Four Years After Harvey, Houston Stuck On "We've Always Done It This Way"
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For years now, I’ve tracked the work of Accelerate H2O, a water technology accelerator run by Richard Seline. Based in San Antonio, he’s worked with communities and start-ups across Texas to develop new ways of tackling weather-related challenges, from flooding to drought. In Houston and Harris County, though, he’s hit one of those bureaucratic Catch-22’s that should infuriate everyone in the watershed. Private companies will not use new technology without government approval, and the government will not approve the technology unless the private sector uses it first.
We are not talking about two entrepreneurs in a garage here. These proposals include technology firms like Cisco and Microsoft, insurance companies like Aon, and nonprofits like the Insurance Information Institute and the Nature Conservancy. Neither are we talking about space-based laser beams evaporating flood water. These companies want to install sensors and remote controls on public and private flood-control facilities to ensure they work together at maximum efficiency no matter where the rain falls, or the water flows.
Many of these technologies are used overseas, and foreign governments are willing to finance demonstration projects to prove their effectiveness. But Seline says he could not find any city or county leaders willing to work with ambassadors from those countries when they visited. “When the opportunity existed to innovate, decision-makers chose to do the least modifications necessary and to pass the future loss-expense to their insurers. And that seems to be a constant theme – slipping back to what is ‘known’ versus unleashing innovation that has been proven to reduce future losses,” Seline said.
Matthew Zeve, deputy executive director at Harris County Flood Control, told my colleague, R.A. Schuetz, his agency is just not interested. “We’re very concerned about the additional legal liabilities introduced by one of those systems,” Zeve said. “Because all it takes is one person to flood… They can say it’s your fault because you didn’t operate the system correctly — and then it’s who is right and who is wrong, and we have enough problems as it is.” While other cities around the world install new technology boosting resilience and save money by making flood control facilities more efficient, Harris County and Houston grant $20 billion to the same old companies to build the same old things they’ve always built using designs which in some cases are decades old.
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https://climatecrocks.com/2021/05/02/houston-already-forgetting-harvey/#more-65984
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