Read the full transcript of the interview here:
Q: Today is September 18th, 2019. My name is Samantha De Leon, and I am conducting this interview for the Centre of Public History at the University of Houston. Can you go ahead and state your name, birth date and occupation for me?
A: Yes. My name is Douglas Irwin and I’m a professor at the University of Houston, and I was born on November 14th, 1966.
Q: Your occupation?
A: I’m a professor here.
Q: What do you teach?
A: I teach history and I run the Bonner Leaders Program. It’s a service-learning program here at U of H.
Q: How long have you lived in Houston?
A: Lived here my whole life, 52 years?
Q: Where are you from originally? What part of Houston and how long did you live there before you moved over here?
A: I was born in University Oaks which we’re doing this interview here on the U of H campus. Just on the other side of Wheeler, two blocks away in a neighbourhood where my grandparents lived, I now live there, but my daughter lives down the street.
Q: How long have you been living specifically or you are now in this specific home?
A: Since 2005.
Q: Prior to that, did you live still in University Oaks or in another part of Houston?
A: I rented an apartment for a while but I lived in my mother’s house on Varsity Lane for a while, while she was married, living in Colorado.
Q: What is your experience with past tropical storms and hurricanes?
A: They’re just a fabric of life here in Houston, and you get used to them, maybe when you’re a kid, they’re a little bit exciting, but by the time you’re an early adulthood and old enough to be involved in cleaning up after them, you don’t look forward to them. I’ve seen and lived through enough of them here in Houston. If I don’t ever see another one, that’d be just fine.
Q: Can you name all the specific hurricanes that you’ve been in?
A: I can’t, the first one that really stands out in my memory was Alicia in 1989. Of course, we’ve had Allison in 2000 or 2001 we’ve had Ike, and then of course we’ve had Harvey. It was just the most prominent ones.
Q: When did you realize that-
A: And I’ve also grown up in a life that’s had a tapestry of storms. My great grandmother lived through the Galveston storm of 1900 and Carla and Camille, my family tells stories about those storms. Hurricanes are part of the tapestry of our family history.
Q: When did you recognize that Harvey was going to be a serious weather event?
A: Probably about a week before it hit, I think I’m not alone in believing that the weather forecasters often exaggerate the magnitude and effect of these storms to get people’s attention which has led to a crime wolf syndrome. But about a week before Harvey hit, the predictions were so grave and astronomical about the amount of rain that was going to fall, that caught my attention. Then I had a friend of mine who knows a weather forecaster or who works for CBS and told me that this one would be as dire and that there would be as much rain as they were predicting. It was hard to imagine what 40 or 50 inches of rain would be like, but I realized it was going to be serious. But it’s one thing to say that, and then it’s another thing to go through it. The day before Harvey really hit a friend of mine and I got his wife to load up his truck with kayaks. In the rain we drove up Brays Bayou outside of the loop and then kayaked back to my house here in University Oaks, and took smiling pictures and had a great time. We made a little clip of us ridiculing Harvey that this was the best that Harvey had. Thank God we didn’t post any of that because we would’ve really looked a bunch of idiots because the next day the water was about probably about 30 feet over our heads where we had been kayaking. We had no appreciation for what was about to happen in just 24 hours.
Q: You definitely had some doubt or fears about the storm, is that right?
A: I think I got the idea that it was going to be 40 inches of rain, but we had had a tremendous amount of rain in Allison, and the bayou came out of the bank briefly, but it was nothing really. It was nothing catastrophic. We didn’t prepare for this any differently than any other storm.
Q: How did you weather the storm during the few days when Harvey made landfall and made its way through Houston?
A: Our lives were totally undisturbed. My house sits on the flood crest Bank of Brays bayou, and then on top of that, I built the house three feet off the ground. We just had a nice weekend, the rain just fell, we sat out on the porch, we ate, drank some wine, we took naps as the water had already filled up houses along McGregor. We kayaked around in it. Our lives were really undisturbed. The gravity of it, I think began to take hold on the Monday after the storm had begun to abate, we went down to- I can’t think of the name of it, but it’s an elder care facility at the corner of McGregor and Calhoun to check on them. They had had two or three feet of water in the first floor that had flooded all the apartments. We asked the residents where the staff was, and they said, “Oh, the staff were safe.” They’re high and dry, is what they told us. I said, “Well, great. They’re up on the third floor, right?” they said, “No, they’re in Cypress.” Most of those residents depend upon Meals on Wheels. The staff was gone, Meals on Wheels wasn’t delivering. There were about 250 people there who had no food. I think that was my first inkling in one small instance about the magnitude that this storm would have on the city as a whole.
Q: Did you need any assistance at all during the storm?
A: No, not at all. None.
Q: What-
A: I will tell you though that as we sat and watched the waters rise it made me realize how inaccurate our understanding of floods are because we’ve had, I don’t know, four or five, 500-year flood events in the last 40 or 50 years. That clearly is an indication we don’t know what a 500-year flood event is. When I built my house, I was a contractor and I was building some houses at the time, building some spec houses at the time, and the architect, and he said, ”Your house, the base elevation is in the 500-year flood plain, so let’s just build it at Gray.”
I spoke with him, and the engineer and I said, “No, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to build it three feet off the ground.” They said, “Well, why would you do that?” It became obvious as we discussed the math involved here at risk that people don’t understand what the risks are of a 100-year floodplain or a 500-year flood plan. If I’m in my house 50 years, which I had planned to be because this was a house I was going to live in and retire, it meant that there was going to be a 10% chance that the house was going to flood and I remember I asked the architect and the engineer, I said, “So if I told you that over the next 50 years, 10% of the planes out at Intercontinental Airport were going to crash, would you happily merrily go on and just get on all and get on planes and fly around?”
They said, “Well, absolutely not.” I said, “But you’re asking me to do the same thing with my house.” I said, “Absolutely not.” Build the house three feet off the ground. I said I wanted to lifted well up out of the flood plain. I was lucky but a whole lot of people, I don’t think, and this became clear in the days and weeks afterwards when I did a bunch of gutting of houses that people didn’t have an understanding about what the risks were, they thought if they lived in a 100-year flood plain, that there was a 1% chance every 100 years of it flooding. In effect, if they were there seven years, there was virtually no chance. People don’t understand what the risks are.
