Deadliest Natural Disaster

Step 1. Predict

What was the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history?

List the key characteristics (e.g., location, year, type of disaster) of this event.

Here is an example of how you could record your findings: Click on image to enlarge it

Step 2. Analyze Report

Read excerpts of the following report Isaac Cline submitted to document the tragic event that killed more than 6,000 residents. Compare his description to the characteristics you listed in Step 1. Is he describing the same event you identified as the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history? Why?

The hurricane [...] was no doubt one of the most important meteorological events in the world's history. The ruin which it wrought beggars description, and conservative estimates place the loss of life at the appalling figure, 6,000.

The usual signs which herald the approach of hurricanes were not present in this case. The brick-dust sky was not in evidence to the smallest degree. This feature, which has been distinctly observed in other storms that have occurred in this section, was carefully watched for, both on the evening of the 7th and the morning of the 8th.

A heavy swell from the southeast made its appearance in the Gulf of Mexico during the afternoon of the 7th. The swell continued during the night without diminishing, and the tide rose to an unusual height when it is considered that the wind was from the north and northwest.

I then returned to the Gulf, made more detailed observations of the tide and swells, and filed the following telegram addressed to the Central Office a Washington:

"Unusually heavy swells from the southeast, intervals of one to five minutes, overflowing low places south portion of city three to four blocks from beach. Such high wate4r with opposing winds never observed previously."

Hundreds of people who could not reach us by telephone came to the Weather Bureau office seeking advice. I went down on Strand street and advised some wholesale commission merchants who had perishable goods on their floors to place them 3 feet above the floor. One gentleman has informed me that he carried out my instructions, but the wind blew his goods down. The public was warned, over the telephone and verbally, that the wind would go by the east to the south and that the worst was yet to come. People were advised to seek secure places for the night. As a result thousands of people who lived near the beach or in small houses moved their families into the center of the city and were thus saved. Those who lived in large strong buildings, a few blocks from the beach, one of whom was the writer of this report, thought that they could weather the wind and tide. Soon after 3 p.m. conditions became so threatening that it was deemed essential that a special report be sent at once to Washington.

I reached home and found the water around my residence waist deep. I at once went to work assisting people, who were not securely located, into my residence, until forty or fifty persons were housed therein.

At this time, however, the roofs of houses and timbers were flying through the streets as though they were paper, and it appeared suicidal to attempt a journey through the flying timbers. Many people were killed by flying timbers about this time while endeavoring to escape to town.

The water rose at a steady rate from 3 p.m. until about 7:30 p.m., when there was a sudden rise of about four feet in as many seconds. I was standing at my front door, which was partly open, watching the water, which was flowing with great rapidity from east to west. The water at this time was about eight inches deep in my residence, and the sudden rise of 4 feet brought it above my waist before I could change my position. The water had now reached a stage 10 feet above the ground at Rosenberg Avenue (Twenty-fifth street) and Q street, where my residence stood. The ground was 5.2 feet elevation, which made the tide 15.2 feet. The tide rose the next hour, between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m., nearly five feet additional, making a total tide in that locality of about twenty feet.

Sunday, September 9, 1900, revealed one of the most horrible sights that ever a civilized people looked upon. About three thousand homes, nearly half the residence portion of Galveston, had been completely swept out of existence, and probably more than six thousand persons had passed from life to death during that dreadful night. The correct number of those who perished will probably never be known, for many entire families are missing. Where 20,000 people lived on the 8th not a house remained on the 9th, and who occupied the houses may, in many instances, never be known. On account of the pleasant Gulf breezes many strangers were residing temporarily near the beach, and the number of these that were lost can not yet be estimated.

All goods and supplies not over eight feet above floor were badly injured, and much was totally lost. The damage to buildings, personal, and other property in Galveston County is estimated at above thirty million dollars. The insurance inspector for Galveston states that there were 2,636 residences located prior to the hurricane in the area of total destruction, and he estimates 1,000 houses totally destroyed in other portions of the city, making a total of 3,636 houses totally destroyed. The value of these buildings alone is estimated at $5,500,000.

