Hurricane flags posted

BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS | WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

September 6, 2005

WASHINGTON - Weather patterns indicate that the United States has entered an era of many more hurricanes than in recent decades, and disaster experts say the country is not ready for them.

"We're in this new era now ... the U.S. is going to be hit with these major storms. We're going to see hurricane damage like we've never previously seen it," said Bill Gray of Colorado State University, one of the leading hurricane forecasters in the country.

The new hurricane cycle started in 1995, Gray said, but until last year the United States had been lucky, as winds kept many of the hurricanes out to sea. Now, with four hurricanes hitting Florida last year and Katrina this year, the luck seems to be running out.

There was ample warning this summer that this would be a tough year for hurricanes, and probably will continue to be.

50% chance for East Coast

Last month both Gray and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration raised their estimates of the total number of hurricanes expected to form in the Atlantic Ocean this year. NOAA predicted nine to 11 hurricanes this year, with five to seven becoming major hurricanes, instead of two or three big hurricanes in a normal year.

Gray predicted 10 hurricanes, and said there is a better than 50 percent chance that a big hurricane with sustained winds of 110 mph or more will hit the East Coast - somewhere from Florida to just north of Long Island - this year. Katrina struck the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts with sustained winds of from 125 to nearly 135 mph, according to NOAA.

"Given the forecast that the remainder of the season will be very active, it is imperative that residents and government officials in hurricane-vulnerable communities have a hurricane preparedness plan in place," NOAA warned on Aug. 2, four weeks before Katrina struck New Orleans.

Gray said that the variations in sea water salinity, temperature, currents and winds that help to make a hurricane tend to run in cycles that run roughly 30 years, and that the current cycle could easily last another 15 or 20.

"People should realize how lucky the U.S. has been in the last 40 years, up until last year," Gray said.

But that good fortune has helped encourage a tremendous building boom along the East and Gulf Coasts that means that many more people, houses, hotels and other structures are in jeopardy.

The value of insured property along the two coasts is five times greater now than 25 years ago. According to one disaster expert, David Prevatt of Clemson University, half of the nation's population now lives in hurricane prone areas.

Prevatt, a professor of civil engineering who specializes in wind and water damage, said the United States is not spending nearly what it needs to on research and protection from hurricanes.

"If we spend nothing [more] we would result in this catastrophe coming over and over again," he said. "We have to face the fact we are living with hurricanes and we cannot prevent them."

He said the damage to New Orleans from Katrina could have been mitigated by long years of work.

"It would not have happened in a year or two. It would have to have been a concerted, directed effort over many years," he said.

"Unfortunately we will get it [another Katrina] again," Prevatt said. "It might be 500 years from today, it might be tomorrow, but we will get it again."

Terrorism steals attention

Not only has development along the coast greatly increased the risk, but new priorities such as preventing terrorism have actually meant a cut in funds to prepare for natural disasters just when they are more likely, said Tricia Wachtendorf, a disaster sociologist at the Disaster Research Center in Delaware.

"Since 9/11 we have been focusing on terrorism preparedness and that's important, but there have been concerns raised by local emergency managers that the attention to mitigation for natural disasters may have been severely cut," she said.

Prevatt said the country must grapple with some tough questions in how it responds to Katrina.

"We like to live by the beach and people like to visit beaches in summers and it's very attractive," he said. But "in those areas that have been devastated, like Mississippi, are we going to build back within a mile of the coastline? It's a question for society. Do we want to place those houses and casinos right in the line of the storm surge, again?"