Giving Compass' Take:

• The Texas Tribune reports on proposals by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to create a natural disaster resiliency plan for coastal areas in the state.

• Plans are one thing, action is another. While building stronger infrastructure is vital for hurricane protection, what can policymakers and community-based organizations do to prepare for the next major weather event?

• Here's more on how funders can make an impact after hurricanes, fires and earthquakes.


Later this month, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will recommend a multi-billion-dollar plan to help protect the Texas coast — the Houston area in particular — from hurricanes. When it will become a reality, however, is anyone’s guess.

The more than 200-year-old agency — in partnership with the Texas General Land Office — embarked on the largest study in its history in 2014 to determine how best to guard the Bayou City and other coastal communities from devastating storm surge.

Four years later, the agency has devised four proposals for the Houston area; it will announce which one it thinks is best on Oct. 26 and open a 75-day public comment period, according to Kelly Burks-Copes, a project manager at the Army Corps’ Galveston District.

The plans are distinctly different — one of them has an alternate variation — but all include a mixture of new levees, improvements to existing levees and seawalls and the installation of so-called “navigation” gates, which would be closed ahead of storms to protect densely populated areas southeast of Houston and the city’s port — home to the largest refining and petrochemical complex in the nation, which saw significant flooding during Hurricane Harvey — from the deadly swells generated by a hurricane’s strong winds. That storm surge can result in major flooding even before a storm makes landfall.

Read the full article about the Army Corps' hurricane protection plan for Houston by Kiah Collier at The Texas Tribune.