's this 30 billion dollar price tag. You know, I like the idea of protecting the debtfully developed areas like downtown galveston, maybe certain areas around refineries, these hot spot areas, maybe starting with the low-anging fruit, with what can we do for the least amount of money for the most benefit? I think we're going to have to do something. We're very vulnerable here. I'd like to see more protections. We're just going to have to wait and see what happens in the news though, because it's something in the news, but it's a very pricey project.
Speaker 3:All right.
Speaker 2:So any closing thoughts from you, dr Hal? Yeah, check out the GeoTrek podcast, check out flood information systems, where we're launching this address-based flood forecasting. Galveston will be the first city in the world that we've really launched it for, so there's a lot of different innovations that we're doing. The last thing I'll say to leave you with this when you drive in a car, you have a rear view mirror, but even bigger is your windshield.
Speaker 2:I absolutely love Galveston history. I think it's so inspirational. In a way, I look at it like a rear view mirror. I love looking at where we came from. I get inspired by the history of the city, but if we just stop there, we're missing out. I also think when you drive, you're looking at the windshield. Even more important is where we go. I think Galveston's a very inspirational city to launch a lot of innovations, in part by what our ancestors did here with the gray raising the seawall, a lot of the innovations that happened here. That's an inspirational past. We're still very flood prone, but I get excited about in the decade or two in the future. How are we going to launch some of these initiatives? Maybe create a flood resiliency industry here. You know that can help the local economy. I picture us doing things to save ourselves and then exporting that knowledge to save other cities as well. So I think you know our past is amazing. I think our future is going to be even more amazing as we move ahead.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for joining me tonight. Thank everyone for coming Round of applause for Dr Howe.