Q: You’re doing great. I’m just going ahead and just stopping this for a second and can going to continue it. What was the most significant moment of Hurricane Harvey for you?
A: I think that’s hard to say which was the most significant? I might identify a few along the course of it. I think going down there to the elder care facility, the day the storm began to abate was eye-opening experience about the magnitude of the damage and the situation was just presented to us. My wife and I kicked into high gear, organized a group out of our neighbourhood, and we fed all of those people for about a week until Meals on Wheels and the staff got back, and of course the staff leaping them that way, I thought it was just grossly negligent. Within a few days I was out within groups of people mucking houses and in the Bellaire Meyerland area. It was really stunning to me to see houses there filled with four five feet of water.
I still have a recollection of one house that we went to. I stayed in touch with the guy for a while. I had him over to my house. He ended up in a social setting, meeting the students that had cleaned up his house and he had had been stuck and unable to return home. As we were driving the street looking for a house potentially to help somebody, he pulled up and the lack of the pile of debris in front of his house indicated that his house was untouched and of course, of course, we knew it had filled with water. Having him answer the door in this state of just shock having come home was really something to see.
I remember that included on the floor where his wedding pictures of a wife who had passed away, all sorts of memorabilia that over the next few hours we literally just heaved out, it was worthless to breathe. I think another one that was an eye-opening experience is a lot of students; I ended up leading teams that mucked 60 houses in the wake of Harvey. Some of the students on these teams felt quite proud of themselves, I thought that was deserved to an extent. But I thought the celebratory mood became a bit much, so some time, I don’t know, six months after we had mucked the house, we went back and visited the people there.
The wife broke down crying saying she’d never seen her husband frozen and unable to act. They were unable to move back into their house. They didn’t have enough insurance proceeds. They’ve had discovered other problems at the house. Their son was getting into trouble. The husband worked for Intex and so he was being asked to work overtime and couldn’t help. It was, I thought an eye-opening experience to see somebody, and we had been there one day and felt good about ourselves, but her life was really a wreck, in that sense, Harvey hadn’t come and gone and was still very ever present, was very present in her life.
Q: How did the storm impact your family?
A: It really didn’t, not in any negative way. Our house was untouched. The vast majority of my family and my wife’s family were not harmed by it. One relative in Houston that lived out on the west side of town had some water, but they had people to stay with and a lot of insurance money, it was just a question to put in the house back together.
Q: How do you think-
A: And I think that’s one of the things that’s odd about this is we often think about these events. It’s not that they don’t, but this storm struck and affected all sorts of people. For example, most of the third ward did not flood because it was high ground anyway whereas I mucked some houses for some in some wealthier homes out of Memorial and Bunker Hill that were very wealthy. It certainly wasn’t a storm that first glance that the waters went places and affected the poor. Now, that’s not to say that the ultimate effects and putting their lives back together were equal for all of them, because they weren’t. But the initial effects of the storm hit wealthy and poor life.
Q: How did Hurricane Harvey impact your neighbourhood?
A: The only homes that flooded in University Oaks were a long McGregor. It was a set of homes that anyone could have predicted would’ve flooded. They flooded in Allison, they had flooded in Alicia. They’d flooded in other storms as well. But the interior of the neighbourhood wasn’t. People got out quickly as they normally would, cleaned up what little debris there was. We never lost electricity in the course of this storm. It was just slow, steady, not slow, but it was just a steady rainfall without a lot of wind. Our neighbourhood was largely untouched.
Q: Would you say that the rest of the third ward also was that way, or would you say it was more affected?
A: No, most of the third ward was largely untouched, because the third ward sits on higher ground. That level of rainfall drenched some older homes, but there was minimal flooding. I drove around with a neighbour of mine trying to see if we could muck houses in the third ward, and there just weren’t many to muck.
Q: What role did local, state, and federal government play in relief efforts from your eyes in your experience?
A: Almost none. The group of people that I put together and led were composed of students and volunteers. We found the houses ourselves, and then my wife began to orchestrate us finding homes through the Cajun Navy. I ended up working with them. We provided the tools, we provided the expertise, we got ourselves to places, we mucked the houses. In fact, during the days that I was mucking cars and trucks were driving up and down the streets with volunteers who’ve driven as far away as Dallas Lubbock, El Paso, places in Louisiana who were handing out food to us. We had volunteers that I mucked houses with that were as far away from Kansas, Nebraska, California. We had an individual that stayed in our house who had flown from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it was a large crew of Cajuns from Louisiana. They just not involved at all. All local effort can do spirit volunteers.
Q: What do you think is the reason why more local, state, and federal government didn’t play as much of a role in this as they should have?
A: I don’t know that don’t necessarily accept the premise of your question that they should have done more. I think probably as society is healthier when people accept responsibility to take care of themselves and act quickly and efficiently and organize themselves. This is a healthy social capital that exists in a society when that happens. I don’t think the government could have, I don’t think they could have mucked more houses more quickly with the manpower and organized it any more efficiently than we did just by ourselves. I think that question largely comes in about urban planning that might have happened beforehand, and then what we do in the wake of it.
I know I’m probably in the minority about this, but I read pieces in the New York Times and others that were very critical of our urban planning, but I think a lot of them have an unrealistic set of- they’re unrealistic in their understanding about the nature of our culture and our society here. New Orleans is, how do they describe it as the improbable city at the inevitable place. There has to be a city at the mouth of the Mississippi River and at some point along the Gulf Coast, there’s going to be a big city that’s there and is necessarily in low line ground cut by bayous. Yes, we could have a city that would be much more resilient, but that would require so much money that there wouldn’t be able to feed the people here.
