I am very, very happy to see this article written by Reuters. I hope it gets widely picked up. People need to understand how much worse Katrina could have been, and how many other, more severe threats — to New Orleans and elsewhere — still exist.
Because I think it’s really important, I quote the whole thing:
If you thought the sight of New Orleans flooded to the eaves — its people trapped in attics or cowering on rooftops — was the nightmare hurricane scenario, think again.
Max Mayfield, director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center, says there’s plenty of potential for a storm worse than Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,339 people along the U.S. Gulf coast and caused some $80 billion in damage last August.
“People think we have seen the worst. We haven’t,” Mayfield told Reuters in an interview at the fortress-like hurricane center in Florida.
“I think the day is coming. I think eventually we’re going to have a very powerful hurricane in a major metropolitan area worse than what we saw in Katrina and it’s going to be a mega-disaster. With lots of lost lives,” Mayfield said.
“I don’t know whether that’s going to be this year or five years from now or a hundred years from now. But as long as we continue to develop the coastline like we are, we’re setting up for disaster.”
Looking back nearly a year to the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, and the third-worst hurricane in terms of American lives lost, Mayfield said Katrina itself could have been a greater disaster. [Not just greater… far greater. Tens of thousands of deaths greater. -ed.]
More than two days before Katrina struck the Gulf coast August 29, the hurricane center had predicted its future track accurately and also warned it could become a powerful Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.
New Orleans was squarely in the danger zone, and emergency managers and residents had plenty of time to prepare.
“One of my greatest fears is having people go to bed at night prepared for a Category 1 and waking up to a Katrina or Andrew. One of these days, that’s going to happen,” Mayfield said.
Katrina went just to the east of New Orleans, sparing the city the worst of a massive storm surge and the strongest winds. But the city’s protective levees failed.
The worst-case hurricane scenario? Mayfield has many in mind. A stronger hurricane closer to New Orleans. A direct hit on the vulnerable Galveston-Houston area, the fragile Florida Keys or heavily populated Miami-Fort Lauderdale.
Or how about a major hurricane racing up the east coast to the New York-New Jersey area, with its millions of people and billions of dollars of pricey real estate?
“One of the highest storm surges possible anywhere in the country is where Long Island juts out at nearly right angles to the New Jersey coast. They could get 25 to 30 feet of storm surge … even going up the Hudson River,” Mayfield said.
“The subways are going to flood. Some people might think ‘Hey, I’ll go into the subways and I’ll be safe.’ No, they are going to flood.”
Mayfield, a silver-haired, 34-year veteran of the hurricane center who became its public face in 2000, is a tireless campaigner for hurricane preparation, warning the 50 million people who live in U.S. coastal counties from Maine to Texas that they are all in the path of a future storm.
He is mystified by a study that found 60 percent of people in hurricane-prone U.S. coastal areas have no hurricane plan — which to disaster managers means up to a week’s worth of food and water squirreled away, a kit with flashlights and other gear, and an established evacuation route to higher ground.
“After Katrina and after the last two hurricane seasons you can’t understand why more people are not taking hurricanes seriously,” Mayfield said.
Katrina, he says, killed people who stayed in their homes with confidence because they had lived through 1969’s Hurricane Camille. Camille was a much stronger storm than Katrina when it crashed ashore in Louisiana and Mississippi as one of only three Category 5s to hit the United States in recorded history.
“There were a lot of people who lost their lives because they thought that they had already lived through the worst they could possibly live through,” Mayfield said.
“Experience isn’t always a good teacher.”
(Hat tip: Susan M.)
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Categories: 2006 Hurricane Season
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August 22nd, 2006 at 8:37:57 pm
The one thing we can be certain of after Katrina is that when something like this happens the media will make it worse, by getting all of the basic facts wrong.
August 22nd, 2006 at 8:55:28 pm
I want to understand the people who don’t have a week’s worth of food on hand. There are two of us - no kids - in my household. We have at least two weeks of GOOD food on hand. That’s before we get to the canned hash stored in the pantry for an emergency. Growing up in a family of eight, we had a week of food on hand, usually, because we only went to the store on Sunday after church. How often do people go to the grocery store?
August 22nd, 2006 at 9:03:10 pm
Max is so right. Development is almost more of an opiate to our economy than oil.
I still think the CAT scale should reflect the barometric pressue and ultimately the storm surge, as supposed to wind speed.
August 22nd, 2006 at 9:15:07 pm
The Long Island scenario is the worst. Not counting ferries, there are only 4 ways off the island, and they would all immediately jam shut. The highest point (about 400′) is on the Sound side; the Atlantic side is completely exposed. The south fork would be pretty much scoured clean. A category 4 would completely inundate 34 towns and largely destroy more than twice that number.
Link
In the worst case scenario, it could be even worse than Galveston.
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:04:25 pm
The LI scenario is scary but the island is about 100 miles long and a high cat storm on one end mioghtonly be a trop storm on the other end.
