"What kind of human and economic impact do we have if "Rita Does Houston" as a major?"
Well, no doubt it will suck all the windows out of the downtown buildings again. Flood the Medical Center pretty badly. South Houston and Pasadena with all of its refineries would be toast, mainly flooding.
The worst would be along the coast. If Galveston gets or a near miss from anything much above a minimum Cat. 3, there would be a lot of dead unless they can call it 60 hours out like they did with Katrina. I10 is only a few feet above sea level, storm surge can flood it out pretty easily a long way from landfall. The other two ways off the Island are, if anything, even worse, being beach roads. While Hwy 6 matches up with I10 just south of Texas City, it is even lower than I10. A large enough storm would cut Galveston up in pieces, starting with the end of the Seawall and picking several other points towards the West End. Everybody who decides to stay out there would be isolated, assuming they survive. Flooding would be very bad on the mainland. Texas City would flood, the Texas City Dike ain't all that tall. Dickenson and all the other little towns between Galveston and NASA would be flooded. A little further east lies Port Arthur and parts of it are below sea level. The whole area is a lot like Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Low, flat and with few roads compared to the population. Evacuation without a couple of days worth of lead time would mean people on the roads when the storm came ashore. Assuming they didn't decide to take their chances, that is.
Economic impact. It depends on where it hits. If anything, the Texas Gulf coast refines more petrochemicals than Louisiana. The port of Houston is pretty big too, although not as big as New Orleans. The Texas Medical Center is one of the premier medical centers in the world, and is built in an incredibly stupid place. And then there are all the natural gas, oil and refined product pipelines that come through the area. The pipelines themselves are pretty safe, but the pumping stations need electricity. Safe to say that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans and and another hitting the right place in the Houston area in short order could cut the refined petrochemicals produced in this country in half. Or more. It would also cripple our ability to import and ship a large fraction of the pipeline products.
I'm willing to bet our new FEMA doesn't have even the sketchiest plan to deal with that. |
