God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(23)
One had to wonder at the wisdom of rebuilding. Initially, it was thought that the water had gotten in through the subterranean tunnel system that underlies downtown Houston, as had happened during Allison. Since then, submarine doors had been installed, which worked during Harvey. This time, the floodwaters rose high enough to enter through an air vent the size of a sewer drain and blew out the reinforced concrete wall leading to the power vault. That sheared off a sprinkler head, which added another million gallons of water to the gusher coming in from the street.
Hanging over our rehearsal was the obvious question of whether we would actually have a production. Alternative venues were either damaged or booked. Bob Balaban was stuck in New York since the Houston airports remained closed. We were waiting for the ax to fall.
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THE NEXT MORNING, I walked over to the George R. Brown Convention Center, where eight thousand refugees had taken shelter.
The initial chaos of the first days of Harvey had subsided into an impressive sense of order and gentility. The giant halls of the convention center were divided into dormitories for families, families with animals, single men, and single women. There was food in every aisle. I spoke to Scott Toncray, an official with the Red Cross. “I did Katrina with FEMA,” he said. “This one is a whole lot calmer.”
The death toll from Hurricane Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans in 2005, was estimated to be over 1,800 people, but no final tally has been made, since 135 people are still listed as missing. Looters took over the streets. The New Orleans police disgraced themselves with their civil rights violations. Doctors at one hospital became so desperate as they waited for rescue that they intentionally hastened the deaths of their patients. FEMA was unequal to the urgency and scale of the disaster. In one of Governor Rick Perry’s finest moments, he opened Texas to the refugees, and a quarter million of them came to Houston. As many as forty thousand of them became Houston citizens, aided by a multimillion-dollar resettlement program the city put in place.
I walked past a line of people waiting to file claims with the dozens of FEMA counselors. Volunteers were sorting mountains of donated clothing. Actors in Disney costumes (The Lion King, Frozen) wandered around, looking for children. There were phone-charging stations, a table full of consuls from South and Central America, massage therapists, face painters, and yoga instructors. It was almost like a street fair.
Rhonda Wilson, a Houston police officer, observed that, when she first got to the center during the storm, “it was a sea of helpless, desolate victims.” Seventy-seven people had died, but that was a fraction of those who had been lost in Katrina and even less than the figure for Rita. “There are still people being evacuated, and the rivers keep rising. I’m living my life in twelve-hour shifts,” Wilson said. The night before she had finally gotten a chance to turn on the television, and she had broken down. Like other police officers, her badge was masked, in memory of their colleague Sergeant Steve Perez, who drowned in the flood while trying to report for duty.
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“THIS CITY SPRAWLS over six hundred square miles, an area so big that Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit could all fit within it simultaneously,” Manny Fernandez, the Houston bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote on Sunday, September 3, when the city was still partly submerged. “The nine-county Houston metropolitan region, covering more than ten thousand square miles, is almost as large as the entire state of Massachusetts.” Eighty-five percent of homeowners had no flood insurance.
Harvey calls into question the future of Houston. It has endured more flooding over the last forty years than any other city in America, and yet it continues to grow by four hundred people a day, building forty thousand houses a year to accommodate the influx, many of them in the floodplain, and continually paving over the grassland prairie that sponged up the deluges of the past. Harvey made the cost of the absence of zoning shockingly clear.
“Everybody got hit,” Judge Ed Emmett told me when I visited him again, this time in his county office in downtown Houston. “Geographically, demographically—it doesn’t matter whether you were rich or poor. If we’re going to continue to have this large urban area on the Gulf Coast, we’re going to have to deal with flooding.”
Houston had come into its own after the Great Storm of 1900 wiped out Galveston, then the major seaport in the state. “The Ellis Island of the West” was the point of entry for tens of thousands of immigrants, especially European and Russian Jews. Wealthy and complacent, Galveston refused to address the hazards of its location—for instance, by building a seawall. The city was only eight feet above sea level at its highest point. The weather bureau did not heed the warnings from Cuba that a major hurricane was on its way. When the storm arrived, it brought a surge fifteen feet high, drowning the island and wiping out the city almost entirely. The death toll was estimated between six thousand and eight thousand people. It is still the deadliest natural disaster in American history. The survivors rebuilt the city with great determination, raising it seventeen feet higher, but chastened investors wanted a safer port.
They turned to Houston.
The seeds of a great city had already been planted. Houston had streetcars and a railroad connection to New Orleans. A philanthropist named George Hermann gave a tract of land for a charity hospital, which would eventually become the foundation of the Texas Medical Center. The bayou had already been dredged to facilitate the lumber trade, but that work quickly expanded when Spindletop came in the year after the Great Storm. President Woodrow Wilson officially opened the Houston Ship Channel in November 1914 by pushing a button on his desk in the White House that was supposedly connected to a cannon in Houston.