Also, odds something bigger than Cat 3 makes it that far north are problematic. We know about 1938. But even that storm didn’t hit NYC that hard, as the east side of the storm was over the Hamptons
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:04:28 pm
Mitch, I’m not sure how you come up with “4 ways off the island”. There are two tunnels and three bridges (four, counting the Triboro) connecting Long Island and Manhattan alone. Certainly evacuating the whole island would be a disaster in itself (there are 7.5 million people living in the four counties on Long Island). On the other hand, Long Island is 100 miles long, so maybe it wouldn’t all need to be evacuated.
The storm surge maps at your link are interesting. But I wondered if the storm surge is shown properly. Does a, say, 27 foot storm surge necessarily flood everyplace less than 27 feet above sea level? I have trouble picturing a storm surge that almost reaches Elmont, despite 5-odd miles of barrier islands, and buildings, and roads, etc.
But certainly the Long Island scenario is hard to beat for “costliest hurricane ever”. Just wiping out the Hamptons (which are on the South Fork) would approach the cost of Katrina, I think.
August 22nd, 2006 at 11:51:36 pm
Hed - Joe Bastardi of Accuweather.com agrees with you. He almost constantly harps on the NHC and NOAA for some reason, but the hurricane categories is one of the main ones.
Another place which is in grave danger is Tampa Bay and that general area. Storm surge rushing into the bay would flood a great portion of Tampa, though would probably not have the loss of life that the Long Island scenario would.
One thing I think people forget is that Katrina really wasn’t all that powerful (relative to what it was in the gulf) when it came onshore. New Orleans gets all the press, but Mississippi and Alabama got hit as hard if not harder. The worst of the NO flooding was due to engineering flaws by the Corps of Engineers when building the levees. It wasn’t because of the hurricane winds.
People aren’t taking the precautions because of several reasons, chief among them being they don’t think it will happen to them. If it does happen, they expect the government to bail them out. When we had a tornado hit near us this year, we had friends in the path. I followed the tornado for several miles to their house, made sure they were alright, then brought them home to stay with us because they had no power. Government didn’t even play into it. In fact, I got a page at 3 the next morning because the sheriff’s department couldn’t get into their own EOC and wanted me to come install software on their laptop a full six hours after the incident occurred. (I work for a company that does public safety software, including emergency management.) People are much better served by the community than the government. The problem with large-scale events like a hurricane is that the entire community is affected.
/rant
August 23rd, 2006 at 2:37:51 am
The WWII battleship USS Alabama was grounded in the mud of Mobile Bay and made into a permanent museum exhibit in 1965. Ever since then, when a hurricane threatened Mobile, museum staff have been allowed to weather the storm on board the battleship. Even Hurricane Camille in 1969 didn’t bother the battleship. Forty thousand tons of steel, 14-inch armor plate — it was the safest place to be in a storm.
Or so they thought.
Katrina lifted the ship up off the mud, tilted it fifteen degrees, and filled in sand and mud underneath to give the ship a fixed list to port. The permanent gangways were shattered. The adjacent aircraft pavilion was destroyed. And remember, the eye of Katrina went ashore a hundred miles away.
USS Alabama Photos after Katrina
I was a kid when Camille hit. When Mayfield says people thought Camille was as bad as it could get, he’s exactly right. Camille razed the Mississippi Gulf coast. Memories of Camille inspired my family to evacuate every time a hurricane of any size approached. Last year, we rode out Cindy. We fled Dennis. And we watched from afar as Katrina came ashore, thinking it could be “another Camille”. We had no idea how much worse it could be. No one on that part of the coast did.
August 23rd, 2006 at 6:58:22 am
[…] Now that we’ve survived August 22, Instapundit links my fellow hurricane-watcher, Brendan Loy, who in turn has quoted the […]
August 23rd, 2006 at 9:24:45 am
Brendon,
I don’t know if you remember but you contacted me before the storm last year to post comments on your blog as Katrina came in. Unfortunately, we lost power and phones so I was unable to contact you. I hope you watched Spike Lee’s documentary. It told the truth of what happened and continues to happen here. I was so happy to see you in it. Learn from our lesson. America, YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. The government is useless. Right now I have 40 gallons of gas ready. a generator, food, water, old-time phone, chain saw, ax, important documents in a water tight container…ANYTHING I can think of. Some people are actually dehydrating food to have it ready. I am thinking of getting an inflatable boat even though I am 40 feet above sea level. LOL! You must remember though that all of this costs a lot of money and many people don’t have the resources to do this. Evacuation is even more expensive. That is why government HAS to step up and supply a safe place and supplies for these people. I hope you never have to experience the horror and the vastness of the destruction that the southern Gulf Coast has experienced. I am changed forever.
August 23rd, 2006 at 9:59:55 am
DoctorJ
Which government is useless? Fed, State or Local? Which one do you believe has the obligation to take care of you in an emergency such as Katrina. Who is to take the first action of survival - you, the Government, your neighbors, etc. In a way, I was glad to see the government’s uselessness since it should have been an education to all that each individual has the primary responsibility for its own safety, its own preparedness and its own security. And I live in Florida on east coast (literally on the beach) and have a home in Long Island (in a storm surge flood zone - Cat 3).