Although I chase neither fire engines nor ambulances, I have long had an interest in hurricanes. As a child on Long Island in the 1960s, I huddled around a candle-lit kitchen table while Hurricane Donna blew through New England. Once on a British Airways flight from London to New York, I sat filled with admiration and fascination as the pilot landed the plane into the fringes of Hurricane Belle, which on the tarmac he described as “not much worse than a summer day in Brighton.” In college along the banks of the Susquehanna River, I watched the remnants of a hurricane flood the town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where during a dark night I went door-to-door to convince the residents that it was either time to leave their houses or sleep in the attic. Interestingly, I managed to persuade only a handful of riverside residents to leave in time. The torrent that Susquehanna became at flood stage was more persuasive.
The hurricane bug stayed with me into my twenties, when I proposed to the magazine of Pan American Airways, Clipper, to write an article about tropical storms. The editor wasn’t sure if passengers wanted to be reminded of eyewalls and swirling low pressure while flying the oceans. But I explained to her that hurricanes did not pose much of a risk to commercial aviation, and some weeks later I departed for Florida to interview what in the newspapers are called “hurricane officials.”
I began my week in Coral Gables, Florida, where I met the then-director of the National Hurricane Center, Dr. Neil Frank. The hurricane season generally lasts from June to November. As I was there in the off-season, he invited me to lunch and toured me around the center, which then had banks of primitive computers and radar monitors, like you might see in a tower of air-traffic controllers. Dr. Frank had an ebullient and engaging personality, and after a sandwich lunch he gave me a slide show on the back of his office door.
Before visiting the center, I knew a few of the hurricane basics: that they generally form over Africa or the eastern Atlantic as systems of low pressure, that not all low pressure systems mature into hurricanes, that they feed off the warm waters of the Atlantic and the Caribbean, and that when they approach the southeastern American coast, they are guided by upper air currents and those of the Gulf Stream. Dr. Frank kept repeating that hurricanes were “nature’s teapot,” a rolling boil that lets off the steam of an African summer or other Atlantic highs.
Yes, he feared some correlation between global warming and increased hurricane activity, but at that time in the early 1980s, his evidence on that subject was not conclusive. Rather he spoke more of patterns in the upper atmosphere that either pushed hurricanes into the Gulf of Mexico or up the Atlantic seaboard. In the 1950s, a lot of hurricanes had gone ashore around the Outer Banks of North Carolina while later they tended to slam into either Texas or the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi. Hurricanes are strongest, he said, at their recurvature point, when like bowling bowls they started to curve, usually to the northeast. He made the point that as a hurricane went further north along the Atlantic seaboard, it tended to lose strength over cooler waters, but at the same time often moved faster. The 1938 hurricane that blasted Long Island and New England was traveling at close to 60 miles per hour when it came ashore, while some tropical storms around the warmer Caribbean had dithered and stalled before making landfall.
If you spend any time around hurricane experts, you learn quickly that they all have their favorite storms, and they can discuss many as if they had distinct personalities. Dr. Frank got excited speaking of storms that changed direction abruptly, or those that lasted more than two weeks, or others that had perfect eyewall formations. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 did a small loop, like a basketball player splitting a zone. Zigging and zagging, Hurricane Ginger made about four passes over central Cuba. Hurricane Donna, from my childhood, had maintained its strength while raking Florida and North Carolina and finally New England.
While respecting the lethal qualities of any hurricane, the few experts I met all marveled when they encountered the perfect storm, such as Hurricane Camille, a category 5 that devastated the Gulf coast in 1969. In scientific terms, Camille had it all: low pressure, size, a distinctive tail, and a strengthening drive found in few storms in the last century. Hurricane Allen, in 1980, had been a category 5 several times on its way across the Gulf of Mexico but then lost its mojo and came ashore in Brownsville, Texas as a 3. Most powerful of all storms was the 1935 hurricane that, in the era before satellites and aerial reconnaissance, devastated the Florida Keys with no warning.
As it happened, Dr. Frank went to Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1969, hours after Camille had made landfall. He had brought with him a camera, and it was slides from that trip that I saw on the back of his office door. In particular, Dr. Frank explained to me that the greatest threat in a hurricane, perhaps worse than the high winds, is the storm surge—the dome of high water that comes ashore with a tropical cyclone. On beach piers he had marked the levels of surge associated with Camille, which were more than twenty feet above normal sea levels. Then he spoke about the risks of similar surge elsewhere around the country.
Dr. Frank had various doomsday scenarios—all resulting from a combination of meteorological shortcomings and the force of nature. In most cases, hurricanes are as hard to forecast as skittles or spinning tops. You may know the incline of the floor and the consistency of the tiles. But storms can make freakish turns—sometimes called wobbles—at the last minute, just as Katrina did before she came ashore. A result of this unpredictability is that forecasters do not always know where a hurricane will strike, and that can leave coastal residents with less than adequate time to escape harm’s way.
Dr. Frank kept returning to the hurricane risk in the Florida Keys. In good weather, it would take two or three days to evacuate them, given there is only one way out. At the same time, the Keys are virtually at sea level, and the escape routes, in a bad and unpredictable storm, would be closed hours before the storm hit. One that came with a twenty-foot surge would cover the Keys. Thus forecasters have the unenviable position of having to predict the worse and at times being wrong. Some storms weaken before hitting land; others drift out to sea. If you ask most people, they can describe all the hurricanes that have missed them, and very few that delivered on the apocalyptic promise. The early forecasts had Hurricane Andrew coming ashore on a Tuesday or a Wednesday in Palm Beach, when it landed early on a Monday morning, south of Miami.
