There’s more: Future hurricanes will actually be worse than Isaiah. The models Isaiah is based on, developed by Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation From Disaster (Sspeed) Center, don’t account for climate change. According to Jim Blackburn, Sspeed’s co-director, other models have shown much more alarming surges. “The City of Houston and FEMA did a climate change future,” he told me, “and the surge in that scenario was 34 feet. Hurricanes are going to get bigger. No question. They are fueled by the heat of the ocean, and the ocean’s warming. Our models are nowhere close.”

I took a tour on the M/V Sam Houston to see the Houston Ship Channel, the densest energy infrastructure nexus in the United States. The boat slipped from the pier and spun east. Across the brown-black water, giant cranes shifted scrap from one heap to another with magnets and claws, throwing up clouds of metal.

Several industrial recycling companies line the upper reaches of the channel, all recognized emitters of one of the most potent carcinogens known to science, hexavalent chromium. Behind the cranes lies the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Magnolia Park, whose residents have long complained of mysterious gas emissions, persistent pollution and strange, multicolored explosions. I thought of the models Mr. Blackburn had shown me, imagining a wave of water sweeping toxic waste into playgrounds, shops and houses.

The tour boat’s engines thrummed beneath my feet. In the distance, gas flares flashed against the cloud cover.

A voice boomed from the boat: “First refinery to the right, this is Valero. This refinery began operations in 1942. It will handle 145,000 barrels of oil per day.” Directly behind Valero lies Hartman Park, with its green lawns and baseball diamonds — the jewel of Manchester, one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the United States. Manchester is bordered on the north by Valero, and on the east, south and west by a chemical plant, a car-crushing yard, a water-treatment plant, a train yard, Interstate 610 and a Goodyear synthetic rubber plant. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency found toxic levels of seven different carcinogens in the neighborhood.

Our tour boat was out and back in 90 minutes, but the Houston Ship Channel keeps going for miles. Rounding the San Jacinto Battleground, it bends south, cutting a trench approximately 530 feet wide and 45 feet deep through Galveston Bay all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. As you follow the channel south on I-45, strip clubs and fast-food franchises give way to bayou resorts and refineries. I-45 ends in downtown Galveston, once known as the “Wall Street of the South”: a mix of historic homes, dry-docked oil rigs, beach bars and the University of Texas Medical Branch. The gulf spreads sullen and muddy to the horizon, its placid skin broken by distant blisters of flaming steel.