HOUSTON, Texas, October 2, 2008 (ENS) – The Texas Medical Center in Houston came within inches of being flooded during and after Hurricane Ike, but a long-term collaboration with Rice University calmed fears of the kind of deluge that caused extensive damage during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. An accurate prediction of flood levels at the medical campus allowed a war veteran to have a life-saving operation amidst Ike’s torrential rain and howling winds.

Rice researchers precisely predicted the peak surge of Houston’s Brays Bayou during and immediately after Ike, despite power outages that shut down the university’s computing center at a critical time.

“The Texas Medical Center was very happy about how well the system worked and the fact that we were able to pull this off via a long-distance connection,” said Phil Bedient, a professor of engineering at Rice and an expert on flood warning and storm surges. “They were very concerned, because if the medical center had gone under, it would have been a mess.”

Bedient, who with the Texas Medical Center has set up a real-time flood alert system in the years since Allison, saw that effort pay off during the storm. “We absolutely nailed it,” he said.

Having lost power at his own Houston home, Bedient spent a long night during Ike evaluating radar rainfall data coming by phone from the National Weather Service’s radar through Vieux & Associates Inc. in Oklahoma and calling medical center officials with his predictions.

“Brays was two feet from going over its banks,” he said. “The measured water flow in the bayou was 25,500 cubic feet per second. We had predicted 26,800, and we predicted it to occur at almost exactly the same time.” The bayou, which runs just to the south of the medical center, floods at 29,000 cubic feet per second, he said.

“If we’d gotten another inch or two, the bayou would have gone over,” said Bedient. “And that inch or two could have come hours later.”

As it happened, while Texas Gulf Coast residents were boarding up windows and buying batteries less than 12 hours ahead of Hurricane Ike, doctors at the Texas Medical Center were performing a liver transplant on a 59-year-old man.

“We could not deny a veteran the chance for a potential life-saving procedure because of a little wind and rain,” said David Berger, M.D, a physician at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, which is a part of the Texas Medical Center.

Thomas Franklin, who suffered from end-stage liver disease caused by hepatitis C, received his new liver in a seven-hour surgery on Friday, September 12 as wind and rain buffeted the Texas Medical Center.

Liver transplant patient Thomas Franklin recovers
at the Michal E. DeBakey VA Medical
Center surrounded by Surgical Intensive
Care staff members. (Photo by Deborah
Williams courtesy Texas Medical Center)

Hurricane Ike made landfall at nearby Galveston, Texas at two o’clock on Saturday morning. A few hours later, with power outages across Houston, flooded streets, downed trees and power lines, and rain bands and wind gusts still battering the city, John Goss, M.D., chief of abdominal transplantation at Baylor College of Medicine, which partners with the Veterans Administration in liver transplant efforts, made his way to the hospital to check on his patient.

“I check on all my patients after surgery,” said Goss. “The situation was no different with Mr. Franklin.”

“I won the lottery,” said Franklin. “I’m alive today because of this hospital, because of these wonderful doctors, nurses, and everyone else involved in the transplant program, and most importantly, because of the gift of life that was given to me by an organ donor and their family.”

Now, Bedient and his colleagues at the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center, or SSPEED, are working to extend the same predictive capabilities they used for the Texas Medical Center to all of Greater Houston.

SSPEED is an organization of Gulf Coast universities, emergency managers and public and private partners formed to address deficiencies in storm prediction, disaster planning and evacuations from New Orleans to Brownsville.

The goal, said Bedient, is to provide authorities with information from a new flood prediction tool while there is still time to save lives and property. If a road is likely to go under or a bridge may be washed over, officials will get the word quickly.

“We love meteorologists, but they always look up, and they don’t look down,” he said. “We’re doing the evaluation down here on the ground, where the meteorology meets the road.”

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HOUSTON, Texas, April 27, 2008 (ENS) – The ground moving beneath Houstonians’ feet is not felt at the magnitude of recent earthquakes in San Antonio and Illinois, but it is shifting nonetheless, say geologists at the University of Houston. They warn that the shaky ground beneath the city could mean trouble for buildings, roads and pipelines located on one of hundreds of fault lines.

After finding more than 300 surface faults in Harris County, the University of Houston geologists say the region’s builders and city planners would do well to pay attention to the new information they have mapped.

“These shifting fault lines originated millions of years ago during the formation of the Gulf of Mexico,” said Shuhab Khan, assistant professor of geology at the university.

“While they are not the kinds that wreak havoc in earthquake-prone California and now the Midwest, they can move up to one inch a year, causing serious damage over the course of several years to buildings and streets that straddle a fault line,” he said.

Structures on the subsiding side of the fault line could be more susceptible to flooding due to the lower elevation over time, Khan warned.

Using radar-like laser technology – called lidar for light detection and ranging – Khan and geology PhD student Richard Engelkemeir found that the Houston area is riddled with hundreds of faults. Cracks in pavement and structures are already showing in many of these locations.

The scientists started by looking at data compiled during a 2001 study funded by the Federal Emergency Management Administration, FEMA, and the Harris County Flood Control District.

In 2001, Tropical Storm Allison dumped nearly 40 inches of rain on the Houston area over five days, causing nearly two dozen deaths and billions of dollars in property damage.

To update floodplain maps, FEMA and the flood district employed lidar technology to survey the county.

Using lidar technology, laser beams were directed from an aircraft toward the ground. The time between the laser beam pulse and the return reflection from any point on the ground was used to determine the distance between the instrument and that point.

Buildings and vegetation were then removed from the model to produce a map that shows even the most subtle differences in surface elevation.

When Khan and Engelkemeir refined the grids to identify the more than 300 faults, they found that many were associated with the salt domes in the southeast part of the county.

Other faults were found in the northwest part of the county near highways Texas 6 and I-10, where the ground is subsiding, or sinking.

During the summer of 2005, Engelkemeir visited about 50 of the faults located with the lidar data, looking for signs of displacement where the land on one side of the fault was rising higher than the other.

At many of the faults, he saw cracks in street pavements, and learned that neighborhood residents had foundation problems. At one home there was about three feet of displacement between the garage and the house.

At another site, a building had been so damaged by ground shifts that it was condemned.

Geologists are still studying what causes fault movements and the resulting subsidence in the region. Engelkemeir said some scientists believe land-use practices such as groundwater and petroleum withdrawal are responsible for the faults.

“By knowing the location of surface faults, builders and government planners will be able to avoid those areas or accommodate potential ground shifts in their construction plans,” Khan said. “And we must still keep in mind that while lidar has allowed us to identify previously unmapped faults, there still might be faults in the region that have yet to be located.”

To view a Houston-area map showing active surface faults, click here [www.uh.edu].

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