Transcript

Katy Vine (voice-over): Hi, and welcome to TM Out Loud, exclusive audio storytelling for Texas Monthly Audio subscribers. I’m Katy Vine. 

Hurricane season in the Atlantic runs roughly from June to September, so we’re in the middle of it now. Major storms and flooding have always hit the Texas coast—most famously, the 1900 hurricane that demolished Galveston, and most recently, Hurricane Beryl last year, which flooded Texas’s most populous city—Houston—killing more than forty people in the area.

Climate change is making disasters like these worse—and more frequent. A seawall to protect the city of Houston would cost tens of billions of dollars. But this year, the Trump administration has been scaling back programs that forecast storms and help with recovery.

When the devastating floods hit Central Texas this month, key positions at the National Weather Service were empty after Trump’s government-wide layoffs earlier this year. Additionally, thousands of calls to FEMA went unanswered in the days after the floods. Many in Houston are wondering what this means for them if a hurricane hits this summer.

My guests this week are Texas Monthly’s Houston-based staff writers Michael Hardy and Mimi Swartz. I talked with them about living with the hurricanes, what a scaled-back federal response might look like, and why, despite the risks, they won’t be leaving anytime soon.

Here’s my conversation with Michael and Mimi.

Katy Vine: Hey, everybody. Thanks for coming, Mimi.

Mimi Swartz: Thanks for having me.

Katy Vine: Michael.

Michael Hardy: Thanks.

Katy Vine: You’re two of Texas Monthly‘s longtime Houstonians. You’ve lived through and written about Hurricane Harvey and other big storms that hit the city every few years. This is a risk you live with in Houston in any year, but now this year, the Trump administration has been cutting staff and programs that forecast storms and manage recovery efforts.

There was a question about how that might play out if a major storm hit Texas, and then, on the Fourth of July, one did. So, how are you feeling going into this summer, and how has the federal response to the floods in Central Texas affected how you’re looking at hurricane season in Houston?

Mimi Swartz: Well, I’m very worried. I think I live in a hundred-year-old house that’s withstood a lot of storms, and we have supplemented the house with a generator that cost a year of some college, and—a cheap one. But I’m very cognizant that we could get a category five anytime between June and September.

Michael Hardy: We’ve been lucky in Houston so far this year. We’ve still got a lot of hurricane season to go. Last year was a bad one. We got Hurricane Beryl in Houston, which knocked out power to most of the city. At our house, we lost power for six days, and after that, I decided to follow Mimi’s lead and get my own generator. And then even before Beryl last summer, we had the derecho, and then we had what some people call derecho part two, a week later. So, each one of those knocked out our power. This is something we live with in Houston.

Mimi Swartz: Yeah.

Katy Vine: You’ve both lived through massive storms in Houston, and you’ve written about them and how your fellow Houstonians have responded to them. How do you prepare for managing the risks at home and for going out to cover the news if disaster strikes? Does it get easier, harder to do this work after each new storm?

Mimi Swartz: There’s this horrible sameness to it, I think. I mean, it’s funny, when the derecho came through, I was at the gym, and—I only live a mile from there. But the sky was, you know, the color of onyx. And we all just went, “Well . . .” And everybody, you know—for some reason, all the machines still worked. So everybody, like, watched the rain, then went back to exercising, thinking, “Well, we’ll just dig out when we can get out of here.” But it’s so unhealthy to be thinking that way, to realize, as Michael said, we’re just, we’re so alone in this.

Michael Hardy: As far as covering storms, I have not been living in Houston as long as Mimi has, even in recent years, because I was away in the Northeast for a while in grad school. But, since returning, in 2013—I mean, I’ve lived through Harvey, through Beryl, through a number of other storms, and with Harvey, which was, you know, a big one, I was trapped in the Heights with Mimi. We live in the same neighborhood. We were completely surrounded by floodwater. It was impossible to go anywhere.

So I ended up covering the story, by necessity, from my computer, in my home. ‘Cause I hadn’t lost power during Harvey, but we were on an island—surrounded by freeways, but the freeways had turned into rivers. So it was impossible. I didn’t have a boat. If I’d had a boat, maybe I could have gone and paddled around, and reported from it. But, I mean, as it was, you know, we’re limited too, as reporters. We’re affected by it.

Mimi Swartz: Yeah. There was—I sat in a food line at Kroger for like an hour and a half. I can’t remember which storm it was, but, you know, suddenly you’re living in your own small town, ’cause you can’t get out. You just start adjusting. There’s a guy in my neighborhood who has sailcloth that he now hooks around every window. You know, he’s built hooks in, and he just plomps it on instead of nailing windows shut. And I think we’re all kind of, you know, adjusting to, “Well, what do we have to do if there’s a big one?”

