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Perspectives
Texas Update
Coastal Update January 2009
By Jim Blackburn
This is the annual coastal update that I have been sending out for many years. It started out as a report on the progress of various agreements that I negotiated with Formosa Plastics and has evolved into a report about trends and ideas regarding the Texas coast as well as my form of season's greetings. Today, Formosa is not a big issue on the coast although I try to keep up with how they are performing and whether or not they are finally ready to implement a zero discharge solution for wastewater. There are, however, many other important issues that all of us concerned about the coast should watch and/or act upon.
1. Short term versus Long term Planning (This section appeared as an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle on January 11, 2009)
I have lived near the Texas coast for a long time. I have seen hurricanes come and go. I saw Carla's impact. I have lived through Beulah, Alicia, Allison, Rita, Ike and others. Hurricanes are a constant threat. Certain coastal towns such as Indianola never recovered from the blow of hurricanes. Others such as Galveston were rebuilt, only to be hit again.
In the aftermath of Ike, my concern is that our governmental leaders only seem to have one part of hurricane planning somewhat well considered and that is evacuation. After the Rita debacle, we seem to have our act together a bit better, although one might argue we did not get tested in Ike - that a lot of Houston-Galveston residents failed to evacuate from Ike because it was "only a category 2 storm". Although the next evacuation might not go as well if we all decide again to leave, a lot of time and effort has been directed to evacuation and that is all very good.
My concern, however, is that no one seems to have thought through the resettlement process that comes after a hurricane hits. It is almost as if our hurricane planning is to evacuate and then return after the storm misses us. There does not seem to be much thought given to the unthinkable – returning to a destroyed landscape, to hundreds of thousands of homes not habitable, to electricity and sewer and water disabled, to massive infrastructure damage that takes months if not years to fix.
We are now facing that problem in the Houston-Galveston area, but not to the extent that we could have faced it. I know it is hard to believe, but Ike did not directly hit the most populated part of our region. Ike veered northward just before landfall, pushing the dirty side of the storm into the Bolivar Peninsula, Chambers and Jefferson Counties. We on the West Side of Galveston Bay and Galveston Island did not get the dirty side. If Ike had hit thirty or so miles back down the coast, the destruction and particularly the loss of life would have been significantly greater.
In the Houston region, we are fortunate to have Mayor White and Judge Emmett. Through their personal efforts, many problems that should have been foreseen were addressed by their leadership and management skills. We were fortunate, but not necessarily prepared.
Notwithstanding some successes, the resettlement problems are evident everywhere. There is no master plan for debris removal, particularly in the less well-off counties most heavily hit. FEMA seems to be operating in a different place in time and space, although that might be related to our failure to anticipate and plan. But they key issue behind many of the problems seems to me to be – what is our concept of rebuilding? Are we simply going to develop again in the same way as before it was destroyed? Are we simply working toward déjà vu all over again?
These are not easy issues. And the worst time to be discussing them is when people are homeless, without alternatives, living out of suitcases, out of cars, out of motels. Yet that is what is happening. These discussions about rebuilding, about our plans after the disaster, need to be held when people are not being held hostage by circumstances, by poor planning, by the absence of leadership.
What we need are bold initiatives that attempt to come to grips with a number of issues, including sea level rise, the prospect of more severe and perhaps more frequent storm events, storm surges that easily can exceed 20 feet and rainfall events dumping 20 or more inches of rain in 24 hours. Oh – and we probably should figure on less money being available from the federal government in the future, given that Wall Street and the automobile makers have sucked the financial marrow remaining after Iraq.