I think it’s easy for others to point fingers and say that there was some massive urban planning failure here but I’m not a real buyer of that argument, not convinced of it. Could we have done better? Yes. I think the proper means to this is a response in which we say, “Look, we’re going to spend the money and do the things so that we don’t have another Harvey.” What that does is keep a measure of hope there so that the culture and nature of our city survives. This is an immigrant city. It is a gateway city. My wife’s family came from Vietnam, poor and destitute here. One branch in my family came from Germany here, again, poor, from a war-torn country.
This is an immigrant city and people come here for hope and to make their way in the world, and that’s valuable and our country needs places like that. But that also means that it’s going to be a place where a lot of people are on the margins and yes, we could all have concrete homes built 15 feet off the ground but you wouldn’t be able to have the city that we have here today if we did that. I think too much was made out of some massive urban planning failure and not enough appreciation for the nature of the type of place that this is.
I will say, having said that, this is not to say that there weren’t some terrible decisions. I bought houses that were in the Barker Reservoir that had five and six feet of water in them. How in the hell we ever got that thought that that was a good idea that got approved, that’s obviously a terrible failure that happened there, dams weren’t sufficiently robust that was something else, of course, that could be done. I think those are smaller and more marginal issues relative to the big one that I would rather have a society that generates enough wealth that allows us to fix and repair it rather than so constrain ourselves that we’re unable to have the society in the first place to generate the wealth.
Q: In your opinion, based off everything that you’ve said and what you’ve seen, do you think that the city of Houston was prepared for Hurricane Harvey?
A: No, I don’t think that’s- I would not agree with that. When you say the city, I’m taking that to mean just the broader package of people, places, government, everything that goes around it. We should probably be thinking about ideas about mandating flood insurance for many people. Although there’s a cost involved in it, it’s probably a wise idea that we’re now going to raise the base elevation of homes.
But if you had said, prepare for a storm that’s going to dump more water in one place than has ever been dumped in the continental United States in recorded history and would cover the lower 48 states, I think in three inches of water, I don’t know that we could have prepared for that. What do you do to create again, it’s back to this question, how much are we sacrificing to prepare for events that are very unlikely? What’s the likelihood that we were going to have a storm that did that? Yes, I think in some things as a society we could do better but I’m not very critical of the city or the county and the totality of things for this.
Q: What role did local non-profits, charities, or religious institutions play in the relief efforts after the storm?
A: I think that they were, if you add in ad hoc groups, that was the primary sets of institutions and organizations that worked on it. I went just looking for something to do. I think you may have gone, you may have been there with Kirby and other students, and we drove over to Lakewood Church and worked there. I thought the criticism of Lakewood was not well-founded. There was some harsh criticism immediately that I’m not sure was well-founded. The Cajun Army and Cajun Navy were prominent, and then there were just lots of guys like me that, heed tools into trucks and got other people and went and found houses and mucked them. This isn’t the only place I’ve done that. I was in Baton Rouge, a few years ago, and they had a big flood there, and there were a lot of people like me that just got in a vehicle and drove there and mucked houses. That was the primary means of relief.
Q: You said that you think that the criticism towards Lakewood Church was unfounded. Can you explain a little more on that?
A: Yes, there seemed to be an element of it that was a reflexive criticism of Lakewood Church that the moment the storm abated, they weren’t open and welcoming people who were victims in the wake of the storm. I’m not a member there; I’m frankly not even really a fan of Joel Osteen. I just thought the criticism was all too quick, all too reflexive without an appreciation that they were struggling to even get their own parishioners there to open the church and then what was going to happen once they opened it. In fact, the storm was, my recollection was that it was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday storm.
My recollection is that I was there on Wednesday working at the church directing traffic, and there was a line that was running about a quarter mile down the theatre of 59 of people looping into drop off clothes. People had emptied out sections of targets to just bring supplies, the church was open as a place. I thought it was a little too little too quick and probably exposed some of that fault line in our society about people who are quick and reflexively critical of religious institutions. And again, I’m saying that, and I’m not a fan, frankly I’m not a fan of Joel Osteen, and I’m not a parishioner in Lakewood church.
Q: Can you take us through a day of the hurricane and the weeks after? What challenges did you face and how did the situation change over time?
A: When the storm was actually there, we were not affected by it; our days were just staying at home and eating the food. We never lost power, we had one day, I think it was Saturday night that they had predicted we would get another 15 inches of rain the next day. I thought that if we got that much rain, it might flood my mother’s house, which is also in University Oaks. We drove and water that filled the street but wasn’t even all the way up in the yards and got them out of their house. My mother and my stepdad, and they stayed with us, but once they were at our house, we just had a nice time. It was a little surreal that in the midst of this catastrophe that we could get out in and do anything about immediately, that we didn’t lose power.
We frankly just had a nice weekend. But quickly the days were upon me where one day during the week I was organizing groups and mucking houses, and then on the weekends I was doing it. This involved me putting on thick jeans, back in work boots, swinging a sledgehammer, six to eight hours a day and wearing a ventilator, either that or really robust masks and leading groups of people and how essentially to disassemble pieces of houses. It was nasty and stinking and long and hot, and it was unrelenting. But I did it all through the fall.
I just realized by the spring as winter dawned that I was done with it and I needed to get back to my work, the full scope of my own work, I felt I’d reached the extent of the nature that what I had to give about that. But those days were long and I’m not a young guy anymore. When I had been 35, those sorts of exertions, they just weren’t that much for me. But as I approached 50, yes, I was tired at the end of the day, but it felt good, it was nice to see a lot of young people and students at U of H working hard and pitching in and getting themselves involved in uncomfortable circumstances out of their comfort zones and working really hard.
I think the thing that probably struck me the most about it is the fact that I didn’t know the people whose houses I mucked, and they didn’t know me, any more than exchanging names, we didn’t do that. I really like that; the first three words in the Constitution are we the people. It’s an unknown indeterminate. It’s not me my tribe or you in your tribe and you in this group. It’s just we, people were generous, they were kind, they were thankful. There was a rugged determination and resilience that I saw repeatedly. I specifically remember one house off the Barker Reservoir, I was doing the sledge work in these kitchens because I didn’t want students to be smashing tile and end up with wounds, it’s dangerous. It was clear this island in this kitchen was going to have to come out.
