(Bloomberg Opinion) — In coastal Texas and many other places, walled cities are making a comeback. It’s quite a turnabout, as the efficacy of defensive walls had declined precipitously since the age of the long bow. Barbarians still menace, of course. But the rekindled enthusiasm for defensive walls is a response to a different kind of threat.
San Francisco is contemplating a huge tidal wall across its bay to fend off sea rise and the attendant dousing of some of the world’s most expensive real estate. Miami is weighing the damage a sea wall would do to tourist vistas against the damage a rising sea might do absent a wall. New Orleans, after $14 billion in levee construction, is an armored metropolis. Norfolk, Virginia, another low-lying city exposed to a surging sea, is spending a few hundred million federal dollars on a downtown sea wall. New York City, which has flooded in two devastating storms so far this century, is building a $1.45 billion series of walls, floodgates and underground drainage, a modest down payment on the city’s defense against rising tides and storm surge.
In March, I spent a storm-soaked day driving the Texas Gulf Coast with three members of the Army Corps of Engineers. Galveston Bay and its coastal environs is the focus of the largest Army Corps proposal in history: a vast array of walls, gates, barriers and berms. The project would cover so much terrain that a nearly nine-hour tour wasn’t sufficient to take it all in. It’s so expensive that the current $29 billion price, recently increased from $26 billion, is universally regarded as a short-term estimate. The projected cost, calculated in 2020 dollars, doesn’t factor inflation or include a few billion in ancillary construction.
The unprecedented scale and expense suggest that a national reckoning with climate change has truly begun. It’s not the reckoning that climate activists and scientists had clamored for — a radical reduction in greenhouse gas production to keep global temperatures in check. Instead, it’s a reckoning with the reality that it’s 2022, and carbon, like global temperatures, is still burning hot.
Even in Texas, home to almost one third of the nation’s petroleum refining capacity, denialism is running out of rope. Plans for a vast coastal defense of Texas aren’t just a testament to the world’s persistent demand for fossil fuels — they’re an acknowledgment of the grim consequences of it. The Houston Ship Channel, which courses for 52 miles through Galveston Bay, from the Port of Houston to the Gulf of Mexico, is the egress for more than a million barrels a day of crude. About 700,000 tons of petroleum products flow through the channel each year.
On the Bolivar Peninsula, a breezy ferry ride from Galveston, oil derricks pump within sight of the beach. On the industrial highway from Houston to Galveston, smokestacks and pipelines protrude everywhere. Houston alone accounts for 42% of the nation’s petrochemical capacity. In effect, the nation’s carbon energy capital is seeking protection from a sea and sky broiled by its own manufacture.
This region was clobbered by Hurricane Ike in 2008 and drenched by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Each storm brought death, destruction and billions in cleanup costs. (Ike cost Texas an estimated $29 billion, equivalent to the projected cost of the Corps’ main coastal defense plan.) Yet each storm also represented a bullet dodged. Given the concentration of petrochemicals around Galveston Bay, any major storm has potential for a long toxic aftermath.
Perhaps in other locales, greener living and organic defenses still have a fighting chance. Even around Galveston Bay, some argue for fewer walls and more marsh and dunes and oyster beds. But on the Texas coast, where hurricanes are already fierce and frequent, and where the land sinks as the water rises, it’s getting late for that. It’s down to steel and money now.
It took six years and more than $20 million just to study the Texas coast and produce recommendations for armoring it. The Corps completed its report last September and subsequently forwarded it to Congress. If Congress begins funding the project later this year, and keeps funding it until conclusion, the whole thing should be wrapped up by 2040 or so, provided Texas and the state’s coastal counties come up with their share — about one third — of the total cost.
The centerpiece of the project, and its costliest component, is a surge barrier system across the Bolivar Roads, the gaping mouth where Galveston Bay opens to the Gulf of Mexico. (The barrier is sometimes called the “Ike Dike,” a term coined by a Texas A&M professor, after the 2008 hurricane.) The Corps says the system, which would stretch from the east end of the barrier island of Galveston across to the west end of Bolivar Peninsula, combines “sector gates, vertical lift gates and shallow water environmental gates that tie in to the shoreline with combi-walls and levees.”
