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Nearly Four Years After Hurricane Ike, Area Officials Still Struggle With Recovery & Future Planning

Posted byHoumanitarian

(Harvey Rice, Houston Chronicle)
The six-county district formed after Hurricane Ike to protect the upper Texas Gulf Coast from a massive storm surge has stalled for lack of money, but new efforts have emerged to avert a disastrous inundation.

The Gulf Coast Community Protection and Recovery District met twice in 2010 and has since been inactive.“I don’t know how useful it would be for us to meet in the absence of a funding mechanism,” said Jefferson County Judge Jeff Branick, the district’s vice chairman.

In the absence of action by the district, two separate efforts are under way to prevent a storm surge that could cripple the nation’s energy supply if it overwhelmed the Houston or Port Arthur areas. One initiative aims to revive plans for a massive dike and flood gate system to protect Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula, and the concept has grown to encompass the Sabine Pass area. The cost has been estimated at $3 billion or more.

A competing plan by a Rice University organization known as SSPEED – the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center – has come up with storm protection ideas directed solely at the Houston area. It believes its proposals could be developed more cheaply than the massive “Ike Dike” proposed by Texas A&M-Galveston marine sciences professor William Merrell.

“We need to have a very thorough and public debate on it,” Merrell said.

Jim Blackburn, SSPEED member and environmental law professor at Rice, agreed: “We’re happy to debate the Ike Dike and what its alternatives are,” Blackburn said. “This is a true community decision point.”
(Read more of this story at the Houston Chronicle)

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