We need to take a serious look at our floodplain maps. The evacuation zones that are set in our region are for hurricanes varying in strength from Category 1 to Category 5. We are prepared to ask people living in these zones to evacuate, but we are not asking that their homes be constructed in a manner to protect against Category 4 or 5 storms. A category 4 surge tide of 22 or so feet is certainly foreseeable if not a higher category 5 surge. Yet, if you check, you will see that our flood plain maps – developed by FEMA in association with our local governments – do not require flood protection to that level. In fact, in many of these evacuation zones, new homes are only required to be built 10 or 12 feet above sea level, a fact that virtually guarantees that over a few decades, these homes will be severely damaged if not destroyed.
Perhaps even more worrisome is the fact that projections from the Houston–Galveston Area Council show that hundreds of thousands more people will be moving into the census tracts within the Hurricane Evacuation Zones 1-5, the most dangerous areas in the region for development. Do we really want to encourage hundreds of thousands of more people to move into areas that will need to be evacuated? Do we really want to watch as these residents along with the hundreds of thousands already living in these areas choose not to evacuate because the storm is "only a Category 2"?
I know that I live in Texas - that Texans supposedly don't care much for regulation, although proponents are showing up by the score for better Wall Street regulation. I know that many Texans and particularly Texas Legislators believe that every municipality and every city and every landowner have the right to try to grow as much as they possibly can. I know that it is unpopular to question that ethic – to ask "don't we have enough people living in hurricane evacuation zones"? Do we really want to encourage rebuilding or new development in these hazard zones? Do we really want to put our money into infrastructure in these areas? Do we want to spend hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars trying to settle areas that may simply be too dangerous for permanent residents?
Those are the types of issues that we should be discussing and debating in a civil manner. Our country does not have the financial reserves that we once did. We cannot afford to build and rebuild and rebuild yet again in the same place with the same result. I do not believe that the federal government will continue to bail us out for bad development thinking, for our lack of regulation, for our unwillingness to ask hard questions and find hard answers.
Ultimately, we need a sustainable development concept for the Texas coast, one that is sound and safe, that will protect the residents, our social structure, our economic structure and our ecological structure. And the stakes are serious. We could easily see thousands of people killed and hundreds of billions of dollar in damage. Nothing less than the long-term economic future of our region is at stake.
2. Enough on the Coast
When I first started writing this coastal update, it was about Formosa Plastics. That was a fight joined by many of you on the coast because the environmental compliance record – the record of behavior – was bad. Over time and with a lot of hard work by the management at Formosa, by Dr. Davis Ford and by me, that situation has improved substantially. It is worth remembering that it was not the government that changed that situation. Government was looking the other way. It was citizen action that turned that situation around. And it appears that we cannot trust the Texas government to protect us these days either.
The Texas coast contains about 8400 square miles, about 3% of Texas and about 0.2% of the United States. It has about 6.3 million people, about 27% of the Texas population and a little over 2% of the U.S. population. There are a lot of us on the coast and we keep growing.
From an energy standpoint, the Texas coast has served the state and the country far beyond its size and population. The Texas coast is home to 4% of U.S. oil and gas production (both onshore and offshore), it brings in 32% of our oil imports and contains 22% of the refining capacity of the United States, not to mention plastics and other petrochems. We have two constructed LNG import facilities representing 39% of U.S. capacity. We generate about 40% of the state's electricity, with 279 gas-fired plants and 5 coal-fired power plants along with two operational nuclear units and four more planned, currently representing about 50% of Texas nuclear capacity. We mine 7% of the nation's uranium. And to top it off, about 500 MW of wind power are now being built in Kenedy County with other farms planned in San Patricio and Cameron Counties.
In exchange, our natural environment on the coast has suffered extensively. We have lost hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands. We have dredged and scraped out our bays. We have only one functional natural pass between the bays and the Gulf of Mexico, a key to life cycle movement of fish and shellfish. We have a dioxin and PCB warning on speckled trout consumption in the Galveston Bay system and a warning on mercury contamination in crabs in the Matagorda Bay system. We have not set aside any freshwater inflows for any of our bays and estuaries. Without such set asides, we will lose the white and brown shrimp production, the blue crabs and oysters along with our finfish.
