Hurricane Harvey: Are Houston's zoning laws to blame for the damage?

[TheWorldNewsOrg]

Hurricane Harvey: Are Houston's zoning laws to blame for the damage?

 

 

[JW Insider]

Didn't watch the video yet, but I've heard that Houston is the worst designed large city in the United States. No planning for new housing divisions. The world's worst sprawl. No way to easily get from one side of city to the other with public transportation. Buildings built below sea level on purpose. Building too close to water and wetland. And all this is from complaints I've heard in the last few years.

[TrueTomHarley]

Well - I agree with the kid that Houston may be poorly designed, but no one has had to cope with 50 inches before and so there's not much to measure with.

Boy, that woman in the succeeding video is a ditz! - explaining at length cartoons that you can take in at a glance. Not to be unkind...but I am on a roll today.

 

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

I designed a 10.000 year storm model for Savannah River Site (Dept. of Energy, near Aiken, SC), for a radioactive waste burial grounds, which was silly, as it would be part of the Atlantic Ocean ... and no records exist, it was calculated using a great range of assumptions and questionable formulas. ... but Houston supposedly is a 500 year storm, which would have cost billions of dollars to design for, and may turn out as a 1,000 year storm before it is finished.

NOBODY can afford to plan for every possible emergency.

Putting up barriers to prevent a person from running into porcupines is an example.

I used to work in Houston, and it has flooding problems with a five year storm, and less ... and cannot afford to design for normal annual rainfall without underpasses into the city flooding.

Theoretically, you have a thousand year storm every thousand years ... practically you can have two in one week.