How Vulnerable Are Other US Cities to Katrina-Like Damage?

Commentary by John C. Topping, Jr., President, Climate Institute

The terrible human tragedy caused by Hurricane Katrina has already sparked some very harsh commentary by commentators from all parts of the political spectrum about the tardiness of the initial governmental response, with commentators from Paul Krugman to David Brooks and even such conservative publications as The Manchester Union Leader blasting the President and the Washington Times criticizing the Bush administration and the City of New Orleans for their handling of the disaster response effort.

The scenario that is playing out in New Orleans was eerily forecast in a five part series in the New Orleans Time-Picayune in June 2002. The series indicated that a direct hit by a major hurricane might breach the levees, flood the city and cause a huge casualty toll. In the summer of 2004 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had carried out a simulation of the effect of a category 3 hurricane scoring a direct hit on New Orleans. The scenario pointed to the likelihood that much of the population would not be evacuated and that the casualties could be immense.

New Orleans’ vulnerability was a function of several factors: 1) its perilous geographic location between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, that has helped make the city a great shipping hub, but has exposed it to hurricanes and flooding; 2) flood protection levee engineering along the Mississippi River that has greatly reduced alluvial soil replenishment of the mouth of the River causing the Mississippi mud to be deposited in the Gulf of Mexico with about 24 square miles of Louisiana wetlands being lost each year to the Gulf and 3) global sea level rise that has caused about six inches to a foot of sea level rise over the last century and is expected to accelerate significantly in this century.

Over the next few months and perhaps years American politics will likely be focused in significant part on such emotionally charged issues as who lost New Orleans, particularly if the City of New Orleans, except perhaps its historic French Quarter, seems destined like Times Beach, Missouri, to be a casualty of human action or inaction. At the same time that the US, in resettling upwards of a million refugees, is facing as grave a domestic crisis as it has encountered since the Great Depression our politics may be embroiled in a debate nearly as toxic as the waters that may make much of New Orleans uninhabitable for a long time.

New Orleans, Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula May Only Be the Beginning

Sadly, the terrible carnage in coastal Louisiana and coastal Mississippi may not be a freak event, but a foretaste of what many US coastal cities, large and small, may face as a result of improvident development policies that have swept away wetlands and other natural barriers against the sea, a gradual sea level rise driven by humankind’s greenhouse emissions, and a possible increase of hurricane intensity.

There is still scientific uncertainty, but as the article by the noted hurricane researcher Hugh Willoughby indicates, a doubling of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 is likely to result in more intense rainfall in even moderate hurricanes and a movement of more high category 4s on the Saffir- Simpson scale to category 5s. One cannot definitively attribute any single hurricane such as Katrina or even the four that ravaged Florida in 2004 to climate change any more than a particular heat wave can be so attributed. What seems likely, however, is that we are skewing the odds gradually each year for more heat waves and perhaps more intense hurricanes.

Sea level rise is one evident result of climate change and as the sea level rises so does the level of storm surge, the major killer during Katrina on the Mississippi coast. Even without any intensification of hurricane ferocity, US coastal cities are likely to face a steady increase in risk of storm surge. Compounding this is the development pressure on US coastlines, packing populations, businesses and homes in very vulnerable locations and sometimes causing subsidence as a result of ground water withdrawal, construction compaction, wetlands destruction or oil or gas extraction.

There has been a tendency in the United States to view climate change and sea level rise as largely a problem for deltaic countries such as Bangladesh or a few not very populous island states. Yet the US Gulf and Atlantic coasts may be among the most vulnerable coasts on our planet. The US National Assessment on Climate Change Impacts on the United States, published in 2000, but effectively Bowdlerized in subsequent US government publications, provided detailed analyses of such vulnerability.

