hazards

The Houston-Galveston region is even more vulnerable to hurricane flood damage today than it was when Hurricane Ike struck in 2008, concluded Md Yousuf Reja ’16 in his final Master of Urban Planning project.

Texas A&M University researchers are collaborating on an NSF initiative aimed at identifying links between the U.S. food distribution system and the nation’s energy, water and transportation networks that are most likely to be disrupted in a natural disaster.

After each heavy rain last spring on the streets of an impoverished, east Houston industrial neighborhood, students from nearby Furr High School trained by Texas A&M graduate planning students mapped and tested the toxicity of storm floodwaters.

Phil Berke, professor of urban planning, and Jennifer Horney, Texas A&M associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, are conducting research to raise community resilience to natural disasters.

Interdisciplinary groups of faculty and students in five U.S. universities will pair with counterparts in The Netherlands in a research project led by Sam Brody, professor of urban planning, to determine how to reduce the impact of coastal flooding.

A proposed “Ike Dike” to protect the Galveston/Houston area from hurricane storm surges should incorporate business parks, public spaces and pedestrian thoroughfares, concludes research funded by Texas A&M’s Institute for Sustainable Coastal Communities.

A research team from Texas A&M’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center is working to identify best practices in pre- and post-disaster planning in communities recovering from a variety of natural and man-made disasters.

Texas A&M’s national prominence in disaster planning research is evidenced in the February 2015 Journal of the American Planning Association special issue in which four of the publication’s 10 articles were penned by Texas A&M faculty and former students.

An elite group of urban planning researchers from Texas A&M University have been selected to play an integral role with scientists from 11 universities in a nationwide initiative aimed at helping communities prepare for and recover from natural disasters.

The Sea Grant Program at Texas A&M have teamed up with the university's Institute for Applied Creativity to produce videos that illuminate important issues related to weather, water and climate change in Texas.

Procedures to create resilient communities — places that avoid, absorb and recover quickly from natural disasters — are detailed in a new book co-authored by four urban planning educators at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture.

A master plan for transforming a heavily polluted industrial area in Dhaka, Bangladesh into a vibrant community — designed in-part by two Texas A&M Master of Architecture students — earned first place honors at a four-day design charrette in Bangladesh.

To contend with the rapidly escalating threat of coastal flooding, government agencies need to adopt a new, fundamentally different strategy focused on flood prevention rather than recovery, according to a recent National Research Council report.

Toxic waste pits along the San Jacinto River in far east Harris County containing dioxin and other hazardous substances are a “loaded gun” threatening human health and the environment, said Sam Brody, professor of urban planning at Texas A&M University.

A Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center team is investigating how recovery from a man-made disaster differs from a natural disaster as part of a National Science Foundation study focusing on the Texas towns of West and Granbury, which were hit, respectively, by a chemical plant explosion and a tornado.