Our government is not getting the job done on protecting the Texas coast. It is not difficult to balance environmental and economic issues. Many other states manage it quite well. On several projects that I have been involved with, that balance has been attained. However, we in Texas seem to either be unwilling or unable to put comprehensive and effective ecological protection programs in place. Why are we putting up with this absence of stewardship, this inability to protect this coast that is important if not sacred?
I have a question to those of you reading this document. Do you think that the governmental system that is in place in Texas is doing an adequate job protecting the Texas coast? If you think the answer to that question is no, would you be willing to sign a document to that effect and send it to your state senator and state representative? If you are willing, please do it and let me know about it.
3. The Texas Coastal Management Program
Any discussion of environmental protection and economic development on the coast should include a discussion of the Coastal Management Program of the State of Texas, yet few of us ever run across the coastal program. It is in essence missing in action as an effective voice for the future of the Texas coast. Although it promised to address freshwaters inflows and land development, particularly affecting wetlands, it has been silent on these issues. And it is totally non-existent on an issue such as the wind farm development in Kenedy County where it has a clear obligation.
The federal Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) was part of a concept President Richard Nixon called the "New Federalism". The idea of the federal CZMA was that the federal government would provide money to plan for and to implement a program to protect the coast. If the state wished to join the program and get the money, the state had to develop a plan that met certain federal requirements, including having a coastal plan and a regulatory program with authority over all land and water uses that could affect coastal waters. Later, more money became available through the Coastal Impact Assistance Program (CIAP). Yet other amendments prohibited offshore port facilities from being constructed in a state that chose not to participate in the federal program.
Texas joined the federal coastal management program in 1996, some twenty-four years after the passage of the federal CZMA in 1972. The Texas program is overseen by the Coastal Coordination Council and administered by the General Land Office of the State of Texas. The Commissioner of the General Land Office chairs the CCC and essentially manages the Texas coast. In other words, Jerry Patterson has both jurisdiction over and responsibility for many of the important issues on the Texas coast. His failure to address these issues speaks volumes to his commitment to stewardship of the Texas coast.
In the Kenedy County wind farm fight, those of us in the Coastal Habitat Alliance who were fighting for some type of wind regulation found that there was no regulation at all for wind development on the coast. We challenged this situation in federal court where we were dismissed because the court ruled that private groups had no standing to complain of Texas's violation of the CZMA, either directly or though certain constitutional concepts. To date, the federal government has not acted on our request that they investigate whether or not Texas is in violation of their representations that allowed Texas to enter the program in the first place.
The bottom line is that the regulatory program that the State of Texas represented it could implement does not exist. Texas has misrepresented their authority and does not have a program that regulates electrical generation facilities on the Texas coast, a specific requirement of the federal CZMA. There are many other shortcomings of the Texas coastal program. Freshwater inflows are required to be included for the coast, but no such inflows exist at this time. Certain wetland regulations of the Texas coastal program are routinely being overlooked.
It seems that this issue of the absence of some overall land development policy is recurring throughout the coast. It is apparent in the rebuilding situation after Ike. It is true regarding new development in Kenedy County, in Cameron County and in San Patricio County with wind farms. It is true of petroleum-coke or coal fired power plants in Corpus and Coleto Creek and in Freeport. It is an issue that we all should keep up with and care about. One day we are likely to look up and not recognize the Texas coast. At that time, it will be too late to act.
4. The Guadalupe River Situation
Many of you may remember when the Rio Grande went dry in 2000. Many of us have watched Nueces Bay suffer from the cut-off of freshwater inflow. We know that we humans can dry up a river and we know that such action can negatively affect a bay. And the next situation on the coast that bears particular attention is the Guadalupe River and San Antonio Bay.
