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This story was originally appeared Darken and Climate Table collaboration.
When Hurricane Ike landed in 2008, Bill Merrell took refuge on the second floor of a historic brick building in downtown Galveston, Texas, along with his wife, daughter, grandson and two chihuahuas. A steady wind of 110 mph shook the building. Seawater flooded the ground floor to a depth of more than 8 meters. Once, at night, Merrell saw an almost full moon and realized that they had entered the eye of the hurricane.
A few years earlier, Merrell, a physical oceanographer at the University of Texas A&M Galveston, visited the giant Eastern Scheldt storm barrier, a nearly 6-kilometer-long ball that prevents North Sea storms from flooding the south coast of the Netherlands. As Ike roared outside, Merrell continued to think about the fence. “The next morning, I started sketching what I thought was fair here,” he said, “and it was pretty close to what the Dutch were going to do.”
These drafts were the beginning of Ike Dike, a proposal for a coastal fence to protect Galveston Bay. The main idea: to combine the huge gates from the Gulf of Mexico on the main entrance gate, known as Bolivar Roads, with many miles of open sea.
At Galveston, at least 15 people were killed that night on the Bolivar Peninsula, and the storm destroyed about 3,600 homes there. The bodies were missing the following year when Merrell began promoting Ike Dike, but, he said, the idea “was pretty ridiculous overall.” Politicians didn’t like the costs, environmentalists were concerned about the impacts and no one was convinced it would work.
Merrell insisted. Returning to the Netherlands, he visited experts at the University of Delft and asked for their help. Over the next few years, academic researchers from the Netherlands and the U.S. conducted ten studies on the possibilities of Galveston Bay, and Merrell and his allies gathered support from local communities, business leaders, and politicians.
In 2014, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers partnered with the state to study alternatives to the Ike Dike type for Galveston Bay. After numerous repetitions, bills to establish a government structure for the $ 26.2 billion barrier proposal, Which the body developed in conjunction with the Texas General Land Office, recently passed the Texas House and Senate. In September, the Corps will make recommendations to the U.S. Congress, which will have to approve funding for the project.
No one can guess the exact fate of the proposed obstacle, at a tremendous price. As sea level rises and storms increase with climate change, Houston is far from the only metropolitan region on the U.S. coast that is in grave danger. Billion-dollar coastal megaprojects are underway or being studied from San Francisco to Miami to New York.
President Joe Biden’s new $ 2 trillion national infrastructure initiative calls for projects on the country’s coastlines. The Houston initiative, the fifth largest metro area in the U.S. and the weak heart of the petrochemical industry, highlights tough decisions by coastal megaprojects that must balance society’s needs, engineering capabilities, environmental protection, and costs.
Meanwhile, the sea continues to rise. “There’s a significant tension between the need to address these issues and get them done quickly,” said Carly Foster, an expert in global design consulting for Arcadis, “and do it well”.
Hurricane Ike was observed 220 kilometers from Earth on September 10, 2008.
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