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Every one of those [petrochemical] materials floats on water. So if the flood waters reach your home but they’re only an inch deep, you’re still contaminated for a long time.
Rob Rogers, founding partner, Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers
Eighteen years after Hurricane Ike showed the catastrophic storm-surge risk to the Houston area’s industrial and petroleum complex, architect Rob Rogers is making the case for a storm barrier inside Galveston Bay. Built largely from material dredged from the Houston Ship Channel, it would double as a public park.
Why it matters
When Ike hit, Texas refineries holding about a fifth of U.S. capacity shut down, and gas ran short as far away as Atlanta. The federal plan to protect the channel is still in design.
The question
How do we maintain the public will to pay for protection when the last disaster is fading from view?
Why here
On the I-10 corridor’s Gulf Coast, the Coastal Texas Project—the “Ike Dike”—is what Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham calls “the largest coastal resiliency undertaking in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers history.”
Rogers Partners developed the Galveston Bay Park Plan with Rice University’s SSPEED Center and engineers at Walter P Moore. Rice put its cost at about $7 billion in 2025.
In this episode, Rob Rogers, founding partner of Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers, joins Duke Reiter to discuss what an architect brings to flood protection design, why the Army Corps’ process never produced a plan like his, and what the Ship Channel, like the interstate highway system, tells us about building for generations. This is Part One of a two-part series on who pays to protect the Texas coast. In Part Two, Bolivar Peninsula resident and advocate Brenda Flanagan and Michel Bechtel of the Gulf Coast Protection District talk about the peninsula’s engineered sand dunes and who maintains them.
Relevant Articles and Resources
- “Massive Galveston Bay Barrier System Gets One Step Closer to Construction” (Public Health Watch, February 2026)
- “Texas Leads Bold Push to Build ‘The Gate’” (Texas General Land Office, December 2025)
- “Rice’s SSPEED Center unveils Galveston Bay Park Plan: A comprehensive solution to hurricane storm surge threats” (Rice News, May 2025)
- “Houston Ship Channel Ranked #1 U.S. Waterway” (Port Houston, May 2025)
- “Galveston Bay Park (Houston-Galveston Area Protection System)” (Rogers Partners)
- “Post-Ike gas shortage may take weeks to end” (Christian Science Monitor, September 2008)
- “Hurricane Ike idles 21% of US refining capacity” (Oil & Gas Journal, September 2008)
Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts
- Negotiating Survival: The Complex Decision-Making Required to Save Louisiana’s Coast
- Katrina’s 20th: Jeff Hébert on Community Recovery and Resilience
- Addressing Historical Inequities in Our National Infrastructure, Then and Now
- How Houston Texas Reveals America’s Future with Kyle Shelton
Credits
Host: Duke Reiter
Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano
Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler
Guest Speaker
Rob Rogers, FAIA, is the Founding Partner of Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers and has served as professor and architecture critic at prestigious design schools and universities around the country. Believing that even a single building is a piece of urban design, his work explores the limits of architecture and the overlap of disciplines: the spaces where architecture, landscapes, and the public realm converge. Designing in cities nationally and abroad, Rob is committed to design excellence, creating work built on research, analysis, discovery, and shared experience.