The situation on the Guadalupe has been evolving since I first reported on it several years ago. At that time, the San Antonio Water System, the San Antonio River Authority and the Guadalupe Blanco River Authority had joined together in a permit application to take about 289,600 acre feet of water from the river, build several ring dike reservoirs and pipeline over 100,000 acre feet off freshwater to San Antonio. SAWS dropped that project and GBRA has since been developing several other similar concepts.
Today, the situation is as follows. Based on records from the Texas Water Master for the Guadalupe River from 1991 to 2006, GBRA has an average of 115,242 acre-feet of unused water rights. After promising 60,000 acre feet of this water for the San Marcos/New Braunfels area, GBRA has now optioned 75,000 acre feet of this right to Exelon in Victoria for a nuclear power plant. They also have announced that they will divert approximately 30,000 acre-feet to the Coleto Creek power plant and will use a similar amount of water from Canyon Dam for local water supply. They also have applied to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for a permit to divert 25,000 to 50,000 acre feet of "new" water in the middle reach of the Guadalupe, arguably for use in the middle basin.
The problem is simply this – there is not enough water in the river to meet all of these demands and to also provide fresh water inflows for San Antonio Bay. In fact, in order to gain the 50,000 acre feet, GBRA will seek an allocation of water that is not available 100% of the time. The base flow of the river is already allocated. We are now starting to see permit applications for less frequently available water. And the bay still has no water dedicated to its health.
The problem identified above will only get worse due to climate change according to a 2007 article in Science magazine. In this article, the authors present the results of several different modeling teams, all of whom agree that the temperature in most of the Guadalupe River watershed will increase, evaporation will increase and rainfall in the western portion of the watershed will decrease. According to Dr. Ron Sass, a climate specialist at Rice University, the potential exists that approximately 135,000 fewer acre-feet of water could be available over the long term on the river. On top of that, Dr. Sass is concerned that increased evaporation could also further increase salinity in the bay, further adding to the need for dedicated inflows.
To date, we have been discussing water availability in the context of historic base flows and availabilities. That past standard no longer works. We should start talking about climate change's impact on water availability and we need to start soon. Water rights that are assumed to be dependable (e.g., 100% available year in and year out) may not be. And the bay may be more vulnerable than previously thought. Both water engineering and water law are based upon historic rainfall and water availability patterns. Unfortunately, those historic patterns cannot reliably predict future availability when the climate will be changing. This is only one of a number of engineering and law-related issues implicit in the fact that the climate is changing. The sooner that we begin to honestly and openly discuss these issues, the better.
5. Issues to Watch on The Coast in 2009
There are several interesting issues that are likely to be of discussed/debated during 2009. Here are some of them:
A. Realizing and Protecting the Natural Economic Value of Wetlands – For years we have been destroying wetlands, particularly freshwater wetlands in the coastal prairie. During Ike, however, we saw the value of wetlands in reducing and absorbing storm surge. During 2009 we are likely to see a focus placed on saving wetlands because of their flood abatement value. This will include buying and setting aside more wetlands to make sure that they are with us in the future as well as working to attempt to better protect wetland areas such as the McFaddin Marsh that is in danger of becoming McFaddin Bay. Ultimately, the preservation of wetlands may be our cheapest form of flood control, both regarding coastal surge abatement and also regarding absorption and holding of storm water.
B. Continued Development of Wind Farms – The Coastal Habitat Alliance tried and failed – at least to date - to have coastal wind farms regulated under the Texas coastal program. At this time, two Kenedy County wind farms are under construction and plans exist for new farms in San Patricio County on the north side of Nueces Bay as well as near Rio Hondo in Cameron County. At this time, the Coastal Habitat Alliance is attempting to persuade the Federal Aviation Administration that they have the responsibility to regulate environmental impacts of wind farms under the air navigation safety review that they conduct. That issue will play out later this year in federal court in Washington D.C. The CHA is also continuing to monitor the development of the wind farms in Kenedy County and trying to ensure that the least possible damage occurs from this ill-chosen site for wind farm development as the opposition to the construction of new farms along the coast continues.