The wife was crying as we were literally wrecking her house. The husband brought her back in and said, we’re going to have to take this guy pointing at me, for whatever reasons they trusted me, and my judgment said, “This Island has got to come out.” She broke down and she was crying, and he held her, and they left, and we took the island out. Then about 10 minutes later, they came back in, and they were laughing in the midst of their tears. He told her, he said, “Well, we’re going to get the open floor plan we always wanted.” People were resilient and there was a perseverance in the midst of all of this that in part relied upon humour and supporting each other. I saw a lot of that, and that was really heartening in the midst of all of this.
Q: You did say that you went out and you helped before, during, and after the storm. Can you list off everything in particular that you did to help, mucking houses, going to order food, things like that?
A: As soon as we could get out, we were bringing food and doing the best we could to tend to the people that were in this elder care facility at the corner of Calhoun and McGregor. That included running my neighbor and I took one guy to the emergency room. We brought the food, we organized the meals there. After a few days though, my wife was more prominent in that, and I began working with people to muck houses. The first effort there were organized just quickly through the honour’s college at U of H. There were a group of people that were involved in mucking either professor’s homes or people who were alums. Then that matured into me eventually mucking homes myself with groups of people that I led. I was in 60 homes before it was all over.
Trying to think what else. We were down at the George R. Brown to see if we could do something down there, I want to say on Thursday after the storm, they said that there were a lot of people there and they didn’t have enough baby food. My wife and I went to the Kroger over here on Cohen and bought $500 worth of baby food. There was a lady just as generous as she could that figured out there was no way we were going to use that, asked what we were buying it for, and we told her, and she just handed me $100. A lot of generosity, a lot of people pitching in, the day that I worked at Lakewood Church, I don’t know that I’ve seen that much diversity in such a short period of time between skin colours, clothing and dialects. It was really heartening to see so many people from so many places in life and in the world pitching in.
Q: What propelled you to go out and do all of these things?
A: That’s just what we do. I grew up in a culture in which we did that. You help friends, you help neighbours, you did the best that you could. I had acquaintances that I made through the Cajun Navy that told me that people in Florida didn’t understand them and that they ended up not staying there because they weren’t clear who they were and why they were there and what they expected and where they to be paid and this sort of thing. I think there is definitely a culture that grows up around that sort of thing. The culture I grew up in, that’s just what you did and that’s what you ought to do. It’s a good question, I guess I’m not really thoughtful or reflective enough to know what it is that drives a person to do that, but I certainly wasn’t alone and the amount of work that was going on mucking these houses was thousands of people at a furious pace.
Q: Now that we are two years past Harvey, what do you think the storm’s lasting impact has been on you and your family?
A: I think it’s been negligible. We just have the memory of helping out, but we didn’t live through the problems that some people are still facing about attempting to put their houses back together and collect relief funds from the city and the federal government or things associated with battling insurance companies. We were very fortunate in that regard. I guess the concern I have is, is that our collective memory of it will fade, which often happens here because we’re a city of people that come and go. We’ll have lots of people that come here and don’t have a recollection of Alicia, Alison, Ike, Harvey, those sorts of things. I hope that we’ve woven into our city and our culture and our lives here enough so that we can assure people that we won’t, that we’ll be able to do much better if there is another Harvey.
Q: What would you say the storm’s lasting impact was on your neighbourhood now two years later?
A: Yes, again negligible. I think the thing that’s just concerning is that when I was younger four or five-inch rain, would over a period of minutes, over a brief few minutes might fill the streets with water, but the bayou didn’t come up. Now when there’s a decent rain the bayou comes way up. I wouldn’t go so far as to say a lingering anxiety, but I would say that people are attentive now in a way that they might not be. I think there’s an impression that there’s a lot more to do to try to capture enough water and hold it out on the west side of town and to keep the bayou from flooding, and I don’t know whether we’re doing the systemic sorts of things that we need to do. For example, there are probably more homes along Brays Bayou that should be purchased up and just demolished where people can’t build there, or they have to be told, “Look, if your home’s uninsurable, you can’t get flood insurance on it.” I’m not sure if we’re doing those sorts of things.
Q: If you could do anything differently for the next storm or hurricane, what would you do and why?
A: That’s good question. Me personally, I don’t think I would do anything. Me personally, I don’t think I would do anything differently. I know I served on the board of the Midtown Redevelopment authority for a while as Garnet Coleman’s appointee. There was a decent level of work that was going on there with regard to Midtown and the Third Ward to look at understanding flooding on a much more granular, almost block by block basis. I think that’s probably not the direction that we should be going. We probably need to be thinking one or two larger engineering projects to try to keep the core of the city from filling with water. But I haven’t heard of enough of those sorts of things. Bob Eckles before he was defeated, the county has a large plan that involves state and federal money. But I’m not sure where we stand as far as doing those things.
Q: You said that you personally wouldn’t have done anything differently, is that right?
A: I think that’s correct, yes.
Q: Why is that?
A: I wasn’t affected by the storm personally, and there was plenty of venues and opportunities for me to get out and organize people to help. If we have another storm, I’ll do the same thing and you plan on me being in 50 or 60 houses and trying to help out people anywhere where I can find them. What’s the suggestion? What would I have done? I’m not sure. I guess my thought is that this is a larger issue beyond the ability of any one of us to solve; I hope we’re having collective decision making to do it. In so many places around the country today, this seems stalled at the national level.
Some measure of the frustration people feel is that things are just gridlocked. But we’re not that way historically in Houston. We have done big things before; the recent bail reform that we had indicates that we’ll do things that are addressing the ills and flaws of our civil society. I think that’s as a big collective, that’s what we need to be doing, is working on bigger issues, bigger projects due to attempt to see that some that we alleviate the worst effects of what could happen again. We know that they’re building some barrier out along the gulf, and we know that, and continuing to increase drainage and I’m hopeful.
