Floating Boars Julia Yuxuan Yang

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Floating Boars

Julia Yang

It began as innocuous as any flooding in Houston. The facts of life here are simply: One, it is wet; Two, the roads always flood; Three, Houstonians take it in stride— we rehash the same jokes, check if Waffle House is still open, and remind each other to avoid the roads that flood the worst. So really, Hurricane Harvey began as innocuous as any flooding in Houston. On August 25, 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall. We got a few days off from school. The neighborhood streets caught a few inches of water. Some of the kids set up a slip ’n slide. At one point, cars could no longer drive out of our neighborhood because of the flooded intersection, but this was nothing new— the roads in Houston always flood. However, as the days passed and the rain kept falling and the waters kept rising, my family and I watched black water creep up the curbside and then up our front lawn and then up our driveway. This was not normal; the roads always flood, but it was supposed to be only the roads that flood. I kept watching. The water heaved up into our front garden— how unfortunate, my dad loved those flowers. I kept watching. The days stretched, and we waited, unable to leave by car and waiting for the inevitable, helpless in our house. (It was the same house I hid in during Hurricane Ike, my first hurricane, when I was eight years old. The winds had been fiercer and louder then, and I had been a scared little child, but now, this watching and waiting felt much worse.) Three days before the water hit, we moved our things upstairs. Two days before the

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water hit, we packed emergency bags. The night before the water hit, we placed sandbags outside the door to attempt to seal off any water. It felt futile, trudging back and forth from the garage, carrying forty-pound sandbags in the rain. It felt futile, trying to seal off a trillion-gallon act of God. The next morning, I smelled it first. Having torn through wildlife and sewage by the time it entered our home, the floodwater smelled horribly of decay. It lay deceptively still, a few inches above the baseboard; but a few inches today meant many more tomorrow, so we had to leave. In a daze, my family and I ate granola bars for breakfast, stuck our feet into our rain boots, and carried our bags onto a neighbor’s motorboat. I greeted the two men on board but couldn’t bring myself to make small talk. Ours was not the only neighborhood flooded. By the time it touched down on the Texas coast, Hurricane Harvey was already a category 4 hurricane. After landing, the slowmoving hurricane stalled over the Texas coast for several days. During that time, Hurricane Harvey blew 130-mile-per-hour winds, dumped over 60 inches of rain, and triggered widespread catastrophic flooding across southeastern Texas. Again, Houston was no stranger to hurricanes and flooding. However, before August 2017, the city had yet to meet a magnitude of devastation comparable to Hurricane Harvey. While the storm hovered over Texas, major highways became submerged in water, over 300,000 structures flooded, and an estimated 40,000 flood victims had to be evacuated. Houston received a year’s worth of rain in the span of a few days. Ultimately, Hurricane Harvey generated over $125 billion in damage, making it the second costliest hurricane in United States history after Hurricane Katrina. In Houston, the roads always flood, but never before like this.

After transferring onto a military evacuation vehicle, and

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then evacuating to the local elementary school-turned-temporary shelter, and then making some rushed phone calls, my family and I eventually took shelter at a family friend’s house. To this day, I can hardly remember anything about that house or the time we spent there. I lapsed through days mostly asleep, for nearly fourteen hours at a time. Some days I just lay on the air mattress or the floor, staring at the popcorn ceiling, occasionally finding a smattering that looked like a disfigured baby or a mountainous landscape. When I wasn’t in bed, my choice of daily activity rotated between staring at my college essay drafts (mostly blank and blinking), cooking spaghetti (the only meal I knew I wouldn’t mess up), and walking the family friend’s dog (Bailey, a black and tan mutt of some sort). While walking Bailey, I spent a lot of time looking out at the neighborhood’s master-planned lakes, each with a gently spraying fountain. The uniform streaks of water flew exactly twenty feet up and twenty feet out, as if rain had somehow been plucked out of the sky, flipped upside down, and contained to an enclosed diameter— tamed. I was here because I had suffered the intensity of water— its turbulent pouring and flooding— but now I stood on manicured grass and watched the water from a distance, spraying earnestly but never reaching more than the twenty feet in front of itself. It was all a very muted existence. One day, we learned that the water level had lowered, though not entirely, and some neighbors were offering to boat people back, to pick up belongings or just see the outside of their houses. My parents went the next morning. While they were gone, I found the shape of a hockey player in the ceiling; I let the dog walk me around the neighborhood; I cooked spaghetti. Over dinner, after my parents came back, my mom told me about seeing two wild boar carcasses floating in our neighborhood. Drowned by the storm and the flooding, their bodies had

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somehow been carried by the floodwaters into our neighborhood. I knew there were boars living in the forests around our neighborhood, but it hadn’t occurred to me that— that what? That their homes flooded too? That they had no motorboats or friendly neighbors or church ladies bringing home-cooked meals? That this could kill them too? I pictured the pair of boars— massive and bulky beneath brown fur, with sharp tusks and sharper eyes— subdued into absolute stillness in the water. Their lumbering and feral bodies floating gentle and light like leaves in a puddle, their black and clever eyes unmoving. Amidst the rows and rows of suburban houses, two wild animals meeting a divine storm.

