ISET, in collaboration with the Zurich Flood Resilience Program and the American Red Cross, is conducting a post-event review (PERC) of the Hurricane Harvey flooding in Houston in August/September 2017. With a focus on businesses, we are looking for examples of where Houston was resilient and how disaster resilience for businesses, communities, and the city as a whole can be improved. Through this engagement, we will be sharing best practices and recommendations with any interested audience.
Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas on August 25, 2017 as a Category 4 Hurricane. The storm stalled near the Texas coastline, which caused it to rapidly weaken but also to drop torrential amounts of rainfall over the region. In a four-day period, many areas received more than 40 inches of rain as the system slowly meandered over eastern Texas and adjacent waters, causing catastrophic flooding.
Harvey is the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the United States. The resulting floods inundated hundreds of thousands of homes, displaced more than 30,000 people, and prompted more than 17,000 rescues. Hurricane Harvey is also the costliest tropical cyclone on record, nearly doubling the record set by Hurricane Katrina, and is the second-costliest disaster from natural hazards worldwide, behind only the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami. Total damage from the hurricane is estimated at $198 billion.
The impacts from this event on businesses was particularly notable. The Gulf Coast is home to about 90 percent of U.S. capacity to turn out base plastics, the building blocks for a wide range of consumer and industrial goods. U.S. industrial output plunged 0.9 percent in August, the most in eight years, mostly because of Hurricane Harvey’s impacts on the oil refining, plastics and chemicals industries. Impacts are expected to continue well beyond the immediate event.
This project has been made possible by funding from the International Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies and the Z Zurich Foundation, and is a collaboration under the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance. Collaborators on this project include the American Red Cross and the Global Disaster Preparedness Center (GDPC).
Watch for the Hurricane Harvey Post-Event Review Capability (PERC) report this summer. Meanwhile, we invite you to read about similar post-flooding resilience analysis of events in Nepal, Peru, the U.S.A. and Europe: www.zurich.com/flood-resilience
You can read more about ISET’s Post-Event Review Capability (PERC) and its application in Peru, Nepal, and the U.S.A. in these publications:
The PERC Manual Learning From Disasters to Build Resilience: A Simple Guide to Conducting a Post Event Review
Learning from El Niño Costero 2017: Opportunities for Building Resilience in Peru
A Post-Event Review of the October 2015 Floods in South Carolina: A Deep Dive into the Columbia and Charleston Areas
Urgent case for recovery: what we can learn from the August 2014 Karnali River floods in Nepal