Q: You’ve experienced a lot of hurricanes. You went through Alicia, Allison, Ike, and Harvey, the most significant ones that you can remember. Since Harvey, there has been more catastrophic hurricanes, such as Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Dorian. Do you see Harvey as severe as those to hurricanes? Do you think that our experience with Harvey or with our hurricane was different than theirs? Do you think it was the same? What are your thoughts on that?
A: That’s a good question, was the storm itself worse? Probably not. The fact is that we’ve built a lot more, we’ve put a lot more valuable things in the path of the storms. The Galveston storm of 1900 was probably as bad a storm as any, and it would’ve had the loss of life was much worse than any other natural disaster. But it would’ve had much more far-reaching effects if we had had the same number of people living in its path and the same number of buildings to be destroyed or flooded.
I think it’s just life with hurricanes, when I look at the stuff that Dorian in the Bahamas, the Bahamas, it makes me wonder whether some of those places are properly habitable. I think we might find that we’re beginning to reach the extent of our collective wealth, the wealth that we’ve generated in the world as a people in the west, to have some of these places habitable that can so easily just be completely destroyed. I worry about that. I don’t know, I’m an optimist though, I’ll tell you because I think what I’ve seen in my lifetime is that we have more institutions and a better way of life to understand data and to respond in ways that makes our life better. I’m confident we’ll continue to do that in a variety of avenues, in a variety of areas of our lives, whether it’s in healthcare, dealing with climate change, urban planning and disaster preparedness. Life will go on and yes, these storms are bad, I don’t think this is any worse. I don’t think Harvey was any worse than those storms certainly.
Q: You just spoke a little bit about climate change?
A: Yes.
Q: As a person who’s experienced more than a handful of hurricanes, do you believe that climate change has anything to do with the hurricanes that are going on now or do you think that it will make an impact later on?
A: I think a lot of the questions that are asked about climate change, and I’m not an expert in any way on climate change. My area of interest is in late colonial early National United States history. I don’t know, I’m not an expert in it any way. But I think a lot of them are straw in arguments that are more to elicit reaction and provoke argument than they are serious questions. It’s not that nobody’s asking them, in answer to your question, does it have anything to do with it at all? Yes, sure. The answer is yes. Is any aspect of the climate change that’s being documented due to humans, the answer to that is surely yes, some element of it is, but of course then we’re still left in a Gray area about the magnitude of how much of it is human induced and what its ultimate effects will be.
I still hear people use the word theory very often about this which leads me to believe that it’s not so conclusively proven that it is human induced to a degree that merits dramatic alteration in the way we live, again, back after this argument that’s this agreed large about, we talked about with the city, I’d probably be in favour of having a society that continues to generate as much wealth as it can so that it has the wealth to deal with the worst effects of climate change in the most efficient way once we understand those. I think constraining our wealth is probably not the way to go before we fully understand the degree to which we have some power to alter it, and what the worst effects are that we can blunt or ameliorate.
Does it have anything to do with it? Sure, it does. I think we can agree that oceans are rising, and we need to do something about that. But look, let’s also be clear about this. Now, these storms are sensationalized in a way. I thought that without a doubt, as far back as Ike and in the wake of Katrina, and the storm is now depicted as this red pulsing dot that fills the gulf. I remember thinking to myself, now, am I going to be drowned or am I going to be emulated in fire? The weather is now less at its core, of course, its science, but it’s now dramatized in a way, with uses of adverbs and adjectives in the description of it that you just think it’s the end of civilization. No, we’ve had a constant stream of hurricanes, and it’s an ugly weather event, and we’ll have more, we’ve had a lot.
Q: Do you think that there is anything that we can do to prevent more and more storms from occurring? I can see from the past two years that there seems to be an increase in the number of hurricanes that we have in each hurricane season, especially now with hurricane season still ongoing. There’s still a lot of activity going on in the Gulf of Mexico and in different other parts of the ocean. Do you think that there’s anything humanly possible that we’re able to do to prevent more and more of these storms from occurring?
A: Maybe you know this data in a way I don’t, but I don’t necessarily accept the assumption of your question that we’re seeing some statistically market increase in either the number or the severity of the storms. I’m not sure I accept the assumption that’s at the basis of your question.
Q: Do you think there’s anything that we can do to at least help other places affected by hurricanes? Is there any way that we’re able to prepare properly or anything to perhaps live our lives differently? Having educational classes, is there anything in those type of lines that we’re able to at least help prepare for them if we aren’t able to actually?
A: Yes, I think we should be doing things probably insurance reform would be one. I think that’s destined to come is that a lot of the changes, that there will be changes in society that are as a consequence of reforms, as a result of new actuarial awareness or appreciation of the magnitude and the amount of storms. That’s probably helpful. Some of that should be to increase insurance. Other than other cases, it should be to not provide the insurance massive amounts of the destruction that comes in many storms along coastlines is directly attributable to the fact that we now offer very affordable flood and storm coverage through federal government programs that I don’t think we ought to provide.
I don’t understand why as a taxpayer, I’m subsidizing somebody building a million-dollar home on the coast. But in other cases, I think we ought to be adding more robust either requirements or assisting people with flood insurance there. It’s creating greater pools and doing more to make access to the insurance more affordable. I would trust the engineers to come up with appropriate projects that allow us to deal with the worst of worst effects of these storms. That’s about it and it’s not that there’s probably no link, but the link is probably attenuated and less than terribly significant between climate change and the nature numbers, severity of hurricanes, and am I an advocate that we suddenly stop using oil in order to try to lessen the severity of hurricanes? No.
Q: Other than insurance reform, do you think there’s any other possibility?
A: Big engineering projects. Galveston’s there because of a group of engineers that built the seawall and basically lifted the city up between 10 and 15 feet, the Dutch are able to live in areas that are actually below sea level because of very smart and savvy engineering. We need a lot more engineers than we do lawyers. I think those are two of the biggest areas.
Q: Is there anything that the normal typical American can do to better prepare themselves for hurricanes in your experience?
