God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(21)
For many years Texas led the nation in the number of refugees it admits. In 2016, Texas took in 8,300 of the 85,000 refugees that came to America, a close second to California. (Under President Trump, the number of refugees permitted into the country has been capped at 45,000.) Houston accepts more refugees than any city in the country. At last count (2010), Texas has the largest number of Muslim adherents in the United States. However, the governor decided in September 2016 to withdraw from the federal resettlement program.
Like other cities in Texas, Houston has become more progressive over the years; for instance, 81 percent of Houston’s citizens favor background checks for all gun owners, and a majority approves a path to legal citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The proportion of Houstonians identifying themselves as Democrats was 52 percent in Klineberg’s latest survey, while the number saying they are Republicans declined to 30 percent—the largest gap in the history of his polling. Those numbers are not at all reflected in the political leadership of the state, which is far more right wing than the general population.
Nearly 40 percent of Houston’s population is under twenty-four—it’s an incredibly youthful town—so education is a pressing issue. More than half of that youthful cohort are Latino, and nearly 20 percent are African American; they are the future of Houston and also the most likely to be undereducated. Texas is near the bottom on education spending and academic achievement. These failures will have national consequences, since one out of ten children in the United States is a Texan—more than seven million of them. One in four Texas children lives in poverty.
There was a time when oil, cotton, and cattle were the only real sources of wealth in the state, and education wasn’t such a crucial predictor of success. “The question is whether older, wealthy Anglos are willing to invest in a Texas future that is predominately not Anglo, when it’s not a mirror of Europe but a microcosm of the world,” says Klineberg. “The hope for Houston and Texas is that it is in our basic DNA to do what is needed to succeed.” Houstonians know that they are at a crossroads. “This place could be either London or Lagos,” my friend Mimi Swartz, a longtime Texas Monthly writer, told me.
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IN EARLY AUGUST 2017, an atmospheric formation known as a tropical wave stirred into life off the western coast of Africa and began its journey across the Atlantic Ocean. By the time the disturbance neared the Lesser Antilles, on August 17, it was designated a tropical storm and named Harvey. Two days later, Harvey bumped into a wind shear in the eastern Caribbean, and it subsided once again into a wave. The National Hurricane Center stopped providing advisories as it appeared that the storm with its rather amusing name had simply petered out.
The Texas Gulf Coast acts as sort of a catcher’s mitt for the tempests that are hurled across the sea. And yet, with all the predictions about global warming generating more frequent storms of increased severity, we hadn’t had a direct hit since Hurricane Ike hit Galveston in 2008. Ike was rated only a Category 2 hurricane, but it was one of the most destructive storms in Texas history, bringing a twenty-foot storm surge and killing eighty-four people. Many of our complacent political leaders doubt that the climate is changing—or if it is, that human activity has anything to do with it. In light of widespread scientific consensus on these matters, it is difficult to read the political resistance as anything other than abject submission to the oil and gas industry, which is headquartered right in the Gulf Coast hurricane strike zone.
The depleted storm named Harvey lumbered across the Yucatán Peninsula into the Gulf, where it gathered enough strength to be termed a tropical depression—meaning that it had winds of thirty-eight miles per hour or less. Suddenly, in the space of fifty-six hours, Harvey exploded into a Category 4 hurricane, thanks to abnormally warm waters in the Gulf.
Harvey made landfall at 10 p.m. on August 25 at Rockport, a little fishing village and art colony north of Corpus Christi, with sustained winds of 130 miles per hour, wiping out city blocks in Rockport and leveling smaller towns in the area. But it wasn’t the wind that would do the real damage; it was the rain.
As the storm veered northwest, toward Houston and Beaumont, meteorologists began to panic. “All impacts are unknown & beyond anything ever experienced,” the National Weather Service tweeted on August 27. William Long, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), predicted that the storm would be the worst disaster Texas had ever seen.
Governor Abbott urged residents from Corpus Christi to Houston to evacuate, but Mayor Turner and Judge Emmett quickly overruled him. “You literally cannot put 6.5 million people on the road,” the mayor said at a press conference. He referenced Hurricane Rita in 2005, when an evacuation order had been given. About 2.5 million people fled inland, creating the worst gridlock in Houston’s history. Steve Harrigan got his eighty-five-year-old mother out, and it took him nine hours to drive to Austin, usually less than a three-hour drive. His brother-in-law left two hours later, and the same trip took thirty-two hours. People who were stranded on the highway died of heat stroke. There were traffic accidents. Fights broke out. A bus carrying evacuees from a nursing home caught fire. More than a hundred people died in the thwarted exodus. The uncomfortable truth about Houston is that there is no escape in the face of a major hurricane.
Harvey had become indolent; it just sat on top of Houston and the surrounding region, pouring more rain than any storm in U.S. history—measuring 51.88 inches at Cedar Bayou, just east of Houston, a record. An estimated 34 trillion gallons of rain fell on East Texas and western Louisiana. Nearly a hundred thousand homes were flooded, and as many as a million vehicles were destroyed. Dr. Joel N. Myers, the president and chairman of AccuWeather, predicted, “This will be the worst natural disaster in American history. The economy’s impact, by the time its total destruction is completed, will approach $160 billion, which is similar to the combined effect of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.”