For a sense of scale, the 15 vertical lift gates, which account for only part of the contraption, are each 300 feet wide. Together, they span a distance greater than 12 football fields.
Sea level along this coast is up about 18 inches since the middle of the last century. Forecasts for the middle of this century anticipate a rise of another 12 to 26 inches. Hurricane winds can cause enormous damage but the Corps is mostly focused on repelling the surge that accompanies such storms, which grows more dangerous with sea rise. The Corps’ design allows for barriers to rise if sea rise exceeds expectations.
Kelly Burks-Copes is the Corps’ chief of the Program Support Branch for the Mega Projects Division, a title she wears with grace and humor. But the “mega” part is no joke. In addition to Galveston her portfolio includes plans for a $4 billion series of defenses against storm surge that includes a pumping station, levee and flood wall in Orange County, about 100 miles east of the Bolivar Roads barrier. Like Houston, Orange County is home to enormous chemical plants, and those plants are also vulnerable to surge.
The Bolivar Roads barrier is designed to block surge from the Gulf before it enters Galveston Bay and pulses toward bayside industry. The barrier’s elliptical-shaped vertical gates will remain suspended in air between concrete towers that rise nine stories above the water line. Hydraulic cylinders and pistons — which, like everything about the wall, require regular and costly maintenance — will enable the gates to glide up and down the towers as needed. The full dimensions of the gates will depend on where they are placed: Galveston Bay has varied depths, running about 40 feet near Galveston Island to around half that toward the Bolivar Peninsula side of the bay.
By themselves, the vertical gates would constitute an enormous public work. But they are only one element of the plan, and not the most complicated.
That superlative belongs to the fan-shaped, floating sector gates. Those gates will be housed on three parallel man-made islands. The two sea lanes formed between the three islands will be dredged to create two ship channels, one running in each direction from Houston to the Gulf. Here’s how the Corps describes the gates’ operation:
Dutch engineers, the cool kids of coastal engineering, were consulted on the system. But the nearest cousin to the gates planned at Bolivar Roads isn’t in the Netherlands; it’s a barrier system in St. Petersburg, Russia.
St. Petersburg, on the shores of Neva Bay in the Gulf of Finland, has been inundated hundreds of times in its history. The 16-mile St. Petersburg Flood Prevention Facility was constructed from 1979 to 2011 to keep the city from going under. The centerpiece of the project is two 130-meter curved gates that function similarly to the gate system envisioned by the Corps in Galveston Bay. So far, the system seems to work; flooding in St. Petersburg has been reduced.
It’s not hard to understand why U.S. Army coastal engineers are giddy with anticipation over the Texas Coastal project. It’s historic, complex, vast, expensive and, ultimately, life-saving. Yet it’s equally obvious why some environmentalists are alarmed. The project could be immensely disruptive. Any intervention on that scale seems certain to have unintended consequences for the bay’s delicate ecosystem. Within the Corps’ hulking, mechanized vision of the coastal future, it can be hard to see a safe harbor for nature.
When Europeans first appeared in the Gulf of Mexico, they noted that some of the natives who lived along the coast were large, strong and remarkably healthy. The Gulf offered a cornucopia of fish, crab, oysters and other nutrition; its estuaries teemed with life. Those who lived along its shores were less likely to go hungry and malnourished than members of many inland tribes — or of European nations.
The subsequent destruction of the Gulf environment was as wanton as elsewhere in the New World. Fish were netted by the ton, and tons were thrown back, dead, into the water. Native birds — egrets, herons, flamingos, spoonbills — were slaughtered for their plumes, which ended up on Victorian ladies’ hats. Entrepreneurs descended on Pelican Island, adjacent to Galveston, and killed all the pelicans. The birds were boiled for their oil, though as Jack E. Davis notes in “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,” no market for pelican oil ever emerged.
Oil has been integral to the coastal Texas economy for more than a century. When the Deepwater Horizon rig ruptured in the Gulf in 2010, spewing a couple hundred million gallons of oil over 87 days, it did not mark the end of an era. It merely confirmed the extraordinary price that the oil and gas coast is willing to pay for its industrial way of life.
Environmentalists in Texas tend to be mindful of the region’s history, and work within its contours. I met Bob Stokes, the president of the…