Texas Has a Multibillion Dollar Plan to Protect from Hurricane Storm Surge

This essay is adapted from two articles that appeared in The Texas Tribune.

GALVESTON — Lauri and Scott Mathias were preparing to break ground on their retirement home just blocks away from the beach when they heard the news: The government had proposed building a massive levee a few blocks behind their property. The blueprints showed it would leave their future house on the coastal side of the seawall — unprotected during hurricanes.

The couple bought land on the sparsely populated Bolivar Peninsula two years ago after they became smitten with the close-knit community, where only one home was left standing in 2008 after Hurricane Ike. They had hoped to build a house there by next summer. But they put it on hold as they sought more information about the levee plan.

The more they learned, the more they didn’t like it.

The Mathiases are now among a growing chorus of coastal Texas residents who have rallied in opposition to a multi-billion dollar project that has been years in the making, and — if it becomes a reality — would be one of the most sweeping, and expensive, public works projects in U.S. history.

Last fall, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Texas General Land Office — the state agency charged with managing the state’s coastline — proposed an expansive complex of levees, flood walls, gates and pump stations along dozens of miles of Texas coastline in the Houston area. The generically named “coastal barrier system” is the product of the first major phase of what local Army Corps officials have said is the largest project study the agency has conducted in its 200-year history. Its primary goal is to guard the nation’s fifth-largest metropolitan area — and its largest concentration of oil refineries and petrochemical facilities — from deadly hurricane storm surge.

It’s part of a larger plan estimated to cost $32 billion that includes the restoration of a massive swath of surge-absorbing dunes and marshes on the lower Texas coast. Agency officials say the barrier system could be the most expensive component of the plan, costing upwards of $20 billion. That’s compared to the $14.5 billion the federal government spent on 133 miles of levee and a 26-foot-tall storm surge barrier in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

A NEAR MISS

The coastal barrier system also has roots in a major storm.

While Ike turned out to be the costliest hurricane in state history at the time — the third-costliest in U.S. history — storm researchers saw it as a near miss. If it had hit just a little farther down the coast, sophisticated storm models show it would’ve sent an even more devastating swell of water into the heavily populated suburbs southeast of Houston.

It also would have sent even more water up the Houston Ship Channel — home to the nation’s largest petrochemical complex and one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Scientific models show the surge could’ve dislodged thousands of crude and chemical storage tanks in the area, resulting in a devastating environmental disaster. Gas prices, which spiked significantly as it was, could’ve blown through the roof across the country.

Ever since Ike, scientists and engineers have actively urged elected officials to build some kind of physical barrier to protect life, property, the environment — and a quarter of the nation’s petroleum refining capacity. Over the past decade, researchers at Texas A&M University at Galveston and Houston’s Rice University have put forth proposals, as has a quasi-governmental agency called the Gulf Coast Community Protection and Recovery District. (The six-county coalition was formed in the wake of Ike to study storm protection strategies for the upper Texas coast, but struggled for years to secure funding).

One concept that has emerged as a favorite in recent years, winning the bipartisan support of high-ranking Texas elected officials including Land Commissioner George P. Bush, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, looks a whole lot like the proposed coastal barrier system. It calls for the construction of a high levee or seawall along Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston Island and the installation of a gate in between the two landmasses that could be shut ahead of storms. The concept first emerged in a plan out of A&M Galveston that was dubbed "the Ike Dike."

Officials who have championed the effort have stressed the national security implications as so much of the nation’s oil is refined in the Houston area.

“Texas’ coast is home to one in every four Texans and 30% of the American oil refining sector resides here,” said Bush — the nephew of former U.S. president and Texas Gov. George W. Bush — in a statement last October when the plan was first unveiled. The study “is about protecting our people, our economy and our national security.”

“A REALLY BAD, BAD PLAN”

Army Corps and Land Office officials acknowledge their proposed coastal barrier system borrows from the Ike Dike, but they also describe it as more comprehensive and fine-tuned.

