Looking back on the past few days of low temperatures, ice, snow, power and water outages, and more, it's time to focus on innovation for resilience. Photo courtesy of ABC13

Greater Houston and all of Texas have faced enough persistent challenges over the past seven years that communities and businesses are at a breaking point. Not just financially and economically, but at societal and emotional levels expected from repeated natural and man-made disasters.

Increasingly, the focus on "resilience" as a call to action has become a buzzword rather than measure of performance by public and private sector decision-makers. Simply, our version of resilience is defined as pre-disaster risk mitigation and investment, not recovery and rebuilding after the fact, which is precisely what is being debated across traditional and social media.

As families, small businesses, larger corporations, neighborhoods, and communities require stability, predictability, and frankly reliability, there is now disappointment and disillusion across party lines for our public agencies, programs, officials. When the last major freeze and snowfall hit Texas, the state's power grid ERCOT and the legislature were warned that unless immediate steps were taken to invest in our electrical grid, an expected collapse of the entire system would leave entire cities and potentially the state in darkness with life-threatening consequences. Review any of the published recommendations from previous disasters and each conclusion identifies necessary and urgent investment, re-engineering, and technological innovation. And yet many of those findings are but another can kicked down the road.

While finger-pointing, investigations, hearings, reports, studies can be the actions of our elected and appointed officials, we turn to entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, and investors as the path forward. Want to add to your blood pressure? Read all the After-Action Reports and Lessons-Learned Analyses — from as far back as Hurricane Andrew to the most recent disasters, including snowstorms, derechos, wildfires, and now COVID-19. Very little changes in these documents regarding the failures of government and/or the significant gaps between alerts, warnings, preparation, response, recovery, rebuilding. More recently, analysis and assessments provided by Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania and the Insurance Information Institute suggest a 1:4+ return on investment for pre-disaster resilience.

Communities often are asked to rely upon hydrological engineering and science as the holy grails in response to our floods, storms, hurricanes. And yet, there is a new "class" of data scientists, analytic tools, curated information, and significant user interfaces that have changed how government, industry, civic, academia and philanthropy can allocate their resources in more efficient and effective ways to unleash innovative resilience. Emerging enterprises and organizations to watch that are driving the "new resilience data science" for entrepreneurs and innovators alike to develop the next generation of insight include Jupiter Intelligence, HazardHub, ResilientGrid, and EcoMetrics.

What is rarely captured in the post-incident studies and gatherings is the powerful impact of the "GSD" networks — "The Get Shit Done" relationships, partnerships, tools and resources mobilized by unleashing innovation! And the good news is that Greater Houston as well as across the nation, a number of companies, products, integrated data-equipment, digital platforms, and best practices have emerged from several innovation ecosystems that should be brought to the forefront of any next steps for community and civic leaders seeking to address a 21st century resilience agenda.

There are the data and platform folks — Umanity, FoodBot, GotSpot, Crowd Source Rescue (all based in Houston) along with Harbor, R3Water, and a host of other national firms — for example that have addressed the speed by which needs, resources, information and actionable intelligence can align to assist volunteers, neighborhoods, philanthropy, and small businesses. As previous senior leadership of FEMA have admitted, the public sector can no longer be the go-to resource during every disaster, incident, and threat.If we are to democratize resilience because no one entity can afford continued losses — such as the insurance and reinsurance sector — nor is there enough taxpayer dollars to fix our critical infrastructure, then we must spark private-philanthropic-public partnerships through innovation.

If COVID -19 taught us anything, it's that we continue to face inventory management supply-chain, and resilient inventory problems that have been identified during and after previous disasters. With blockchain, advanced sensors and monitors, robotics and remote screening, reopening Greater Houston and the US can be done with innovative health technologies such as San Antonio-based Xenex.

In regards to the challenge before us, we must recall that the demand and intersection for an energy, water and data "nexus" began to take off in response to the Texas and California droughts, rose again to the forefront during multiple hurricanes in the US, and are a now the latest critical infrastructure focus in the post snowstorms of 2021.

Why is having Elon Musk's GigaFactory in Texas so vital to resilience innovation? Because the research and product development of batteries to retain solar and wind produced power can directly impact the load-demands in advance of an oncoming weather or worse a cybersecurity threat to the grid. Sunnova — another Houston brand — has been proving the benefit of storage capacity from its work in Puerto Rico and now exhibits the unique performance for future off-grid resilience of homes, medical offices, and vital services.

Until and unless the public sector opens the doors for these and other innovators through immediate and permanent changes in procurement and contracting, strategic partnerships, incentives and credits — while frankly sharing the leadership function with entrepreneurs, inventors, and investors — we will all pay the price for the failure to act.

There is still work to be done from a legislative and governmental perspective, but more and more innovators — especially in Houston — are proving to be essential in creating a better future for the next historic disaster we will face. The Insurance Information Institute's National Resilience Accelerator Initiative and Resilience Innovation Hub Collaboratory (with its flagship in Houston) is working to unleash the best of Texas', the Nation's and the World's best ideas, resources, information and investments.

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Richard Seline is the co-founder of the Houston-based Resilience Innovation Hub.

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Rice University team develops eco-friendly method to destroy 'forever chemicals' in water

clean water research

Rice University researchers have teamed up with South Korean scientists to develop the first eco-friendly technology that captures and destroys toxic “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, in water.