Improvements will be made stronger and more judiciously; for the past twenty-five years they have been made with the hurricane of 1875 in mind, but no one ever dreamed that the water would reach the height observed in the present case. The railroad bridges are to be built ten feet higher than they were before. The engineer of the Southern Pacific Company has informed me that they will construct their wharves so that they will withstand even such a hurricane as the one we have just experienced

Discussion Questions

The event Cline describes is the hurricane that hit Galveston, TX in 1900. The hurricane killed over 6,000 people, making it the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Is this event the same one you predicted as the deadliest natural disaster in the U.S.? What clues did you find in his report that supported or refuted your prediction?

What constitutes a natural disaster? To what extent was the event Cline describes a natural disaster?

What choices do you think could have been made that improved or worsened the likelihood of these 6,000+ deaths?

Step 3. Your Task

Your task will be to answer the following question: Why did both hurricanes (1900 & 2005) result such a large number of deaths? To help you answer this central question, analyze the sources you were assigned and keep in mind the following questions:

What systems were in place to warn people about this hurricane? Do you think they were adequate?

What impact did this hurricane have on the city and its citizens?

Why was the city so vulnerable to the hurricane? What made it unique?

Who/what does the source blame? Why?

Deadliest U.S. Disaster: Introduction

Introduction

Tropical cyclones are organized weather systems that originate in the tropics and exhibit sustained (continuous) winds exceeding 74 mph. When tropical cyclones occur in the North Atlantic Ocean, they are referred to as hurricanes. In other regions, they may be referred to as typhoons. Each year during the late summer and early autumn hurricanes form in the subtropical Atlantic and move toward the United States. They vary considerably in terms of size, duration, impact, and intensity (Saffir-Simpson scale rating, Table 1). Although major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher) make landfall in the USA frequently (about once every two years on average), our coastlines are highly susceptible to substantial impacts when they strike.

Table 1. The Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity Click on image to enlarge it

Hurricane damage occurs in three ways: storm surge, winds, and inland flooding. The term storm surge refers to a wind-driven rise in ocean level that pushes water onshore near the point of where the hurricane makes landfall. In extreme cases, when the hurricane landfall coincides with high tide, the storm surge can be as high as 15-20 feet. Many hurricane fatalities, including most of the 6000+ fatalities that occurred in the 1900 Galveston hurricane, occur when people drown in the storm surge. In the strongest hurricanes, structures near the ocean are destroyed by the combination of the storm surge and hurricane-force winds. Although the storm surge and hurricane-force winds are usually limited to a short distance near the coast, hurricane impacts are often felt far inland as heavy rains cause inland flooding. For example, Hurricane Camille (a Category 5 hurricane at landfall in 1969) caused widespread damage along the Gulf Coast, but also claimed 113 lives in Virginia as heavy rains caused localized flooding.

The impact that a hurricane has ultimately depends not only on its physical characteristics but also on the characteristics of the region it affects. Note that although the 1900 Galveston hurricane and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina are the two deadliest hurricanes in US history, they are not the strongest to make landfall (see Table 2). Important regional characteristics include building codes, access to resources, ability to evacuate, and emergency preparedness. In the following readings we will investigate how storm characteristics and regional response both contributed to the losses that were realized with the 1900 Galveston hurricane and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

Table 2. The 10 most intense hurricanes (at landfall) to strike the United States since 1900. Death toll data are from the National Hurricane Center Publication “The Deadliest Atlantic Tropical Cyclones, 1492-present. Click on image to enlarge it

In this unit, we will investigate two of the most noteworthy hurricanes in US history: the 1900 Galveston hurricane and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Both of these storms resulted in significant loss of life. Our goal is to combine a basic understanding of hurricane characteristics with written accounts of these events to compare and contrast the characteristics in both hurricanes that lead to tragic losses of life.