What scared Dr. Frank was the following: big powerful storms, with little warning time, striking Miami, Tampa Bay, or New Orleans. He even said the worse possible time would be on the last day of the Labor Day weekend, when people were stuck in holiday traffic. Usually, hurricanes have long tracks across the Atlantic and the Caribbean—so-called Cape Verde storms—and satellites together with Hurricane Hunter planes have made forecasting them more a science than an art. But Caribbean storms can intensify with sudden violence. Both Camille in 1969, and Katrina in 2005, grew to category 5 storms only in the Gulf of Mexico, and then struck land within two days. To evacuate a city like New Orleans, I remember Dr. Frank telling me, would take more than a week, and how is that possible every time a storm spins into the Gulf? Since 1851, 108 hurricanes have struck Texas and Louisiana. What made Katrina so lethal was its vast size, its relative slow speed, the warmth and shallow coastline of the Gulf, and the misfortune that its cyclonic winds caught the levees from the north and lakeside of the city. But it was not an exception: in the last 150 years about twenty category 4 and 5 hurricanes have come ashore along the US Gulf.
Dr. Frank was not an economist, but his argument about hurricanes, in the end, was financial. The point he kept making in 1981 was that the U.S. could not afford the cost of hurricane damage if it continued to allow beachside construction on sand dunes and in flood zones. He showed me maps and slides of Florida in the 1940s, when deserted barrier islands could absorb the brunt of a strong hurricane, and then modern photographs of the same coastline, now dotted with high-rise condominiums. He believed his forecasters could get many people away from a hurricane’s fury, but he had no ability to stop the frantic development of the Eastern and Gulf coastlines. As a result, he predicted the usual cycle of tropical storms, but ones that would cost proportionately more money than anyone could imagine.
I have lost track of Dr. Frank, but not his cautionary tales. The news that Hurricane Katrina would cost more than $100 billion in losses prompted me to look at the invoices associated with other hurricanes. The National Hurricane Center has a list on its Web site of the costliest U.S. hurricanes. Alas, the figures are not adjusted for inflation. Nevertheless, of the thirty most expensive storms since 1900, 19 have occurred since 1989, when Hurricane Hugo cost the city of Charleston, South Carolina $7 billion. Before Katrina flooded New Orleans, the costliest storm was Andrew, which ran up bills of $26.5 billion in south Florida—the same coastline that Dr. Frank had warned me was ripe for a large hurricane.
In the case of Hurricane Katrina, Congress voted temporary disaster aid of $10 billion before the last survivors were off the rooftops. A few days later President George W. Bush defiantly promised to rebuild the ravished coasts and requested another $51 billion in disaster aid. He knew well what he was promising, as in the months prior to the 2004 presidential election, hurricanes Charley, Ivan, and Jeanne had prompted $36.1 billion in payouts to Florida residents. The federal government had footed many of those bills, supporting the inalienable American right to live in the path of natural disasters. Nor did it hurt anyone’s claim that the people crawling out of their devastated trailers would soon be voting in the presidential election. In the case of New Orleans, nearly all of the bailout will also come from the federal government as for many years insurance companies there have refused to write flood insurance—showing more foresight than the Bush administration when it diverted funds for levee reinforcement to Iraq and tax cuts.
After leaving the office of Dr. Frank in Coral Gables, I spent a week in Florida touring hurricane preparedness offices, and speaking with coast watchers in places like Key West. All of them agreed that they did not have the resources to deal with a major storm, such as a Camille or an Andrew, either in terms of convincing people to leave or in terms of protecting private property. Building codes were rarely enforced, they noted, and more than one official described how the low pressure of a hurricane’s core had the ability to pop roofs off houses as if they were bottle tops. The only way to escape from the savage sea was to be inland—a lesson state and federal governments have dismissed since a hurricane in 1900 killed 8,000 residents in Galveston, Texas. In Florida alone in the last hundred years, the population has increased by 15 million, and most of that growth has been along the coastline.
Just because Dr. Frank warned me in 1981 about the hurricane risks to New Orleans does not mean the disaster there was avoidable. At the same time no one in city, state or the federal government can say of the breached levees, as did President Bush: “How were we to know?” or the more provocative, “Tell me what didn’t go right?” Dr. Frank and his successors, men like Bob Sheets and the current director, Max Mayfield, all knew. Sheets published Hurricane Watch in 2001 in which he writes: “Among the experts, the vulnerability of New Orleans is legendary and scary,” and then devotes a chapter to describing how the city would flood in a category 4 hurricane, and how many residents would not get out in time. The book costs $15; paying for ignoring its conclusions will cost more than $100 billion.
A friend of mine once said about politics that it is no fun to be in government if you can’t spend any money. By that account, the Bush administration must be having a ball in Washington. It turned a half trillion-dollar budget surplus into a deficit of the same amount. The occupation of Iraq is costing more than $5 billion a month, and the annual budgets for defense and homeland security now exceed $450 billion, although for that money you can’t get bottled water delivered to the New Orleans Convention Center. Another half a trillion dollar invoice is that of the trade deficit, much of it paid to Middle East sheikdoms to import oil, if not their religious fundamentalism. The attacks of September 11th, also on the radar of many forecasters, cost between $10-20 billion. In the last year the Bush administration will have paid out almost $150 billion to cover hurricane damage, although none of that funding will erase the image of New Orleans as a first-world Bangladesh—a flood zone of anarchy and absentee leadership. Is it any wonder then that, after Katrina, a few African and Asian governments offered to send the residents of Louisiana tents and blankets? Maybe next time around they will send financial aid?