PFAS have been linked to immune system disruption, certain cancers, liver damage and reproductive disorders. They can be found in water, soil and air, as well as in products like Teflon pans, waterproof clothing and food packaging. They do not degrade easily and are difficult to remove.

Thus far, PFAS cleanup methods have relied on adsorption, in which molecules cling to materials like activated carbon or ion-exchange resins. But these methods tend to have limited capacity, low efficiency, slow performance and can create additional waste.

The Rice-led study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, centered on a layered double hydroxide (LDH) material made from copper and aluminum that could rapidly capture PFAS and be used to destroy the chemicals.

The study was led by Rice professor Youngkun Chung, a postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Michael S. Wong. It was conducted in collaboration with Seoktae Kang, professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Keon-Ham Kim, professor at Pukyung National University, who first discovered the LDH material.

The team evaluated the LDH material in river water, tap water and wastewater. And, according to Rice, that material’s unique copper-aluminum layers and charge imbalances created an ideal binding environment to capture PFAS molecules.

“To my astonishment, this LDH compound captured PFAS more than 1,000 times better than other materials,” Chung, lead author of the study and now a fellow at Rice’s WaTER (Water Technologies, Entrepreneurship and Research) Institute and Sustainability Institute, said in a news release. “It also worked incredibly fast, removing large amounts of PFAS within minutes, about 100 times faster than commercial carbon filters.”

Next, Chung, along with Rice professors Pedro Alvarez and James Tour, worked to develop an eco-friendly, sustainable method of thermally decomposing the PFAS captured on the LDH material. They heated saturated material with calcium carbonate, which eliminated more than half of the trapped PFAS without releasing toxic by-products.

The team believes the study’s results could potentially have large-scale applications in industrial cleanups and municipal water treatments.

“We are excited by the potential of this one-of-a-kind LDH-based technology to transform how PFAS-contaminated water sources are treated in the near future,” Wong added in the news release. “It’s the result of an extraordinary international collaboration and the creativity of young researchers.”

Axiom Space announces new CEO amid strategic leadership change

new leader

Six months after promoting Tejpaul Bhatia from chief revenue officer to CEO, commercial space infrastructure and human spaceflight services provider Axiom Space has replaced him.

On Oct. 15, Houston-based Axiom announced Jonathan Cirtain has succeeded Bhatia as CEO. Bhatia joined Axiom in 2021. Cirtain remains the company’s president, a role he assumed in June, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In a news release, Axiom said Cirtain’s appointment as CEO is a “strategic leadership change” aimed at advancing the company’s development of space infrastructure.

Axiom hired Cirtain as president in June, according to his LinkedIn profile. The company didn’t publicly announce that move.

Kam Ghaffarian, co-founder and executive chairman of Axiom, said Cirtain’s “proven track record of leadership and commitment to excellence align perfectly with our mission of building era-defining space infrastructure that will drive exploration and fuel the global space economy.”

Aside from praising Cirtain, Ghaffarian expressed his “sincere gratitude” for Bhatia’s work at Axiom, including his leadership as CEO during “a significant transition period.”

Bhatia was promoted to CEO in April after helping Axiom gain more than $1 billion in contracts, Space News reported. He succeeded Ghaffarian as CEO. Axiom didn’t indicate whether Bhatia quit or was terminated.

Cirtain, an astrophysicist, was a senior executive at BWX Technologies, a supplier of nuclear components and fuel, for eight years before joining Axiom. Earlier, Cirtain spent nearly nine years in various roles at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He previously co-founded a machine learning company specializing in Earth observation.

“Axiom Space is pioneering the commercialization of low-Earth orbit infrastructure while accelerating advancements in human spaceflight technologies,” Cirtain said. “I look forward to continuing our team’s important work of driving innovation to support expanded access to space and off-planet capabilities that will underpin the future of space exploration.”

Among other projects, Axiom is developing the world’s first commercial space station, creating next-generation spacesuits for astronauts and sending astronauts on low-Earth orbit missions.

Houston billionaire benefactors will donate almost entire fortune to charity

Giving Back

Houston billionaires Rich and Nancy Kinder plan to donate an astounding 95% of their multi-billion-dollar wealth to charities, they told ABC13's Melanie Lawson.

The news comes as the Kinder Foundation announced an $18.5 million expansion project for Emancipation Park in the heart of Third Ward. That historic park was founded by slaves in 1872.

The Kinders are one of the wealthiest couples in the nation, worth $11.4 billion, according to Forbes. You've certainly seen the Kinder name on buildings and facilities around the city of Houston.

The Kinders are also among the most generous, giving away hundreds of millions to Houston institutions and charities. Their plan is to give away almost all of their wealth, or more than $10 billion.

Rich Kinder helped build oil and gas pipeline giant Kinder Morgan, but he stepped down as CEO more than a decade ago for a what he calls a bigger cause.

"Well, I think we'd all like to leave the world a little better place than we found it," he said. "And we just felt early on that the right thing to do was to try to give most or all of that away. So that's what we plan to do during our lifetime and after our death."

They found kindred spirits as one of the first couples to sign The Giving Pledge, established by billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

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Continue reading the full story, with video, on ABC13.com.