Your task will be to answer the following question: Why did both hurricanes (1900 & 2005) result such a large number of deaths? To help you answer this central question, analyze the sources you were assigned and keep in mind the following questions:

What systems were in place to warn people about this hurricane? Do you think they were adequate?

What impact did this hurricane have on the city and its citizens?

Why was the city so vulnerable to the hurricane? What made it unique?

Who/what does the source blame? Why?

GROUP D: Image 3 (Graphic)

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GROUP D: Image 2 (Graphic)

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GROUP D: Image 1 (Political Cartoon)

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GROUP D: Source 3

LEFT BEHIND

June 24, 2002

Once it’s certain a major storm is about to hit, evacuation offers the best chance for survival. But for those who wait, getting out will become nearly impossible as the few routes out of town grow hopelessly clogged. And 100,000 people without transportation will be especially threatened.

By John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein

Staff writers

Hurricane evacuations rarely go as planned. Storm tracks are hard to predict, and roads are not designed to handle the traffic flow, so huge traffic jams are a common result. In 1998 it took six hours for people leaving the New Orleans area in advance of Hurricane Georges to reach Baton Rouge, 80 miles away. The following year, Hurricane Floyd’s constantly changing course spurred evacuations and bumper-to-bumper traffic on highways from Florida to North Carolina.

Moving entire populations out of harm’s way is a time-consuming and unpredictable operation complicated by geography, demographics, human psychology, the limits of weather forecasting, and transportation problems that tie many cities in knots even in perfect weather.

Like every coastal area vulnerable to hurricanes, south Louisiana faces these challenges. But the Louisiana delta also has it worse than other coastal areas.

Because the entire region is susceptible to storm-surge flooding, hurricanes pose more danger to those left behind than in places where the coastal profile is higher.

"Evacuation is what’s necessary: evacuation, evacuation, evacuation," Jefferson Parish Emergency Preparedness Director Walter Maestri said. "We anticipate that (even) with refuges of last resort in place, some 5 (percent) to 10 percent of the individuals who remain in the face of catastrophic storms are going to lose their lives."

· The region’s sinking coast and rising flood risk also make the task of getting people out harder than it is elsewhere. South Louisiana presents some of the most daunting evacuation problems in the United States because: The region’s large population, including more than 1 million people in the New Orleans area, requires a 72- to 84-hour window for evacuation, well ahead of the time that forecasters can accurately predict a storm’s track and strength.

· Few north-south escape routes exist to move residents away from the coast, and many of those include low-lying sections that can flood days before a hurricane makes landfall.

· Evacuees must travel more than 80 miles to reach high ground, meaning more cars on the highways for a longer time as the storm approaches.

· A large population of low-income residents do not own cars and would have to depend on an untested emergency public transportation system to evacuate them.

· Much of the area is below sea level and vulnerable to catastrophic flooding. Based on the danger to refugees and workers, the Red Cross has decided not to operate shelters south of the Interstate 10-Interstate 12 corridor, leaving refuges of last resort that offer only minimal protection and no food or bedding.

Emergency officials say they have made improvements since Hurricane Georges, but the changes have yet to be tested under real-world conditions, and many obstacles remain.

A flooded underpass on I-10 westbound near the Orleans/Jefferson parish line was a critical choke point during Tropical Storm Frances. (FILE PHOTO BY ALEX BRANDON / The Times-Picayune)

GROUP D: Source 2

Even though Hurricane Georges was considered a near miss, it made its fury known in New Orleans. The hardest hit areas were the St. Bernard Parish and along Lake Pontchartrain in eastern New Orleans where about two dozen fishing camps were destroyed by the storm in September 1998. HereBlayke Badeaux, 10, walks over a pile oflumber and debris that used to be his uncle's fishing camp. (PHOTO BY JENNIFER ZDON / The Times-Picayune)

THE BIG ONE

June 24, 2002

A major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It's just a matter of time.

By Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid

Staff writers

The line of splintered planks, trash and seaweed scattered along the slope of New Orleans' lakefront levees on Hayne Boulevard in late September 1998 marked more than just the wake of Hurricane Georges. It measured the slender margin separating the city from mass destruction.

The debris, largely the remains of about 70 camps smashed by the waves of a storm surge more than 7 feet above sea level, showed that Georges, a Category 2 storm that only grazed New Orleans, had pushed waves to within a foot of the top of the levees. A stronger storm on a slightly different course -- such as the path Georges was on just 16 hours before landfall -- could have realized emergency officials' worst-case scenario: hundreds of billions of gallons of lake water pouring over the levees into an area averaging 5 feet below sea level with no natural means of drainage.

That would turn the city and the east bank of Jefferson Parish into a lake as much as 30 feet deep, fouled with chemicals and waste from ruined septic systems, businesses and homes. Such a flood could trap hundreds of thousands of people in buildings and in vehicles. At the same time, high winds and tornadoes would tear at everything left standing. Between 25,000 and 100,000 people would die, said John Clizbe, national vice president for disaster services with the American Red Cross.

"A catastrophic hurricane represents 10 or 15 atomic bombs in terms of the energy it releases," said Joseph Suhayda, a Louisiana State University engineer who is studying ways to limit hurricane damage in the New Orleans area. "Think about it. New York lost two big buildings. Multiply that by 10 or 20 or 30 in the area impacted and the people lost, and we know what could happen."

Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable. But there wouldn't be much for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins.

The scene has been played out for years in computer models and emergency-operations simulations. Officials at the local, state and national level are convinced the risk is genuine and are devising plans for alleviating the aftermath of a disaster that could leave the city uninhabitable for six months or more. The Army Corps of Engineers has begun a study to see whether the levees should be raised to counter the threat. But officials say that right now, nothing can stop "the big one."

Like coastal Bangladesh, where typhoons killed 100,000 and 300,000 villagers, respectively, in two horrific storms in 1970 and 1991, the New Orleans area lies in a low, flat coastal area. Unlike Bangladesh, New Orleans has hurricane levees that create a bowl with the bottom dipping lower than the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain. Though providing protection from weaker storms, the levees also would trap any water that gets inside -- by breach, overtopping or torrential downpour -- in a catastrophic storm.

"Filling the bowl" is the worst potential scenario for a natural disaster in the United States, emergency officials say. The Red Cross' projected death toll dwarfs estimates of 14,000 dead from a major earthquake along the New Madrid, Mo., fault, and 4,500 dead from a similar catastrophic earthquake hitting San Francisco, the next two deadliest disasters on the agency's list.

The projected death and destruction eclipse almost any other natural disaster that people paid to think about catastrophes can dream up. And the risks are significant, especially over the long term. In a given year, for example, the corps says the risk of the lakefront levees being topped is less than 1 in 300. But over the life of a 30-year mortgage, statistically that risk approaches 9 percent.

In the past year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials have begun working with state and local agencies to devise plans on what to do if a Category 5 hurricane strikes New Orleans.

Shortly after he took office, FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh ordered aides to examine the nation's potential major catastrophes, including the New Orleans scenario.

"Catastrophic disasters are best defined in that they totally outstrip local and state resources, which is why the federal government needs to play a role," Allbaugh said. "There are a half-dozen or so contingencies around the nation that cause me great concern, and one of them is right there in your back yard."

In concert with state and local officials, FEMA is studying evacuation procedures, postdisaster rescue strategies, temporary housing and technical issues such as how to pump out water trapped inside the levees, said Michael Lowder, chief of policy and planning in FEMA's Readiness, Response and Recovery directorate. A preliminary report should be completed in the next few months.

Louisiana emergency management officials say they lobbied the agency for years to study how to respond to New Orleans' vulnerability, finally getting attention last year.

With computer modeling of hurricanes and storm surges, disaster experts have developed a detailed picture of how a storm could push Lake Pontchartrain over the levees and into the city.

