Hurricane horror: Harvey's bill rises by the hour

After hitting Texas, storm makes landfall in Louisiana

On Tuesday morning, disaster analyst Chuck Watson had pegged $42 billion as a reasonable estimate for the cost of destruction Tropical Storm Harvey would leave in its wake. By the end of the day, he’d added another $10 billion.

Harvey’s initial blast along the Texas coast as a Category 4 hurricane was bad enough, sending gasoline prices surging and crude futures plunging as refineries shut. Now the storm has returned, making landfall a second time in southwestern Louisiana, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It weakened as it moved farther inland.

The storm has brought torrential rain and the collapse of levees, dams and drains. That combination has analysts raising damage estimates by the hour and could easily push the catastrophe above the rank of Superstorm Sandy, the second-costliest weather disaster in US history. “We’re on the verge of having cascading failures,” said Watson, a Savannah, Georgia-based disaster modeller with Enki Research. “It is conceivable that we could get into the $60 to $80 billion range without that much effort.”

Economic losses could be as high as $70-90 billion, with the bulk of the losses coming from inland flooding in the Houston metropolitan area, risk modelling firm RMS said. Major US railroads have warned it could be a long time before normal operations resume in the Houston area.

Louisiana, including New Orleans, is familiar with apocalyptic storms. Hurricane Katrina killed at least 1,800 and caused $160 billion in damage. Sandy, which slammed into New York and New Jersey in 2012, claimed 147 lives along its path from the Caribbean, including 72 in the US. The damage was about $70.2 billion, according to the US National Centres for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina.

A night time curfew, from 10 pm to 5 am, was imposed in Houston Tuesday night as the storm’s centre drifted back toward the Gulf of Mexico. The curfew was announced after police arrested a crew of armed robbers hijacking vehicles, and officials warned residents of people impersonating Homeland Security investigators. There also were fears of looting as thousands of houses lay partially submerged and abandoned.

The storm made landfall between Port Aransas and Port O’Connor in Texas on Friday, stalled out further inland over the weekend and is now trekking eastward. It is expected to reach the Lower Mississippi Valley by Thursday. The storm will be followed by tornadoes from Louisiana to Arkansas. East Texas could get another 10 inches (25 cm) of rain throughout the week.

“Harvey aligned perfectly to bring intense rain bands over Houston,” said James Done, a project scientist and meteorologist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. As it drifted along the coast on Monday and Tuesday, it also “perfectly aligned for Houston to get the peak rainfall.”

Harvey also created a situation where Gulf of Mexico waters have kept drumming hard up against the coastline, preventing rain water from running off into the sea and backing everything up for miles around.

The ferocious arrival was tempered by high-pressure systems across the US, including a large one that pushed temperatures in California beyond 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius), said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University. Harvey became “a pebble in stagnant stream.”

Predictions were that some areas east of Houston would witness 50 inches or more of rain by the time Harvey moved off into the central US. As of 3 am local time Wednesday, the gauge at Mont Belvieu, east of the city, showed 51.88 inches had fallen since the start of the storm. That may be the most in recorded history for a tropical cyclone in the contiguous US, breaking a mark also set in Texas back in 1978.

The record for all 50 states in such a storm was set in 1950 in Hawaii -52 inches.

Harvey’s deluge was made all the worse because the ground was already saturated by heavy rainfall earlier in the season. “We have had roughly a year’s worth of rain in the last three months,” said Wendy Wong, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Dickinson, Texas, a city that was evacuated.

Watson said disaster models just aren’t calibrated for a thing like Harvey. For instance, a typical scenario will assume infrastructure such as dams, levees and drainage systems will fail when stress rates reach 80 to 90 per cent. “We are seeing failures at 60 per cent,” he said.