Yet even without factoring in the possibility of changes of storm intensity due to climate change, the US Gulf and Atlantic Coasts may be quite vulnerable to storm surge. The National Hurricane Center, NOAA’s respected storm tracking, warning and research center, provides a summary of storm surge dynamics. The site also provides graphic projections of possible storm surge effects from hurricanes on Brunswick, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana; Brooklyn. New York; Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina; and Manteo, North Carolina. USA Today provides a useful explanatory graphic. Another analysis displays possible storm surge risk along the South Shore of Long Island and yet another along the Space Coast of Florida. Much more comprehensive estimates of storm surge along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts are available at Live Weather Images. A National Weather Service site provides projections for dozens of locations. Prof. Michael Kearney of the University of Maryland has made available a Power Point presentation of vulnerability of the Chesapeake Bay region to climate change and hurricanes.

US Government funding for climate change impacts analysis has shriveled in recent years. Even what can be gleaned from this cursory survey of available projections makes sobering reading. Besides fulfilling the staggeringly difficult humanitarian duty to get the displaced population back on their feet, the US must act decisively to limit the possibility of a recurrence of the Katrina disaster.

This means remaking the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) into the model of efficiency it was conceded to be by members of both US major parties under James Lee Witt who headed it throughout the Clinton Administration. Perhaps even more damaging than the indifferent quality of recent appointments to top positions in FEMA has been its being folded into the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security has made impressive strides in fulfilling its primary mission- protecting the US from terrorist attack- but it seems woefully unprepared to respond to natural disasters.

A truly professional FEMA can develop the implementation arrangements that may be required if a storm heads for Miami, New York, Charleston, Galveston or Mobile, chartering or commandeering of buses for evacuation, moving Navy vessels to the area just after the storm passes and other pro-active measures that might have limited losses in Katrina. Although FEMA has borne the brunt of criticism in the wake of the New Orleans disaster, two large problems are attributable to the City of New Orleans and the Army Corps of Engineers. Knowing full well that much of the City’s population lacked cars to get out of town, the City failed to use about 200 school buses that could have transported out thousands. These buses now stand ruined in several feet of water. The breaching of the levees and most of the damage to New Orleans might have been averted had the Army Corps of Engineers, already alerted to the imminence of a major storm, begun preparing sandbags and arranged to ram barges into the potential levee holes to be followed up with sandbags. This collective dropping of the ball with such tragic results may underscore the need in such an emergency to give a lead role to an agency such as FEMA with summary power to commandeer federal, state and local resources.

There is a remarkable contrast between the relative success of the State of Florida in addressing the hammering it took from four hurricanes in 2004 and the contrasting results in Louisiana and Mississippi in the wake of Katrina. Some of this is attributable to the greater ferocity of Katrina but much may also be due to the excellent state-citizen group-university cooperation in Florida epitomized in the Hurricane Alliance based at the International Hurricane Research Center of Florida International University.

Over the longer term the Federal Government must work with localities, states and even regional authorities to develop an anticipatory coastal protection strategy. This may entail increasing setback requirements for homes and hotels, taking extraordinary measures to preserve wetlands and increase replenishment of alluvial soil, use of low tech and inexpensive beach and road protection strategies such as planting of vetiver grass, and changes in levee policies to limit the risk that flood control measures increase risks of coastal disasters. Together with financing the rebuilding of much of New Orleans, the Federal Government must commit the fourteen billion dollars or so it is estimated will be required to implement a comprehensive Louisiana coastal restoration plan. Absent that, we may face a repeat of the Katrina disaster before we are well into the next decade.

If we are to protect coastal cities, beaches and wetlands for our grandchildren and our great grandchildren, there is an urgent need for the US to take a lead in clean energy transformation, just as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has done in California with a commitment that amounts to about a 93% reduction in California’s per capita greenhouse emissions from present levels by 2050. There is huge momentum in the climate system driving climate warming and sea level rise. This is not an argument as skeptics have suggested for inaction, but instead a compelling call for much more ambitious actions than those in the Kyoto Protocol. If we rise to the occasion, there is a chance that Katrina will ultimately, like 9/11, be seen as a wakeup call that helped galvanize US resolve.

MORE READING

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR): Are Hurricanes Intensifying?

Dr. D. James Baker Remarks at Lake Pontchartrain 2000

The 1900 Storm — Galveston Island Texas

The Slow Drowning of New Orleans