"The worst case is a hurricane moving in from due south of the city," said Suhayda, who has developed a computer simulation of the flooding from such a storm. On that track, winds on the outer edges of a huge storm system would be pushing water in Breton Sound and west of the Chandeleur Islands into the St. Bernard marshes and then Lake Pontchartrain for two days before landfall.

"Water is literally pumped into Lake Pontchartrain," Suhayda said. "It will try to flow through any gaps, and that means the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal (which is connected to Breton Sound by the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet) and the Chef Menteur and the Rigolets passes.

"So now the lake is 5 to 8 feet higher than normal, and we're talking about a lake that's only 15 or 20 feet deep, so you're adding a third to a half as much water to the lake," Suhayda said. As the eye of the hurricane moves north, next to New Orleans but just to the east, the winds over the lake switch around to come from the north.

"As the eye impacts the Mississippi coastline, the winds are now blowing south across the lake, maybe at 50, 80, 100 mph, and all that water starts to move south," he said. "It's moving like a big army advancing toward the lake's hurricane-protection system. And then the winds themselves are generating waves, 5 to 10 feet high, on top of all that water. They'll be breaking and crashing along the sea wall."

Soon waves will start breaking over the levee.

"All of a sudden you'll start seeing flowing water. It'll look like a weir, water just pouring over the top," Suhayda said. The water will flood the lakefront, filling up low-lying areas first, and continue its march south toward the river. There would be no stopping or slowing it; pumping systems would be overwhelmed and submerged in a matter of hours.

"Another scenario is that some part of the levee would fail," Suhayda said. "It's not something that's expected. But erosion occurs, and as levees broke, the break will get wider and wider. The water will flow through the city and stop only when it reaches the next higher thing. The most continuous barrier is the south levee, along the river. That's 25 feet high, so you'll see the water pile up on the river levee."

As the floodwaters invade and submerge neighborhoods, the wind will be blowing at speeds of at least 155 mph, accompanied by shorter gusts of as much as 200 mph, meteorologists say, enough to overturn cars, uproot trees and toss people around like dollhouse toys.

The wind will blow out windows and explode many homes, even those built to the existing 110-mph building-code standards. People seeking refuge from the floodwaters in high-rise buildings won't be very safe, recent research indicates, because wind speed in a hurricane gets greater with height. If the winds are 155 mph at ground level, scientists say, they may be 50 mph stronger 100 feet above street level.

Buildings also will have to withstand pummeling by debris picked up by water surging from the lakefront toward downtown, with larger pieces acting like battering rams.

Ninety percent of the structures in the city are likely to be destroyed by the combination of water and wind accompanying a Category 5 storm, said Robert Eichorn, former director of the New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness. The LSU Hurricane Center surveyed numerous large public buildings in Jefferson Parish in hopes of identifying those that might withstand such catastrophic winds. They found none.

Amid this maelstrom, the estimated 200,000 or more people left behind in an evacuation will be struggling to survive. Some will be housed at the Superdome, the designated shelter in New Orleans for people too sick or infirm to leave the city. Others will end up in last-minute emergency refuges that will offer minimal safety. But many will simply be on their own, in homes or looking for high ground.

Thousands will drown while trapped in homes or cars by rising water. Others will be washed away or crushed by debris. Survivors will end up trapped on roofs, in buildings or on high ground surrounded by water, with no means of escape and little food or fresh water, perhaps for several days.

"If you look at the World Trade Center collapsing, it'll be like that, but add water," Eichorn said. "There will be debris flying around, and you're going to be in the water with snakes, rodents, nutria and fish from the lake. It's not going to be nice."

Mobilized by FEMA, search and rescue teams from across the nation will converge on the city. Volunteer teams of doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians that were pre-positioned in Monroe or Shreveport before the storm will move to the area, said Henry Delgado, regional emergency coordinator for the U.S. Public Health Service.