Katy Vine: Do the neighbors talk about the big one?

Mimi Swartz: Yeah. I think everybody’s very aware. The other thing is, like, getting out of town—you can’t do it. 

Michael Hardy: Yeah. This was a big problem with Hurricane Rita.

Katy Vine: Isn’t that where they ran out of gas on the highway?

Michael Hardy: They ordered an evacuation—or, I think it was, maybe it was a voluntary evacuation—but hundreds of thousands of people attempted to evacuate. Dozens of people died in their cars while they were stuck on the highway, which is why, you know, despite a lot of criticism, Houston’s then-mayor, Sylvester Turner, did not order an evacuation ahead of Harvey, which was the smartest thing to do.

So, you know, to get back to your question about the big one, some people think, “Well, couldn’t you just evacuate if you knew a big one was coming?” No. It’s impossible. We tried it, and more people died during the evacuation than actually died from the storm. But, you know, these—hurricanes might be getting more frequent and intense, but they are not new to this area. I mean, the Great Storm of 1900 that wiped Galveston off the map is still the deadliest natural disaster in American history. Still holds that record. The year after Houston was founded, in 1837, there was a huge flood that went through Houston and killed a bunch of people. And, so even from the very beginning of, you know, the Houston region’s existence, people were dealing with these natural disasters.

Mimi Swartz: Or not dealing with—

Michael Hardy: Or not dealing with it. And there’s a pretty good argument to be made that it should never have been built there in the first place. But here we are.

Mimi Swartz: And I think it’s that lack of willingness to look forward and see what we need and do it.

Michael Hardy: Well, you know, after the 1900 great flood of Galveston, they raised the entire city by ten to twelve feet. The entire city. And if you read accounts of that, it’s just extraordinary how they did this. It was an engineering marvel. Meanwhile, you know, we can’t even replace our nearly hundred-year-old dams, in west Houston, in Addicks and Barker. Those were built in the forties.

Mimi Swartz: And that’s what really scared me about the last storm, is that, you know, we were sitting there, kind of cheerful, in our air-conditioned home, with our generator running. And then they started talking about Addicks Dam collapsing and the water going straight to downtown. And it was—

Michael Hardy: My grandmother lived directly south of the Barker Reservoir.

Mimi Swartz: So what happened? Did she—

Michael Hardy: She evacuated. Because I told her there was a nonzero chance that the dam would break and she would die.

Mimi Swartz: Yeah. Did she—did her house flood? 

Michael Hardy: No. She was lucky. But parts of her neighborhood did.

Mimi Swartz: Yeah, a lot of that neighborhood was destroy—

Michael Hardy: This is turning into a therapy session.

Mimi Swartz: I know.

Katy Vine: I want to talk about how your thinking has evolved around living with floods since you moved to Houston years ago. And I know this has been a long time for both of you. But Mimi, in a 2019 piece, you compared the psychological process to the five stages of grief. You wrote that you’ve learned to quit saying “It’s only little rain” because of how quickly things can change.

Michael, you and your wife decided to buy that generator, so that you don’t have to rely on the power grid, even during the summer. Never mind the hurricane season, right? I know my neighbors and I have had the same discussion too, weighing the different brands—especially in the aftermath of the 2021 freeze. 

In the essay you wrote about the decision to buy a $15,000 Generac, you have this brutal closing line: “Perhaps Texans will one day demand that their elected leaders do their jobs. Until then, I have my generator.” There’s a sense of ambivalence in your piece about your generator, like maybe it feels like an extravagance, or you almost can’t believe you did this. You describe a generator divide in the city, households that can afford to keep their power on and those that can’t. How often does your expertise come up in conversation with other Texans in the aftermath of a power outage? Both of you? Like, do you just start geeking out on brands, and advising, and saying, “Everybody I know has got a generator . . .” Like, how do those conversations go?

Mimi Swartz: Well, we did do a lot of research before we got one, and talked to a lot of people. I mean, it was like buying a car.

Michael Hardy: Yeah. In the wake of Hurricane Beryl, last summer, it was all anyone in my neighborhood could talk about. You know, who was buying a generator? What kind of generator? You know—do you want a gas powered one? Do you want a smaller one you feed with gasoline? My wife and I decided to take the plunge and get a whole-home generator, which, like Mimi’s, powers your entire house for the duration of a power cut. It’s natural gas–fueled. So it hooks up right to your natural gas line. And it comes on right away when your power goes out. Now, it wasn’t cheap. It cost about the cost of a good used car.