A: I think just general knowledge, better more actionable knowledge about what the storm could do to your house in certain circumstances might allow people to understand better when to leave and when not to leave. I think more accurate detailed flood maps would be helpful. I think we could probably do as a society of better planning to get people away from the storms when they’re immediately about to hit. But these storms expose facets of our lives that it’s unlikely that we’re going to change. Most people in this city are a city of immigrants. They don’t have a lot of savings, if you told them, “Well, I need you to start saving now in preparation for a hurricane,” they would laugh at you because the odds of them needing that money for a hurricane rather than paying their cell phone bill or paying for their groceries or car repair or clothes, they’re going to prioritize their own lives. We need to be respectful of those decisions that they make.
They’re not going to start saving money to prepare for a hurricane. I don’t see much value, I hear all these people, “Oh, well, here’s your hurricane preparedness kit.” What is that going to do you when there’s four feet of water in your house? Again, I think better understanding about exactly what the nature of the flooding is, how to get away from it, and less dramatized presentations of it that give people good factual knowledge would be helpful.
Q: You were saying earlier, or you just said now actually, that it’s unrealistic for, let’s say, immigrant families to put aside hurricane money when they’re living paycheck to paycheck and have other expenses and everything like that. Do you think that having more money, in terms of the people, the American people having more money, do you think that would help the effects and devastation of hurricanes in terms of –
A: I’m not sure what you mean by more money.
Q: More money, as in, if people had more money, they’d be able to prepare, you’re going to save up money to properly evacuate, do you think that how? –
A: They wouldn’t do that, we’re already the healthiest, wealthiest, freest people in all of mankind’s history; the only people who might be freer, wealthier and richer than us are a few Scandinavian countries at this time by a small amount. If they had more money, they’re going to do what they want to do with it, which is means the same things they’ve been doing, buy another flight screen TV, buy another cell phone, enhance the air conditioning in their house, buy a cheaper, bigger house, buy another home that may be flood prone that’s more expensive, buy nice or clothes buy more jewellery. I’m not faulting them for this. They have the right to do with their money, what they will.
That’s why the solutions that I focus that I would think about are not so much atomized and individual; they would be bigger structural changes just to cushion people from the worst effects of the storm. If we collectively all pay money, for example if in the course of development you had to pay a fee for all of the ground that you covered up with concrete that could not absorb water, and then that money is go used to build greater detention in other places, that’s probably a better use than telling people they have to go save their money for a hurricane fund.
Q: What else do you want people to understand about Harvey’s impact?
A: We live in a world today in which people are in little bubbles. We don’t live with people different from us in many ways. My neighbourhood where I live now, when I grew up, we didn’t have African Americans that lived there. In fact, I remember when the first African American family moved into the neighbourhood, the realtor actually told them everything that was wrong with the house to try to dissuade them from line. But there was a mix of people from different walks of life. This was a richer tapestry that was a moderating influence in people’s views.
That experience is one that we don’t have enough of today for people to have empathy to be sympathetic and appreciative of the profound human challenges that other people in our city have, who for very often no fault of theirs, just find themselves in different circumstances, and the lasting turmoil for those people to go through these experiences. I think too many people just got back to work all too quickly and forgot about it. It’s somebody else’s problem, it’s in some other place. I saw it first-hand, I was teaching a history class that fall. I’m sorry, that’s the spring, the semester after Harvey and had a student in that class. I won’t use his name, but he often had a musty smell to his clothes, and he was living in a house that had been gutted on an air mattress and attempting to carry on and go to school. That’s an experience that the upper middle-class, upper-class kids have no appreciation from at all.
Q: About your students, as a professor here at the university, you spent a lot of time on campus. What would you say or how would you say Hurricane Harvey affected not only students, but faculty as well? With your classes and everything like that. Were there any specific instances where you felt that you could direct other than the students that you just mentioned?
A: I don’t really have a good sense for the faculty, the small contingent of faculty that I dealt with dove into this problem with the same level of intensity and drive that I did, and were laudable now they didn’t continue as long as I did, but I don’t fault them for that. They were there for a good while, working hard. I was really impressed with the students, but I wasn’t surprised. Before I was a professor here at U of H, I worked as a real estate attorney, doing a variety of things in real estate. The group that I was in, that’s a consistent drumbeat of criticism for younger generations.
They’re lazy, they’re entitled, they’re selfish, since I’ve been here at U of H, I just don’t see that. Rarely if ever, do I even see hints of that. Instead, what I’ve found is a group of extremely dedicated, very hardworking young people who strive and put themselves under tremendous stress to read everything you ask them to read and work with almost a fierce determination to make themselves better. It’s heartening. I saw a lot of that in Harvey. I saw a whole lot of students who didn’t know how to use a hammer or a screwdriver, and I don’t think had ever been dirty, rolling up their sleeves and working very diligently for long hours to help people that they didn’t know for little, if any recognition. There’s a lot of altruism in young people today, and it’s heartening. It makes it great to be a teacher here, really does.
Q: Would you say that hurricane Harvey had any effect on the campus itself?
A: I don’t recall it having any impact directly on the campus. The campus was pretty high and dry. I don’t remember any direct impact on the campus.
Q: In terms of procedures, do you think that U of H handled hurricane Harvey very well? I know that there were some discussions of before Harvey came, when U of H decided to cancel class. Some people were saying, why, some people were very surprised, there was at least in my experience, some variety in the responses to the procedures. I know that with U of H, they allowed all the students to park their cars in parking garages. They kept dining halls open, allowed students to continue living on campus. Do you think that all those procedures went well? Do you hear about negatively affecting any other students or faculty?
A: I don’t have a tremendous amount of recollection to draw upon to answer that question. I do remember now that you mentioned it, I think that’s right, that there was a bit of a to-do around cancelling classes, and would they be cancelled and when would they be cancelled around Harvey? My experience is that the administration here is just about as efficient as an administration can be, and that they try really hard to do the things and get it right. That wins in my mind a margin of patience and respect and gives them a little room to have a minor misdirection or an error on occasion. I do remember that the dorms, that the cafeterias were open, and I don’t remember anything to be particularly critical of. I think they did a good job overall.