Life picked back up, eventually, even if slightly offkilter: the floodwaters cleared, a school counselor I had never met before called me “resilient,” and my family and I began demolition and renovation on our house. We tore out the floodwater-soaked drywall, aired out the moisture and stench, and rebuilt our house. Located a five-minute drive behind our house is George Bush Park. It’s a pretty unassuming park; my brother played little league soccer there, my mom still goes for walks there. You might notice all of these are dry activities, which is why for a long time, I didn’t know that George Bush Park lay entirely within Barker Reservoir. Barker Reservoir is part of Houston’s network of flood structures. The dam and its twin Addicks Reservoir were built in the 1940’s, designed to hold water and prevent flooding of downtown Houston. However, because the dams were built over half a century ago with a smaller intended capacity, they have become much less effective than they were in the 1940’s. In fact, in 2009, the United States Army Corps of Engineers deemed the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs two of the six most dangerous dams in the country. Additionally, when the reservoirs were

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first constructed, the land surrounding the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs was relatively unpopulated. But now, the area has been developed with businesses and local schools and suburban homes— including mine. Unbeknownst to my family and most of our neighbors, our neighborhood is located directly within Addicks’ and Barker’s flood pools. Flood pools are areas designed to flood whenever the reservoirs fill to capacity— like they did during Hurricane Harvey, filling many upstream homes and businesses with reservoir water. In the midst of the hurricane, it didn’t occur to me to wonder how our neighborhood flooded. It seemed like a freak accident, an act of God, some sort of entropying karma from the universe. So when the neighborhood rumors began and the news eventually broke— that many of our homes were built in the reservoir’s flood pool, intentionally designed to flood— it shocked me. In all my time spent watching the muddy water, staring at the ceiling of someone else’s home, and tearing out our soaked drywall, I had thought of Hurricane Harvey as some force beyond human influence. Whether it was nature or God or the devil, I felt so earnestly that nothing we did as humans could have made an indent on those violent winds or trillions of gallons of rainfall. But my own house— lying just inside the edge of a man-made reservoir designed to flood, and thoroughly wrecked by that flooding— was evidence to the contrary.

Barker Reservoir was not the only human influence on Hurricane Harvey. Houston’s urbanization and city planning also exacerbated the flooding. Houston has undeniably been growing in recent years, achieving the largest urban growth and the fifthlargest population growth in the United States from 2001-2011. My family, who moved to Houston in 2007, was part of that growth. And as Houston grew and more condos and parking lots and highways popped up, so did asphalt and concrete. From a

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flood perspective, asphalt and concrete pose serious problems because they cannot absorb water. In Houston, which is naturally dominated by non-absorbent clay-based soil, the acreage of land that can’t soak up rainfall increased by 32 percent from 2001 to 2011. With the introduction of more and more non-absorbent concrete, Houston’s ground cannot absorb significant amounts of water, resulting in considerable flooding risk for the city. To mitigate this flood risk, Houston makes use of its roads. The city designed roads to flood during intense rainfall events, directing water away from buildings— better to flood a street than a home. And while this strategy often suffices in ordinary storms, during severe events like Hurricane Harvey, roads can only serve as secondary drainage, and flooded ones make evacuation more difficult. My mantra that “the roads in Houston always flood” was apparently not the quirk of haphazard city planning or the city’s especially rainy constitution, but a deliberate choice. It wasn’t just Hurricane Harvey: the semiregular street flooding, the Memorial Day flood in 2015, the Tax Day flood in 2016, and the other Memorial Day flood in 2016— they were all results of deliberate choices. The deliberate choices of a city too enamored with its own development— the 20-lane freeways, the master-planned suburbs, the hundreds of billions in economic growth— to let go of the concrete and asphalt that would literally drown it. Hurricane Harvey’s intensity was also exacerbated by a broader, global force: climate change. Over the last century, human activity has generated an increasing amount of greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions have raised the temperature of much of the earth— including the earth’s oceans. Ocean heat content and sea surface temperatures have both significantly increased as a result of climate change. Because hurricanes develop in warm and moist conditions where they can gather atmospheric moisture through evaporation, the warmer

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ocean creates more intense, bigger, and longer lasting tropical storms. According to various scientific analyses, human-induced climate change increased Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall by as much as 19%. The world’s emissions and the world’s climate crisis hit Houston sharply. But part of the fault for climate change falls onto Houston’s shoulders, as well. This city claims the title of energy capital of the world. I wouldn’t even be in Houston were it not for the oil and gas industry: my dad is a petroleum engineer, and it was his job that first moved us to Houston. However, the oil and gas industry is responsible for as much as two-thirds of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions over the last 200 years. Some oil and gas companies have even funded and provoked denial of climate change, exacerbating the world’s climate crisis for their bottom lines. And all of this circled back to Houston in the form of Hurricane Harvey. The hurricane’s magnitude of destruction was not born out of nowhere. My home— this beautiful, ambitious city, the biggest in a state where “everything’s bigger in Texas” — was swallowed by much of its own hubris. Years and years of emissions from around the world, fueled by Houston’s own oil and gas industry, fell onto Houston in the form of trillions of gallons of rain.

In the years since Hurricane Harvey, I’ve made peace with a lot of what happened: we repainted the walls and installed a bigger kitchen counter; my friends and neighbors became essential sources of support and community; and whenever I’m back home, I still drive down Fry Road and take walks in George Bush Park. And yet, that last piece still sits unsettled in me: Hurricane Harvey, despite its otherworldly magnitude and destruction, was marked by a human imprint. For all that my house was flooded by Hurricane Harvey, it was also flooded by the Barker Reservoir engineers and Houston City Council and

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the oil and gas companies and my dad’s job— and me. I’m not trying to take personal responsibility here; more carpooling or more recycling from me wouldn’t have changed Hurricane Harvey, wouldn’t have saved my house. And I’m not trying to distribute blame— not entirely, at least. But you and I and Houston City Council and Exxon and BP and Chevron are interconnected; we are not wild boars floating in the water, untethered from the land and from each other. By grace or wrath or indifference, those boars do not live and we do. They can rest and we cannot. As long as we can make an imprint, even on the force of a hurricane, we have the responsibility to make it a good one.