“Ike Dike” has become the recovery buzzword for islanders already getting anxious about the start of this year’s hurricane season.
Hurricane Ike’s victims, from public officials to residents still trying to pick up the pieces of their broken lives, are clinging to the hope that the system of levees and floodgates proposed by Texas A&M University at Galveston professor William Merrell would keep storm surge out of Galveston Bay and away from the island.
The 300-member city committee charged with creating a recovery plan is asking the city council to support the dike idea, and a state hurricane recovery committee has recommended the legislature fund a feasibility study.
But skeptics said the $2 billion system is just an expensive way to avoid making unpopular changes to the way people live along the Gulf Coast.
It’s also likely to cost billions more through the years, as engineers are forced to make constant improvements to keep up with the effects of climate change, they said.
And even if the federal government were willing to spend the money, arguments about the environmental damage the project could cause could keep it from ever getting started, if the history of comparable projects proposed during the last 30 years is anything to go by, experts with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said.
Continuous Investment
The largest and best known levee system in the world is in the Netherlands, where 60 percent of the population lives below sea level.
Looking for solutions to her state’s delta flooding, Natalie Snider, science director for the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, traveled to the Netherlands to inspect the system.
The 42-foot-tall walls and the massive floodgates are impressive, especially considering the history of their development, she said.
Dutch settlers began building walls to keep floodwater out of their towns in the 1100s. They’ve continued to build taller, stronger and longer levees for the past 900 years, Snider said.
If communities along the Texas coast use the same methods to stave off the Gulf of Mexico’s punishing storms, they need to realize they are committing to a continuous investment, she said.
Battling Sea Level Rise
Dutch engineers are fighting a battle with Mother Nature that experts think will cost the country between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion a year for the next 100 years.
Taking into account the rising sea level and the land’s sinking, the top of the levee walls must continue to be raised to keep the water out, Snider said.
Compared to the country’s overall gross domestic product, the expense is not that extreme, she said.
“But when you’re talking about a state, getting an investment of that nature on a yearly basis will be almost impossible,” she said.
The proposed “Ike Dike” seems expensive now, but its proponents really need to plan for 1,000 years of investment, not just 50 or 100 years, she said.
A Distraction
Mary Kelly, counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Center for Rivers and Deltas and a member of Gov. Rick Perry’s hurricane task force, agrees with many of the island’s residents that something should be done to protect them from hurricane damage.
But investing in hurricane-proof homes and buildings and avoiding development in areas especially vulnerable to hurricane damage is a much more sensible and cost-effective way to mitigate future destruction, she said.
“The most worrisome thing about the ‘Ike Dike’ is that it’s a distraction from the other things that can be done,” she said.
The tendency is to look at building walls or floodgates to avoid changing how we live on the coast, she said.
But Kelly questions whether freeing Galveston from the hassle of dealing with development issues is really a national taxpayer priority.
Galvestonians also would do well to remember New Orleans and realize levees can fail, she said.
The federal government is spending about $7 billion on levee repair and improvements in and around New Orleans, but it takes a lot of political will to get something like that approved now, said Col. David Weston, head of the corps’ Galveston district.
“A project of this magnitude is a rarity these days,” he said, referring to the proposed dike system.
The dike is comparable in scope and cost to some of the dams and levees the corps built 30 years ago. But since the 1970s, the corps hasn’t built a single project of that size, Weston said.
Funding is an issue, but competing interests often are the biggest obstacles to large-scale projects, he said.
In the case of dams that would form new reservoirs, opposition to the loss of land that includes valuable habitat is pitted against the need for more flood control.
Environmentalists here worry the proposed dike could change fish migration patterns, alter salinity levels in Galveston Bay enough to kill oyster beds and destroy what’s left of the island’s natural beaches.
Viable And Cost-effective
In 2007, the corps got congressional authority to conduct an initial assessment of the need for some kind of system to protect and rebuild the beaches, dunes and wetlands along the Texas Coast, the first step in the process that might eventually lead to approval for a structure like the “Ike Dike.”
Under federal guidelines, the assessment can’t cost more than $100,000 or take longer than 12 months. Weston said he was not aware of any city, county or state plan to provide funds for the assessment, something he must have before he can move forward.
If the assessment showed a project was worth pursuing, the corps would recommend a full feasibility study, which usually costs about $4 million. But the federal government would only agree to move forward if another taxing entity were willing to cover half the cost.
The corps did recommend building a ring levee system around the eastern end of the island in 1979, but neither the city nor the county was willing to pay for it.
A feasibility study, which likely would take at least four years, would look at potential alternatives for mitigating the coast’s vulnerability to storms. The proposed dike would only get approval if it was the most cost-effective, viable solution, Weston said.
Despite the opposition to the project and the gauntlet it must go through before getting approved, the Texas A&M University at Galveston professor who first proposed the dike still stands by his idea.
“I think all these issues can be handled,” said Merrell, director of the university’s Center for Texas Beaches and Shores. “If not, I’ll be the first to say we should not build it. But I do think that we can.”
Merrell agrees with the dike’s opponents that it would probably encourage more development on the island, but if the city enacted better development policies, more building wouldn’t be such a problem, he said.
Merrell disagrees with those who say the dike would be inadequate in 100 years because of climate change. By then, engineers will have developed better technology to address those issues, he said.
The most important thing to remember about the dike is it would save lives, he said.
“If you don’t build it, you kill people,” he said.
