Giving Compass' Take:

• As there have been numerous floods in Houston, city planners are figuring out ways to structure and redesign the city so that it will become more resilient. 

• What are the potential barriers to redesign Houston?

• Learn about how teachers had to cope with Hurricane Harvey while juggling their students, logistics, and own emotional struggles. 

The devastating flood in Houston may be called a “1,000-year flood,” meaning it supposedly has a 1-in-1,000 chance of happening in a given year. But parts of Harris County reached 1,000-year flood levels in another storm in 2016; other parts of the county experienced a “500-year flood.” Another 500-year flood happened in 2015. If you’re 28 and have always lived in Houston, you may have experienced eight “100-year” floods so far in your life.

Smaller but still damaging floods are even more frequent. Some amount of flooding is unavoidable in the low-lying city. But urban planners and designers say future storms that are likely to continue to become more common and more intense because of climate change, and that Houston–and any city with a risk of flooding–has a choice: It can continue dealing with catastrophic flooding or accept that they floods will continue and redesign so that it is resilient to them. The city could both to make future floods less damaging, and to become better able to rebound when floods do happen.

“State and local government employees are afraid to even mention climate change because of the politics–because of fear of losing their jobs,” says Blackburn. “Well, the politics need to be damned if they refuse to recognize a key element of protecting our citizens from current and future flood problems.”

Read the full article about Houston building resilience to floods by Adele Peters at Fast Company