“Shelter-in-Place” are words warning of immediate danger, urging people away from public spaces and towards defensible or protective areas. Shelter-in-Place means taking immediately local measures – say, at the scale of a house or a room – to isolate and protect from an identified harm. It’s a colloquial surrogate for the official (police) term, “Lockdown,” but with broader applications. People can visualize a Shelter-in-Place for school shootings, one for tornadoes, another for poisonous chemicals, and more for police and SWAT actions, and for terrorist activity - and on and on - right up to shelter-in-place for really big storms. It would seem pretty reliable as shorthand for immediately looking to one’s own safety. In 2008, Governor of Texas Rick Perry called on citizens to "shelter in place" in facing Hurricane Ike.THE CHALLENGE OF BIG WEATHERThe crisis spelled out by Houston's recent weather dramatizes a convergence between the impacts of hurricanes and of large super-wet storms. Although not hurricanes, and certainly not at Harvey’s scale, the Tax Day and Memorial Day floods of 2016 and 2015 were devastating. They easily qualified as “big weather.” Based on their extremity as flood events, together with the increasing regularity of hurricanes, the recent storm seasons suggest a new world of regular, flood-dominated weather events. If history is any guide, this kind of big weather is likely to start visiting Houston often - perhaps even annually.
IS SHELTER-IN-PLACE VIABLE? NO!
Is Shelter-in-Place a viable response to Houston-style big weather? Based on Harvey, on the Tax Day and Memorial Day floods, and on the typology of Houston’s housing stock, the answer is: NO. Rick Perry’s 2008 order was workable based on assumptions about hurricane impacts that no longer apply – the big risks are now from high waters, not wind. But what’s next? Consider, firstly, that Houston is a “place of houses.” It’s the way the people want to live. Looking at flood risks and the degradation of Houston housing – built now of short, loose-grained boards, glue and sawmill waste – and also at how evacuation risks intersect with mold and pestilence, it's obvious how vulnerable we are to extreme weather. Exposed to wind, houses may fall apart; exposed to water their moldy shells are dangerous. And erected on grade level slabs, any house without a second story could be a floodwater deathtrap. There are some technical solutions, like simply raising existing houses. But even that's no panacea: if elevated on masonry stem walls, as is typical in Meyerland and Bellaire, flood waters pooling within the crawlspace contribute to rising damp, and wick pestilence and mold upwards into the home.
IS SHELTER-IN-PLACE VIABLE? YES!!
Based the specifics of this type of big weather, there's a different, alternate answer possible to the question, "Is shelter in place viable?" Yes, you can do it, but the place matters! And in Houston, 99% of the time that place is a house. Therefore, a house: it should be built 60” minimum above the likely flood height, made of materials installed in ways unaffected by cycles of heat and humidity, with no chance of rising damp, and engineered for the strongest of hurricane winds. That is, it should match the engineering and construction of a Category-5 Storm Defense House, which offers a direct example of how homes can play to win under the new rules of the new storms. Matching these specifications is the way forward for Houston housing, whether old or new. There is no alternative.