Mimi Swartz: Yeah, fifteen [hundred].

Michael Hardy: Yeah. But it increasingly, it just seems like this is a necessity in Houston. The number of homes for sale in Houston that advertise generators as part of the house has, like, tripled in the years since the freeze. And so has the stock price of Generac, the leading company that makes generators.

Mimi Swartz: Our generator was new right before the freeze, and when it came on during the freeze, it was like this incredible—like, it was like a savior. And our whole neighborhood was dark, except for, like, then, the three or four people who had bought them in advance. I mean, who thinks you’re gonna need it for a freeze?

Katy Vine: You make fun of them for being a prepper up until you need it.

Mimi Swartz: Yeah. And we had neighbors moving in with us. I mean, and we ran a line from the generator to our house next door, and you’re suddenly—it’s like 1930s Moscow or something, where you’re living in the future and the past at the same time.

Michael Hardy: So, this is just our reality now, and it’s bizarre to me, because I grew up in Houston and Austin, and I don’t remember any of my neighbors having generators. Increasingly, it just seems to be a necessity, which is sad, because there is a huge income divide in Houston. And the generator divide—those who can afford it and those who can’t—that’s just a symptom. It’s another symptom of just how much income inequality there is.

Katy Vine: Mm-hmm.

Mimi Swartz: And the discomfort level of not having one. You know, when the temperatures are rising at the same time you’ve got these natural disasters. You know, you’ve got a storm, and then you’ve got four or five days of who knows how high and how hot it’s gonna be. And we’re sitting there in air-conditioned comfort. And people, you know, several miles to the north are really in danger of dying because it’s so hot.

Michael Hardy: Or are dying.

Mimi Swartz: Yeah, or are dying. I mean, we’re all being trained not to depend on the government to help. And, you know, when you have a massive disaster, there aren’t enough people, there isn’t enough money, to come back from that without federal help, without state help. And I just feel like our state and national officials seem oddly clueless to this problem.

Michael Hardy: Houston leaders, city leaders, county leaders, they do their best, but they don’t have the funding, and they don’t have the resources. State leaders are indifferent, at best. Federal help, if it arrives, arrives late. And is—

Mimi Swartz: And sometimes doesn’t come through for years, with the funds.

Michael Hardy: We are still dispersing funds from Hurricane Harvey, which was in 2017. They’re still dispersing funds from that. So my takeaway from all this is, the Ike Dike is not gonna get built in my lifetime, probably. And I’m 41. It’s gonna cost tens of billions of dollars, almost none of which has been appropriated by Congress. So, Houstonians are on our own. That’s what we’ve been conditioned to expect.

Katy Vine: I think it’s important to remind people that Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic flooding even without hitting Houston directly. It made landfall near Corpus, almost two hundred miles away. Our colleague Peter Holley has written for the magazine about the potential impact of a direct hit on Houston. One expert told him the damage to the petrochemical industry could set off “America’s Chernobyl.” And there are massive infrastructure proposals to protect the city, like the Ike Dike, a barrier against storm surges that would cost tens of billions of dollars. How do you think about these worst-case scenarios for Houston and the ambitious, expensive projects to try to prevent them?

Michael Hardy: I think that we’re gonna be on our own, like we usually are when anything hits. Just to second what Mimi was saying, no one has the resources or the intent to help Houston when these things happen. We’ve seen it again and again.

Mimi Swartz: Yeah. I think—oddly enough, we were on vacation, and we stopped in Rotterdam to look at this sort of Ike Dike copy, and it’s this amazing mass structure that actually works. I mean, they have solved a lot of their flood problems there. And, you know, like Michael’s saying, why are we on our own? Is this a culture thing? Why can’t we appropriate funds to do something like that that will save hundreds of thousands of lives at some point?

Michael Hardy: In the Netherlands, they built a huge Ike Dike–type project to protect against a ten-thousand-year flood.

Mimi Swartz: Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Hardy: A ten-thousand-year flood. We are still trying to build protections against five-hundred- or one-hundred-year floods. We can’t even protect ourselves from that. We are so far behind the rest of the world—I mean, our state leaders won’t even admit climate change is real. How are you going to protect a city like Houston from the effects of climate change when you don’t acknowledge its existence?

Mimi Swartz: Yeah.