But just getting into the city will be a problem for rescuers. Approaches by road may be washed out.

"Whether or not the Airline Highway bridge across the Bonnet Carre Spillway survives, we don't know," said Jay Combe, a coastal hydraulic engineer with the corps. "The I-10 bridge (west of Kenner) is designed to withstand a surge from a Category 3 storm, but it may be that water gets under the spans, and we don't know if it will survive." Other bridges over waterways and canals throughout the city may also be washed away or made unsafe, he said. In a place where cars may be useless, small boats and helicopters will be used to move survivors to central pickup areas, where they can be moved out of the city. Teams of disaster mortuary volunteers, meanwhile, will start collecting bodies. Other teams will bring in temporary equipment and goods, including sanitation facilities, water, ice and generators. Food, water and medical supplies will be airdropped to some areas and delivered to others.

Stranded survivors will have a dangerous wait even after the storm passes. Emergency officials worry that energized electrical wires could pose a threat of electrocution and that the floodwater could become contaminated with sewage and with toxic chemicals from industrial plants and backyard sheds. Gasoline, diesel fuel and oil leaking from underground storage tanks at service stations may also become a problem, corps officials say.

A variety of creatures -- rats, mice and nutria, poisonous snakes and alligators, fire ants, mosquitoes and abandoned cats and dogs -- will be searching for the same dry accommodations that people are using.

Contaminated food or water used for bathing, drinking and cooking could cause illnesses including salmonella, botulism, typhoid and hepatitis. Outbreaks of mosquito-borne dengue fever and encephalitis are likely, said Dr. James Diaz, director of the department of public health and preventive medicine at LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans.

"History will repeat itself," Diaz said. "My office overlooks one of the St. Louis cemeteries, where there are many graves of victims of yellow fever. Standing water in the subtropics is the breeding ground for mosquitoes."

GROUP D: Source 1

Excerpt from Travis, John (2005) “Scientists’ Fears Come True as Hurricane Floods New Orleans”, Science 309, 1655-1659.

Because much of the city is below sea level, New Orleans is particularly vulnerable to a storm surge moving through the gulf and into Lake Pontchartrain. Over the past few decades, several computer models have shown how strong hurricanes on the right track could cause massive “overtopping” of the levees that, averaging almost 5 meters high, keep the lake from the city. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) official storm surge model SLOSH (Sea, Lake, and Overland Surges from Hurricanes) was developed in the late 1960s, and Leuttich and several collaborators have created a more sophisticated model called ADCIRC (Advanced Circulation) that has been adopted by the Army Corps of Engineers and other groups. Last year, in an exercise simulating a direct hit by a slow-moving category 3 hurricane, both models showed that the levees would not prevent the flooding of New Orleans.

According to these models, Katrina’s storm surge should not have submerged the city. Joannes Westerink of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, who helped develop ADCIRC, says it estimated that the southern shores of Lake Pontchartrain only rose about 3 meters during Katrina. (The various models estimate that the Mississippi coast received a peak storm surge of about 7 to 9 meters, which would be the highest in U.S. history.)

Instead of overtopping, the catastrophic collapse of several levees—ones that had been upgraded with a thick concrete wall—apparently sealed the city’s fate. Stephen Leatherman, director of FIU’s hurricane research center, suggests that the lake’s raised levels may have increased water pressure to the point that water flowed through the earthen levees on which the concrete walls sat. “Then the whole thing collapses. This is how an earthen dam collapses during a flood,” he says.

GROUP C: Image 3 (Graphic)

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GROUP C: Image 2 (Graphic)

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GROUP C: Image 1 (Political Cartoon)

GROUP C: Source 3

September 21, 2008

EDITORIAL

‘Never Again,’ Again

Hurricane Gustav gave the state of Louisiana a test for which it had three years to prepare. There were thousands of poor, sick, disabled and elderly people who could not get out on their own. They needed to be rescued with dispatch, and sheltered in safety and dignity.

One simple test. The state flunked.