But in the months since they unveiled it, they have faced increasingly strong blowback from not only coastal residents who would be directly impacted by its construction but environmental groups who say the proposal doesn’t thoroughly account for impacts to recreational fisheries and wildlife habitat. It also has caused a fissure among that community, though, with some interests arguing the structure would prevent what could be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history while others say the physical disruption just isn’t worth it.

In December in Galveston, at one of several well-attended informational meetings and public hearings on the plan, the overwhelming sentiment was that the barrier system was a miss. But the level of concern varied.

Some, especially Bolivar residents, said they didn’t want anything to be built at all. Many said they accepted the risk when they chose to live there and didn’t need the government to bail them out. Others said they liked the general concept and that some form of protection is needed, but that the proposed placement of the levees is all wrong.

Mayes Middleton, a Galveston Republican recently elected to serve in the Texas House of Representatives, garnered applause with his vocal criticism of the proposal.

“This is a really bad, bad plan right now,” he told a row of Army Corps and Land Office officials seated at a table at the front of a large ballroom in the Galveston Island Convention Center.

Before the hearing, local residents — including Lauri and Scott Mathias — had the chance to ask questions of agency staffers who were stationed in front of informational poster boards clustered in one corner of the ballroom.

“What you’re learning about tonight is not the Ike Dike; it’s not the coastal spine,” Kelly Burks-Copes, a project manager at the Army Corps' Galveston District, told the Mathiases.

She and other government officials repeatedly described the placement of the levees as “conceptual” and subject to change.

That didn’t do much to appease the Mathiases who told Burks-Copes they feared their future home would turn into a “washing machine” when a storm surge hit the proposed barrier behind their home and retreated back toward the coast. In a deliberately calm voice, Burks-Copes told them that if the final plan endangers properties in any way, the Army Corps would be required to mitigate the impacts by paying for owners to raise their homes or buying them out.

Many residents interviewed at the hearing said they feared the impact to their property values — and their ocean views. Lauri said she had already seen more homes for sale on Bolivar, which she attributed to panic over the levee plan.

Much of the concern appeared to be rooted in the many lingering unknowns — where exactly the levees would go, for example, and what they would look like. They could be a mix of sand-covered dunes and berms that may be topped with parks and jogging trails, or they could be vertical concrete seawalls, Burks-Copes said, acknowledging the obstruction of ocean views as a strong possibility.

“There are a lot of details that still need to be worked out,” said Col. Lars N. Zetterstrom, the head of the Army Corps' Galveston office, in opening remarks at the hearing.

Bush, the state land commissioner who has made construction of the coastal barrier system a top priority, has scrambled to manage the blowback. Amid community pressure, he pushed for additional public hearings — there hadn’t been on scheduled for Bolivar, to the dismay of the Mathiases and other peninsula residents — and an extension to the public comment period, which ended on Feb. 8.

“It is important for us to remember the study remains in the draft stage,” Bush said in a statement that day. “We have overwhelmingly heard from the community regarding their concerns and comments on this project. It is our goal to take the community’s thoughts into account and build a consensus on a plan to protect the coast.”

The plan “could change dramatically” based on public input and further study, Burks-Copes said in an interview. But she also emphasized that the plan had the best cost-benefit ratio — a key component of the agency’s methodical study process — than the other concepts it considered.

Gerald Galloway, a former Army Corps district commander in Mississippi who now teaches civil engineering at the University of Maryland, said “no major project has ever gone through without somebody changing something” — and this one could be particularly tricky.

“It’s predicted to be one of the most expensive — if not the most expensive — single project undertaken” by the Army Corps in its history, he said, adding that the study scope is also “one of the largest that the Corps has undertaken.”

“The larger a project is, the bigger the challenge is because you have effects on so many people — and nature, too,” said Galloway, who has informally consulted on the Ike Dike proposal as an A&M faculty fellow and visiting professor. And while there are certainly many other massive levee systems in the United States and around the world, he said there aren’t many located right on the coast — something he said will likely have to change as climate change drives sea level rise.

It will take at least until 2021 for the Army Corps and General Land Office to settle on a final proposal. After that, its fate will be in the hands of Congress, which is under no obligation to fund it.