Q: Has your life changed after Harvey?
A: I don’t think so much. I just think the work that that I did in the wake of Harvey broadened my appreciation for some of the challenges that people face and picking back up after it. I think that added a little bit to the tapestry of my life to have done it. Of course, I think we all would’ve been better off without Harvey, no doubt about that. But Harvey is not for me, 911 is a moment I will never forget. For personal reasons, I think that was a watershed time in my life. Believe it or not, Harvey really wasn’t, there will be other hurricanes, and that’s just part of life here. If you live out in California, you get used to tremors and earthquakes, and if you live in upstate New York, you’re going to have wicked snow crippling snowstorms, and it’s just part of life here.
Q: What do you want people to know about Harvey?
A: I think just how high the waters really rose. One of the things, I give walking tours in Florence, Italy, and they have markers up for a flood that happened in November of 1966, and you can see these markers and they’re placed on buildings. I wish we had a bunch of those up and around so that people can have some something woven into the tapestry here as people come and go about just how high the water rose. I’ve never seen that much water before. Didn’t think it could rain that much. Didn’t think the bayou could come that far out of its banks. I just didn’t think that was possible.
Q: As you just said, living in Houston comes with hurricanes. It’s just something that is a part of life here, and it’s something that we just have to always be prepared for. Do you think that the future hurricanes that have not yet happened, do you think that we are going to be more prepared and more ready to take action and do you think that there’s going to be more people like you ready to go hitting the ground, running, working to help others and things like that? Does that make sense necessarily what I’m asking?
A: I think as the younger generation ages, their altruism may be moderated in some ways, but I think they’ll be pitch in, can do sorts of people. I don’t see any diminution in that. As long as our city is able to continue to attract immigrants who come here for hope, and this is what we share in this city, then yes, I think people will be here to pitch in and help their neighbours and strangers and help them try to get back on their feet.
Q: Do you think that hurricanes are going to get worse in terms of the amount of rainfall that comes, more flooding, like you said, there’s a lot of different solutions that could potentially help with all that, but regardless of those solutions, do you think that nature itself is just going to, more rain and things like that, or do you think that Harvey is the peak that’s not going to get anything worse than what we’ve already experienced, or is the worst to come?
A: Yes, good question. I think we’re due, do I think there’ll be worse storms than Harvey? Yes. The storm that I dread is a real 500-year event. That’s the one that, my house, it’s actually 38 inches off the ground, and that’s the one that’ll put three feet of water in my house. I hope I don’t see a real 500-year flood event. Do I think the hurricanes are going to get worse? They might get a little bit worse. They might be a little wetter. Am I expecting a traumatic change in the nature of hurricanes? No. By many measures, Alicia, in 1989 was substantially worse. The wind was just unbelievable. I also think that we will do more in the intervening years to make the effect of these hurricanes less severe.
Q: Is there anything else that we have not discussed that you wanted to go ahead and add?
A: That’s a good question. I can’t think of it. I’ve enjoyed it.
Q: If you could summarize Harvey up in one sentence, what sentence would you use?
A: I saw a tremendous amount of resilience. If I had to reduce what I saw in the wake of the storm to a word, it would be resilience. What strikes me about this is the amount of time and effort I hear people, some on this campus, more so than in the world at large. But I hear it everywhere talking about how fragile people are. They’re not, people are not fragile. They’re strong, they’re resilient, they’re robust. But if we embrace a society and a culture where we fall prey to excessive amounts of concerns about safety and fragility, we will make ourselves that way. This is not to say that we shouldn’t do anything in any way, shape, or fashion, but I found people to be resilient, robust very determined, hopeful, of course it was.
Q: If another hurricane were to strike next week, do you think that everyone who’s been affected the city as a whole, everyone would be prepared again? Do you think that people would do everything exactly the same as they did last time, or do you genuinely think if there were a storm happening next week that you would actually see something different from Harvey?
A: I’m not sure what you mean by that. You mean would there be people that would go out and pitch, help in?
Q: Anything about how people react to the storms, how people prepared?
A: Sure. I think if we had two Harvey’s in short order, then the city would take a permanent- it would be a permanent or a very long-term blow to the city’s ability to attract immigrants. Some people would probably pick up and move. Look, the city of Indianola along the coast near Matagorda was abandoned after two hurricanes hit it in the 19th century. Yes. Could that happen here? Yes. I think that’s the degree of urgency, is to try to see to it that we don’t essentially have a replica, have a repeat of Harvey in short order. But would people do things? I think they’d probably do it even better than they did. I knew people that were flooded in the Tax Day and Memorial Day floods that were before Harvey and just rolled their eyes and gutted it out and thought, “Holy shit. OK, well here we go again. We’re going to lose our cars again.” They’re stuck in the garage. Let’s get the stuff upstairs, get the baby pictures and stuff upstairs, and here we go.
Q: Were you happy with the way things turned out after Harvey? Were you disappointed? Did you feel that things were possibly better off than they were before Harvey? Do you think things were significantly worse? How did it make you feel afterwards?
A: Rarefied air. Me personally, my wife and I have done fine financially. We live in a nice house; we have savings and abundant insurance. We weren’t touched by the storm. I think the thing that struck me is that just how many people took a real blow in their lives. They’re just going to take them a long time to just get their houses back together and buy appliances and feel that they can just get back to some normal sort of life, and then of course, I’m concerned about whether we’re going to do the things as a society to try to help ourselves, the next storm that we have. But I’m optimistic we will.
Q: Do you think that there are still people affected from Harvey that still need help now?
A: Yes, absolutely. Sure. And the travesty of that is they are predominantly people of colour who had been in areas that although not directly attributable to race didn’t get the amount of infrastructure that they might have had and are fall on the margins of the systems we have to support people. It’s not only them, but they’re, yes, sure. Absolutely there are.
Q: Then what do you think that we can do to help these people? Because it’s been two years since Harvey happened, some of these people still haven’t gotten any assistance. Some of these people still are very lost, and it is a very small percentage of people, but there are very few people out there whose life seem to stop since Harvey. Do you think that there’s anything that we can do now to specifically help them?
