— I’ve never seen water this high on the embankment.
I’ve never seen water stand there before.
At the edge of the timberline out there,
we probably have right now about five feet of water.
And as you get deeper into the reservoir,
the total water depth right now is somewhere around 30 feet deep.
— And that’s usually empty?
— And that’s usually empty.
— When Harvey was done flooding Houston,
Richard Long had to do something inconceivable:
he had to flood it again.
— If that hurricane that’s out in the Atlantic
right now decided to come in here,
and we weren’t making these releases to get rid of this water out of the reservoir,
the flooding upstream and the flooding downstream
would be on an extremely larger proportion than what we have right now.
— And uncontrolled.
— And uncontrolled, that’s exactly right.
— Long manages Houston’s two reservoirs,
which protect around 1.4 million people from flooding.
Normally, they’re dry.
They look like urban parks.
But when it rains, they’re designed to hold excess water
until it can be safely funneled into Houston’s bayous,
which then drain into the Gulf.
After Harvey,
the reservoirs were so close to capacity that Long had to open them up,
releasing more than 10,000 cubic feet of water per second onto city streets.
— Unfortunately, some of our releases are large enough
where it’s going to be in some subdivisions and in some homes.
— Does it weigh on you at any point to know that the decisions you have to make,
even if they’re the right ones,
are ones that affect a lot of people?
— Oh, definitely.
I have friends and neighbors who are being impacted by these floods.
— You’re the first one we rescued out of here.
— Right. For 40 years.
I lived here in this area for 40 years.
There’s a U.S. flag there—
that’s my mailbox.
You can get in here.
Oh my God.
Oh my… goodness.
Oh my goodness.
— Dan Cho, a retired professor who lives along Buffalo Bayou in southwest Houston,
thought he’d made it through Harvey unscathed.
— So we put all the chairs up here like this.
Then, the rain stops and the sun comes out, so…
— And the water went away?
— Yeah.
The sun comes up, so, “Ha ha, it’s good!”
“Let’s go have a good night’s sleep.”
And Wednesday morning, I discovered this.
That makes me so…
I dunno, I can’t explain it.
So… disappointed.
— Mr. Cho stopped paying for flood insurance for almost a decade ago
because, as he puts it, his home doesn’t flood.
It’s never taken in water before.
It’s not in a flood zone.
It’s even perched more than a foot off the ground just to be safe.
— I built it like that.
— Oh, you built it yourself?
— Yeah.
— So you built this house on your hands?
— Right.
These are my memories in here.
My memories are gone.
— Cho’s home is one of hundreds in Houston that were flooded after the storm.
— Do you wish that someone had told you
that the place where you built your home
was in a spot that would be sacrificed if there was a huge flood?
— Yeah.
That’s only good news I can think about it, you know?
If I can sacrifice myself and save a lot of other thousands,
thousands of people, maybe it’s worth it.
After all, you know, God loaned it to me while I’m here.
And I’m returning it.
— Many of the homes won’t be dry for at least another week
because water is still spewing out of the reservoirs
faster than Houston’s flood infrastructure can handle.
— It was not designed for the amount of rain
that we received here in this region during Hurricane Harvey.
— Colonel Paul Owen is in charge of the Southwest Division of the Army Corps of Engineers,
which controls all of Houston’s flood infrastructure.
— This structure was built in 1940.
So imagine you buy a car in 1940.
You are running it 100 miles an hour—
it’s really only designed to go, like, 50 or 60 miles an hour—
but that’s the 1940 power that you’re trying
to run at 100 miles per hour in 2017.
— When you look at a storm like Hurricane Harvey,
do you think, this is a once-in-a-thousand year storm,
or is this the new normal that we need to prepare for?
— Well, it’s very clear to me that storms are increasing in intensity and frequency,
and I think the big lesson learned is,
you know, our infrastructure is old and the conditions have changed dramatically.
And maybe it’s time to buy a new car.
— The system wasn’t built to withstand a storm like Harvey,
which dumped over 50 inches of rain on parts of the city—
roughly three times more water than the record rainfall last year.
But it also wasn’t built to protect a city that looks like Houston does today,
where much smaller storms cause serious problems.
— So you see that floodplain?
— Completely developed.
— It’s something Sam Brody, an urban researcher at Texas A&M,
has been warning about for years.
— It doesn’t have to be a biblical deluge to flood Houston.
— Over the past couple of decades,
developers in Houston have taken advantage, of some of the lax regulations in the country,
putting buildings, parking lots, and homes where Brody says they don’t belong—
over wetlands, along bayous,
and even in areas the Army Corps technically considers parts of the reservoir.
It’s been good for business:
Houston’s population has grown by almost 30 percent over that period.
But it’s also drastically changed the city’s drainage patterns—
a lot of people now live in flood-prone areas without knowing it.
— As we alter these landscapes and put more people in harm’s way,
it’s going to be more and more of a problem
— How many people ideally would not live where they live?
— That I don’t know.
Thousands.
Tens of thousands.
I don’t think you can point the blame to one agency or individual.
It’s a collection of factors working together.
But there’s active information distortion and suppression.
— What do you mean?
— That the real estate community—
for all the wrong reasons, but understandably—
they don’t want people to know the risk because it could affect the sale price.
We need to go beyond recovery
and start fundamentally changing the way we’re dealing with these problems,
and move away from recovery, more towards protection.
If we’re gonna make a fundamental change
in the way we’re conceiving and acting upon flood risk,
now is the time.
— It’s unclear when Houston will be able to spend any money on preventative measures.
Yesterday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott suggested the recovery alone
could cost as much as $180 billion statewide.
Meanwhile, a group of residents who were flooded when the city opened its reservoirs
has already filed a class action lawsuit for damage caused to their homes.
Mr. Cho, who turns 75 this year,
hasn’t gotten that far.
— What do you think?
— It’s terrible.
I’ve gotta figure out some way to minimize loss, maximize recovery,
so I can…
— How are you going to do that?
If you don’t have insurance?
— Good question.
A very, very, very, very good question.