Well, well, well,
Here I am, sitting in my living room, 8 days after Hurricane Ike paid Houston and Galveston a visit, along with a heavy rain storm that happened the following Sunday morning. Westheimer is largely back to normal, though there are a few neighborhoods in the area without power. I tried making most of my regular commute towards work on this Sunday afternoon. I went into work on Friday, only to find that San Felipe inside the Loop is still blocked off. That left drivers having to traverse around the blocked off area to get to Kirby or other thoroughfares. I just got back from a run in Memorial Park that I took around noon and took San Felipe on my way back home. I found the street is still blocked off, but that the trees that had blocked the right of way had been cleared. Linemen were working from utility trucks to restore power. The Chronicle said on its September 22nd, 2008 front page that 54 percent of Centerpoint Energy customers and 71 percent of Entergy customers had their energy and power restored. Complaints have already mounted on the perceived slow pace of power restoration. Meanwhile, Mayor White's curfew of Houston, modified to be enforced between midnight and 6:00am, was supposed to end tonight but will be extended until further notice. The Wizard imagines the curfew will be lifted by the end of next week.
As is to be expected, the Monday morning quarterbacking about what to do, if anything, in the future with regards to hurricanes has already started. Council member Peter Brown, who never saw a regulation that he didn't like, once again trotted out the Urban Romanticism / Smart Growth playbook item of burying electrical power lines. Interestingly, the Houston Chronicle posted an editorial in the Sunday, September 21, 2008 paper largely rejecting this idea, citing studies from Oklahoma and Virginia that the cost of underground power burial would be between $3,500 - $16,000 per customer. The editorial mentioned that the cost per mile of underground burial was some 10 times those of overhead poles. Nonetheless, there are some cost effective ideas that could be pursued to alleviate the problem, such as passing some regulations or ordinances prohibiting the growth of vegetation or tree cover within a certain distance of power lines.
The same battles are going to erupt over development near the sea shore. Jim Blackburn was quoted saying:
We have to protect people from themselves and certainly from developers," said Jim Blackburn, an environmental attorney and coastal expert based in Houston. "Anyone who wants to buy on the West End of Galveston Island should be shown a picture of the Bolivar Peninsula after Ike.
But that all depends on whether you are the type of person who believes that people need to be protected from themselves, much less from real estate developers.
From a purely economic perspective, as opposed to a political perspective, issues such as having your seaside home wiped out by hurricanes, tsunamis, or other phenomena could be looked at with a similar lens to that of understanding whether we should pursue underground burial of power lines. Ask yourself what is the future discounted probability that a hurricane is going to damage your home or how long it will be before power will be restored? We had some shingles taken off the roofs of my condo complex, along with some damage to car ports, but otherwise I suffered no harm. Likewise, I have had two power outages in the past 2 years, a 36 hour outage from Hurricane Rita and a loss of power for 76 hours from Ike. Before that, we had brief power outages because of Tropical Storm Allison back in 2001. I have a generator already, ergo I am largely covered on the account of a loss of electrical power.
The point here is that the last time Houstonians suffered through an electrical outage of this length and magnitude was 25 years ago from Hurricane Alicia. So ask yourself, does suffering through an occasional power outage call for spending billions to retrofit Houston's 640 square miles of already developed territory and put up with the massive attendant disruptions of civic life? It's one thing to consider burying power lines in new areas that are under development right now when it is relatively cheap and easy to do so. It's another thing to rip up the sidewalks of a street like Westheimer in order to bury the power lines.
A friend of mine owns a house in Galveston that was about 15 feet from the shoreline. His house was some 15 feet up. I have yet to hear from him whether he joined the masses in checking to see whether his home made it through Ike. Nonetheless, it seems to me that if private insurance is willing to pick up the tab on rebuilding a house, and effectively asking the future discounting question I posed above, then I see no reason why someone should be prohibited from rebuilding. Likewise, I've seen people in other countries build their housing on rivers and lakes, knowing that they could lose their homes, but they take the risk anyway because that is how they live. One could build cheap housing with no insurance, taking the risk that the structure would be blown away in the event of a natural disaster. Then the onus would be on the homeowner, who would be faced with picking up the pieces and starting all over again.
It remains to be seen whether the the state will take any action, other than enforcing the Texas Open Beaches Act. No doubt that Ike will open some more wounds over that issue.
Sigh...
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at September 21, 2008 06:55 PM