The dams that couldn’t contain Hurricane Harvey

Photo: J. Daniel Escareño / Flickr.
Updated on January 2, 2019

The Addicks and Barker dams were built near Houston, Texas in an attempt to save the city from potential flooding. But the huge storage capacity of the reservoirs was not enough to contain the more than 15 billion gallons of water that Hurricane Harvey brought to the state in less than a week. Given the climatic reality of increasingly intense natural phenomena, we must ask ourselves, are dams really the best option">