Choices made on the ground are behind the disaster of Hurricane Harvey

When the history books talk about Hurricane Harvey, the devastating storm that dropped more than 120 centimetres of water on south-east Texas, they'll call it a natural disaster. When the insurance companies – the ones that don't go bankrupt – categorise claims from the storm, they file them under "acts of God”.

In the past three years, Houston has experienced three 500-year floods. 

But though the trillions of gallons of water dropped from the sky – rainfall so immense that meteorologists had to add new colours to their maps, just as Australian meteorologists had to add new colours to capture record high temperatures in the country – the devastation the storm wrought was as much a result of choices made on the ground.

From urban sprawl to housing policy to climate legislation, the city of Houston's fate was shaped in state houses and on Capitol Hill, determined not only by policymakers' actions but by their inactions. And the solutions to the growing threat of storms like Harvey reside there as well.

Read Nicole Hemmer’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Choices made on the ground are behind the disaster of Hurricane Harvey.”