Katy Vine: And the reality right now is that the federal programs that would forecast storms and help with disaster recovery are getting cut. The Houston-Galveston office of the National Weather Service had had over a third of its staff cut, and then FEMA, which responds to disasters like hurricanes and floods, that agency has received big cuts this year. And Trump has said he wants to “terminate” it by December 2025 and hand responsibility over to the states for recovery. What do you think that is gonna mean for this year’s hurricane season in Houston?

Mimi Swartz: I think we’re on our own. More on our own than we were a year ago, because there are fewer people looking out for us.

Michael Hardy: I mean, FEMA is not the white knight here. I mean, ask anyone in New Orleans, you know, who went through Katrina. They do good work, but they are often tangled up in bureaucratic red tape. They are slow. You know, in an ideal world, the State of Texas would be more nimble and more responsive, but we know for sure that our current state leadership actively disdains the city of Houston. Made sure that we initially got zero recovery money from the Hurricane Harvey Recovery Fund. Most of it was directed to rural areas that just coincidentally vote Republican. And initially, none of it was given to Houston, even though we sustained the vast majority of the economic damage. So we’ve just seen time and again—and Mimi can back me up on this—how much the state disdains us. How can we rely on them in a crisis?

Mimi Swartz: Plus, there’s an enormous Rainy Day Fund, which I used to think, like, “Well, how hard does it have to rain before you can turn it loose?”

Michael Hardy: And Abbott has never once opened it to help out Houston.

Katy Vine: What are you hearing from other folks around Houston, local officials, or even just your neighbors about what it might look like to get through a storm season with less federal help?

Michael Hardy: We already know. Because it happened with Harvey. The people who did some of the best work were what we call the Cajun Navy.

Mimi Swartz: The Cajun Navy, yeah.

Michael Hardy: Which is just a bunch of just ordinary people from Louisiana and other Southern states who brought their own small boats and performed water rescues.

Mimi Swartz: And that’s this sort of—we’re so wedded to this identity of individualism and “We’re gonna work this out ourselves.” And maybe that was fine when everyone lived in tiny towns on the frontier. But Houston’s the fourth-largest city in the country, and it’s impossible to provide the kind of help we need with a bunch of volunteers from Louisiana, as great as they’ve been.

Katy Vine: Yeah. I think that happens every time, right? There’s a great pride in us all helping each other out, but it would provide a lot of comfort to know that there is gonna be a state response that you can rely upon. And you don’t just have to assume that everybody is gonna jump in there and risk their own lives to help you out, right? Do you ever look at a map after storm season and start seeing yourself wandering farther inland, looking to relocate?

Mimi Swartz: Well, we’re high, so we’re probably in the best place, I would think.

Michael Hardy: We live in a neighborhood of Houston called the Heights, which, which is kind of a joke, because all of Houston, as anyone who’s ever been there knows, is flat. But we are in fact about twelve feet above downtown. Our part of the Heights, fortunately, has not flooded recently. I am also in about a hundred-year-old house that has survived a hundred years of weather. But who knows? I mean, you know, past performance is not an indication of future results.

Katy Vine: I guess I mean more beyond Houston. Like, do you ever think of leaving Houston because of the storms? Or your neighbors? Does anybody ever talk about that? 

Mimi Swartz: Yeah. Everybody kind of talks about it, but, like, where are you gonna go? Because it’s—that problem is everywhere, I think. This is a global problem, and we need global solutions.

Michael Hardy: Of course I fantasize about it sometimes. You know, we dream of parts of the country, parts of the world, parts of Texas we would love to live in. But we’re—like many people, we are deeply embedded in the community. My wife and I were both born in Houston. We’ve lived in Houston for most of our lives. And, for better or worse, this is kind of our city.

Mimi Swartz: No, it’s a great place. My husband always says you can’t stumble out your front door without stumbling over a story. And it’s really true. And it’s got exceptional people, and the diversity is fantastic, and the energy, the medical care. But you do start to think, “Should we be getting outta here?” I mean, it really—my husband’s not a Texan, and he, you know, every once in a while, I can see his teeth sort of grit about his wife who won’t be budged. So . . . you know, again, it’s sort of this weird identity issue, where, “Well, this is my home, and I won’t be driven out of it. But I hope I don’t get killed in it, too.”

Katy Vine: Yeah. Well, thank you both so much for coming in [to] talk about this.

Mimi Swartz: Great.

Michael Hardy: Thank you. 

Mimi Swartz: Thank you. 

Katy Vine (voice-over): That was Mimi Swartz and Michael Hardy. . . . We’ll be back with more from the pages of Texas Monthly next week.