A: I’m sure there is. I don’t know exactly what that would be. I don’t know enough about it to be able to tell you. Whether it’s a failure to deliver on promises already made whether new things should be done. I don’t really know enough about it to tell you.
Q: Are you scared for not just any type of hurricane, but any other type of natural disaster that could happen? Do you feel since after Harvey that you’ve become more aware of natural disasters like this? Do you think that the whole Harvey experience has shown you how natural disasters can happen so quickly, are there any other types of disasters that could make you think and probably worry you, because you can handle a hurricane, but are there anything else, possibly tornadoes or more flooding or things like that, since Harvey, is there anything new that you’re worried about?
A: Not for me, but I’m sure other people do. Once those things touch your life, it’s hard to put yourself in the frame of mind that they’re not going to do it again. For me personally, no. Like I told you at the beginning, I’d be totally fine if I never lived through another hurricane again. I’m sure a lot of people feel that way. I remember being a little kid and in a storm that doesn’t even have a name standing in a grove of ancient pecan trees down in Brazoria County, trees that were so large and so strong, I had never seen the trunks move. I didn’t think trunks of trees this size could move, the leaves rustled in the wind, and limbs would shake and ruffle in large breezes. I remember the trunks moving, and I didn’t think that could happen, once you feel the force of nature in one of these, you feel tiny, you feel whittling, you feel insignificant. Now that’s something that you don’t forget, suddenly realize that all the things you think you have control over that you really don’t.
Q: We’re coming up towards the end of our interview. I just have a few more questions. Do you think that the media, properly showed the reality of Harvey, during and after, I know that right after Hurricane Harvey hit, there was a lot of national news networks here along with different local news area networks in this area, and there was a lot of press coverage about it. Do you think that it was accurate, or do you think it was construed in some way or anything like that?
A: I don’t think it served us well too much of the press coverage particularly. I think this applies to, say natural disasters that happened in Louisiana as well, that were somehow in the flyover zone. My experience has been all too often there’s a rush to have a depiction of a guy named Gator with a washing machine and a dryer on a porch and a hound dog and a confederate flag, hanging limply on a flagpole in the front yard. There was a rush after Katrina that says, just basically forget New Orleans, we don’t need it. I don’t think people properly understood the nature of our little world here and what this meant, I think the local media does a good job in covering the personal stories, but the things that don’t get the coverage in either case or the big issues that are difficult to capture in short periods of time.
Infrastructure is boring to cover. People aren’t interested in passing up Game of Thrones to learn about infrastructure that’s going on here in Harris County. For a variety of reasons, I don’t think the press does a very good job. It’s not that it’s not there, my wife and I got a subscription to the Chronicle on a whim just to see what we would find if we did it. It’s quite illuminating the amount of local news that probably has more impact on my life than things that are happening in Washington DC. It’s not that it’s not there, it is, it’s just not as prominent in our lives. It’s not appearing on the headlines on CNN or Fox. It’s not making it into Facebook. It’s not on Instagram or Twitter. I wish we were basically doing, what is journalism? It’s the way we talk to ourselves. I wish we were doing a better job of that. Our city, I don’t think in the national press got its proper due for what we are.
Q: Do you think that the way the media was speaking about Hurricane Harvey and Houston in general affected relief efforts, not only locally, but on a national level?
A: That’s a good question. I don’t know that. I know first-hand that I worked with guys that had gotten in trucks and drove from Kansas and Nebraska, and we put a guy up who had reached out to the Cajun Navy and who stayed with us for three or four days and mucked houses. I think there were a lot of people that got the message through the videos that showed the scope of the devastation that we needed help and came and helped. I think there’s just a cultural bias there that ultimately doesn’t serve us well. No, we’re not New York, or we’re not Los Angeles. Chicago even suffers a little bit. Of course, it’s as grand and magnificent a city as any of any great metropolis in this country but we’re in the flyover zone. Even Dallas gets more respect in many cases than we do, which is not fair, not appropriate.
Q: Other than talking about issues that aren’t necessarily interesting such as infrastructure, do you think that there’s anything else that the media can do to help and to actually show the reality of life after a storm? Or do you think that there’s just something that they won’t ever be able to fully capture?
A: I don’t think they’re interested in fully capturing it, because there’s always going to be another storm that’s going to have more dramatic video. We’re really captive today to these visual images. That carries a lot more weight than a boring story that has a couple of small diagrams about a flood barrier across Galveston Bay or what the core of engineers is doing or how Harris County Flood Control District is adding detention capacity or micro flood maps, those things are very boring. If you ask somebody who’s John Thaler, they have no idea who he is. He might be the most significant impactful human who’s ever won a Nobel Prize, but everybody knows who Kim Kadashian is. No, we don’t have a bias, our bias is in favour of flash and dash and the latest dramatic video which often does not coincide with the people and things that are really providing the most impact and could do the most for us.
Q: Other than yourself or your wife, is there anyone else that you think that I or the research team should speak to about their Harvey experience?
A: I can’t think of somebody right off the top of my head. If I had kept in touch with some of the people whose houses I mucked, I think those would be good stories. There’s one family in particular that we went to go visit who’ve done quite nicely picking their lives up. The lady was in pre-k tending to children at the St. John’s School. A lot of the people there at that school had pitched in quickly and with real loving determination to help her and help her family get back up on their feet, isn’t that a pretty good story? But that’s the one that stands out that’s different than the one I told you.
But I really don’t, that’s the thing, I’m glad you’re asking me about it because what’s happening is as the days go by, Harvey fades more into the history. When you’ve just done what you’ve done, it helps. We think of the history as something in the past, but when we talk about it, we’re actually bringing the history and putting it here in the present. It’s not in the past we lived with it again, in a different way, and it’s a good experience. Thanks for the interview.
Q: Of course. Any last words, final thoughts? Last question?
A: No, just go Houston, really.
Q: Thank you so much for your time.
A: Yes, thanks [inaudible 01:34:02].
Q: Appreciate it.
A: Sure, absolutely.