C. Galveston Bay Dioxin Warnings – There has been quite a bit of noise made over the dioxin warning that was issued for speckled trout in Galveston Bay. While there are certainly questions about the sampling process associated with this study, the fact remains that there has always been a dioxin issue in Galveston Bay. Recently, the U.S. EPA designated several pits that subsided into the San Jacinto River as superfund sites. These pits have been identified as containing/releasing dioxin as well as other chemicals. It is to the benefit of all of us to make sure that the clean up of these sites is handled correctly and quickly. It is hard to believe that sites that were once above ground have slowly subsided into the River without any government official noticing, but then again, this is Texas. This is an issue of importance for all recreational and commercial fishermen and women in the Galveston Bay system.
D. Hazardous Waste Flood Protection – All of the hazardous waste along the coast, as well as wastewater plants, landfills, radioactive waste sites and oil storage facilities must be designed to withstand a 100-year flood. That flood level is determined by FEMA flood plain maps. There is a major disconnect between these FEMA maps and hurricane surge tide flooding. Along Galveston Bay, the 100-year flood level is generally less than 15 feet. Thursday night before Ike hit, surge tides of in excess of 25 feet were projected for the Houston Ship Channel. If Ike had come ashore further south, it is likely that we would have had a contamination disaster worse than anything we have previously seen on the Texas coast. We need to get the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to adopt a reasonable hurricane surge tide for purposes of flood protection of these very sensitive coastal hazards. I likely will be writing to many of you for support in the future in trying to get TCEQ to better protect the bay and all of us living near the bay from surge tide wash-out of hazardous materials.
E. Water Rights For the Bays – In 2009, we might see some water set aside for some of our bays. The Galveston Bay Conservation and Preservation Association (GBCPA) and Galveston Bay Foundation (GBF) and National Wildlife Federation (NWF) have been opposing various permit applications by the City of Houston and/or San Jacinto River Authority. It is likely that one or more of these permit challenges will result in water being set aside for Galveston Bay. The legislatively established SB 3 process for Galveston Bay also has a good chance at reaching some type of consensus, due in part to the successful Galveston Bay Freshwater Inflows Group process established by a settlement between the City of Houston and Galveston Bay Foundation over the final settlement over the Wallisville Reservoir (that led to salinity gates but no reservoir). Similarly, there is a permit contest ongoing on the Colorado River involving CCA Texas, Matagorda Bay Foundation, NWF and Sierra Club that might also lead to a settlement to set some water aside for the bay. In the meantime, the more comprehensive SB3 process is just beginning to get under way. If you wish to be on an SB3 committee for Matagorda or San Antonio Bays, send me your name and I will forward it on to those appointing such members. Be sure to include contact information and the basis for your interest (e.g., recreational fishing, commercial fishing, bird watching, etc.).
F. Cumulative Impact Analysis for Galveston Island – Galveston Beach to Bay Preserve, Spanish Grant Civic Association Sections 1 and 2, Lafittes Cove at Pirate's Beach Nature Society, Scenic Galveston and the Sierra Club filed suit in November 2007 against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regarding the decision to issue the permit to develop Anchor Bay adjacent to Spanish Grant on the bay-side of West Galveston Island. The case alleges that the Corps of Engineers improperly analyzed cumulative impacts in its decision-making process on this permit. At issue is not only the Anchor Bay permit, but also several other pending Corps of Engineers permits on the west end of the island. At stake is the development of all of the prairie uplands on Galveston Island, as well as substantial impacts to freshwater wetlands on the island and impacts to the bay. The case is pending before Federal Judge Sim Lake in the Southern District of Texas. Briefing has been completed and the parties are waiting either for notice of oral argument or for a written decision from the Judge. There is no timetable for either at this time. This case should be of importance to development of other barrier islands on the Texas coast as well as to the future of the West End of Galveston Island.
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