When Houston floods, it turns into a locked circular labyrinth. The
city, my home town, is laid out like a wagon wheel:
downtown sits at the center, surrounded by three concentric circles,
which are bisected by highways in every direction. The first loop,
Interstate 610, is thirty-eight miles long, and corrals the Inner Loop
neighborhoods. Another round of suburban neighborhoods surrounds the
Loop, and is bounded by the eighty-eight-mile-long Beltway 8. Then, the
truly sprawling suburbs (Spring, Sugar Land, the Woodlands) surround the
Beltway. All told, the greater Houston area is gargantuan—at over ten
thousand square miles, it’s bigger than New Jersey—and, with upward of
six million residents, it’s far more populous and diverse than outsiders
tend to guess. Houston is also, famously, largely unregulated: zoning
laws are minimal, and the unceasing outward development has, with
official permission,
drastically inhibited drainage. The freeway system holds the city
together, keeping a huge, dispersed population connected. But in a storm
this lifeline becomes a trap. Houston is flat, and it sits just fifty
feet above sea level; after the bayous overflow, the rain collects on
the roads. When a flood hits, driving in Houston feels like a video game
turned real and deadly. There are sudden impasses everywhere; ingenuity
can’t save you; once the spokes of the wheel go under, there’s nowhere
to go.

Houston is the fourth-largest city in America, and right now much of it
is underwater. Things will get worse this week. Tropical Storm Harvey,
which made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, is sluggishly lingering,
and will continue to pummel the flooded city. Forecasts say that Houston
may get fifty inches of rain from this storm—which is the city’s average
annual rainfall. Five people have died; many more will be injured.
Houston’s safety-net hospital started evacuations on Sunday. The Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world,
closed its submarine doors, designed, after Tropical Storm Allison, to
protect the facility from flooding. Local news crews have struggled
heroically to report on the disaster; one newscaster saved a truck
driver’s life on air.
The National Guard saved between twenty and twenty-five nursing-home residents in Dickinson
after a harrowing photo went viral. My dad, who got stuck in high water on Saturday night, is one of
thousands who have been rescued by Houston police. Harris County has
been calling for citizens to help conduct rescues.
All over the city, the roads have turned into rivers.
Much of what’s visible looks like a nightmare; what makes me even sicker is imagining all the fear that we’ll never see.

People have criticized Houston residents for not evacuating. Plenty did,
and with more understanding of the context, you might excuse many of
those who didn’t. Evacuating a city like Houston, on these interlocked
freeways—where a one-way commute might take two hours on a normal
day—can very easily turn into a secondary disaster. The majority of
Hurricane Rita deaths in Houston occurred in the evacuation, and two-thirds of flood fatalities happen in cars.
Without financial resources, evacuation is a uniquely difficult experience,
and 22.5 per cent of the population in increasingly unequal Houston lives under the poverty line.
Official messages have also been uneven: Greg Abbott, the governor of
Texas, advised evacuation; the mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner—likely
warding off the worst-case scenario of a hurricane hitting gridlock
traffic—advised sheltering in place. (In Rockport, the mayor pro tem
issued a mandatory evacuation order, telling people who refused it to
write their Social Security numbers on their arms.) President Trump, who has been tweeting about Harvey as if it were a
thrilling reality-show finale, and who recently rolled back an Obama-era executive order that infrastructure projects be
designed to survive rising sea levels, offered a helpful “Good luck to everybody!” on Friday, before the storm.

Eight years ago, I spent all summer driving around Houston’s endless
looping freeways, passing picnic-table icehouse bars and stadium
churches and the nondescript streets that birthed chopped-and-screwed. I was canvassing for an environmental nonprofit that was pushing for a
long-overdue citywide recycling program, and we drove for hours to reach
our neighborhood targets. The job was hard: we looked like scammers, and
we were proselytizing about environmental responsibility in a city that
at the time recycled less than three per cent of
its own waste. But I liked the effort of trying to understand and appeal
to a dizzying variety of strangers. I knocked on the doors of McMansions
and decrepit bungalows, talked to immigrants and Texas-born white
people, pitched liberals and conservatives and the politically averse.
Houston, which is by one measure the most diverse city in America, took shape in my imagination as an enormous canvas of
unpredictable, heterogeneous people who were connected, somehow, by a
confusing combination of independence and generosity. As a state, Texas is fiercely individualistic—the land of bootstraps and no income tax and privatized solutions for all. Houstonians absorb this; they are loyal
and responsible in a way that rarely extends across the city, which is,
again, so big as to feel unfathomable—and those freeways, effectively,
are our only public space.

And yet this week I suspect we’ll mostly see another side of Houston:
its scrappy sense of humor, and its extraordinary and very Texan
largesse. Houston responds to disaster with fortitude: the city absorbed
two hundred thousand Vietnamese refugees in the nineteen-seventies, and
it currently resettles twenty-five of every thousand refugees that the
United Nations resettles anywhere—that’s more than any other city in
America, and more than most countries.
After Hurricane Katrina, Houston took in a quarter of a million
evacuees, and, aided by Mayor Bill White’s multimillion-dollar
resettlement program, as many as forty thousand people stayed.
Over the weekend, Houston teen-agers were out in the streets rescuing people via kayak.
As Rebecca Solnit argues in her 2009 book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” disasters create a window into social desire and potential. We’re
normally encouraged to think of private life as precious and public life
as a nuisance, she writes, but “disasters, in returning their sufferers
to public and collective life, undo some of this privatization, which is
a slower, subtler disaster all its own.” Disasters remind us that
ambitious, difficult things are not just possible but necessary; in
Houston, Harvey is already showing how an individualistic work ethic and
a spirit of collective generosity can and have to coexist.