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2021: Designing the Antifragile Future
Revisiting the Lessons from Hurricane Harvey
Four Years Ago, Hurricane Harvey Landed in Houston Texas
Listening to the damage report from Ida in Louisiana and this memory from the Harvey damage appeared. Most of the people in this neighborhood had the financial capacity to rebuild or move and, in some cases, hold the City of Houston accountable for the poor engineering decisions that exacerbated the damage.
Houston continues to flood in the places expected, but now it’s happening in new places, even those locations that, on paper, should be safer because they’re more affluent and we have been acculturated to believe that money will protect us from this kind of damage. Mother Nature doesn’t play that way. Certainly the ‘poor’ areas are continuously at high risk, however so are the folks in River Oaks and West Houston. I know people in both areas who lost everything 4 years ago, most of whom who have been made whole materially, however their ongoing peace of mind and financial sustainability has been deeply affected: if it happened once, it can [will] happen again.