Three years to the week after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, Louisiana executed a fundamentally unfair evacuation plan and did it badly. It relied on dividing the population into separate streams: People with their own cars were directed to shelters run by parishes, churches and the Red Cross. People with medical problems not requiring hospitalization were taken to special shelters. Sex offenders had a shelter to themselves.

All those without a car or a ride were taken on state buses to four state-run warehouses. It was in these shelters, including two abandoned stores, a Wal-Mart and a Sam’s Club, that thousands of working-poor New Orleanians got a sickening reminder of Katrina.

Evacuees said they had had no idea where they were going; bus drivers would not tell them. When they arrived, there were not enough portable toilets, and no showers. For five days there was no way to bathe, except with bottled water in filthy outdoor toilets. Privacy in the vast open space — 1,000 people to a warehouse, shoulder-to-shoulder on cots — was nonexistent. The mood among evacuees was grim, surrounded as they were by police officers and the National Guard, with no visitors or reporters allowed.

“We didn’t want to evacuate into a prison,” Lethia Brooks told the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, an organization that accompanied the evacuees, inspected the shelters and collected hundreds of stories into a report sharply critical of the state’s response.

Gustav ended up being no Katrina, and the week of suffering was not as severe as the deathly mayhem of three years ago. But residents had every right to expect far better treatment than they received. After a week of indignities in crowded, unsanitary shelters, many returned home with their fragile finances in turmoil. They had been forced to buy extra basics while out of their homes, and September rent was due.

The secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Social Services, which was responsible for the shelters, resigned after this scandal and one involving problems with food stamp distribution.

Now, many poor residents are vowing “never again,” as in, “Never again will we get on the bus to be warehoused. We’ll ride out the next storm.” In New Orleans, disaster is never far away, and government incompetence cannot be allowed to undermine a swift, sure evacuation. Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration should move quickly on a better plan that does not expose the poor to differential, substandard treatment.

GROUP C: Source 2

April 21, 2009

Civil Lawsuit Over Katrina Begins

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW ORLEANS — A groundbreaking civil suit began in federal court here Monday to consider claims by property owners that the Army Corps of Engineers amplified the destructive effects of Hurricane Katrina by building a poorly designed navigation channel adjacent to the city.

The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a 76-mile-long channel known locally as MR-GO and pronounced “Mister Go,” was completed in 1968 and created a straight shot to the Gulf of Mexico from New Orleans. The suit claims that the channel was flawed in its design, construction and operation, and that those flaws intensified the flood damage to the eastern parts of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish.

One geological expert testified on behalf of the plaintiffs that the channel was “one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of the United States.”

The federal government argued that Hurricane Katrina would have devastated the region whether or not the channel had ever been dug. The government’s filings in the case say the plaintiffs’ assertions that the taxpayers are liable for the damage are based on “misguided and internally inconsistent arguments.”

If they win, the plaintiffs — a local newscaster, Norman Robinson, and five others whose homes or businesses were destroyed by the 2005 storm — could receive hundreds of thousands of dollars each as compensation for their losses. More broadly, a victory could pave the way for more than 400,000 other plaintiffs who have also filed claims against the government over the hurricane’s destruction.

The government has historically enjoyed strong legal protection against lawsuits related to collapsing levees. The Flood Control Act of 1928 bans suits against the United States for damages resulting from floods or floodwaters. In January 2008, a federal judge, Stanwood R. Duval Jr., ruled that the corps was immune in a different lawsuit related directly to the levee and floodwall failures during Hurricane Katrina in the city’s major drainage canals.

This case, however, is different because MR-GO is a navigation canal, not a flood-control project. In March, Judge Duval allowed the suit to go forward — over repeated efforts by the Justice Department to get him to dismiss it — based largely on a 1971 case, Graci v. United States, that found there was no immunity for flooding caused by a federal project unrelated to flood control.

The Graci decision did warn that the lack of immunity still left a “heavy burden” on plaintiffs to prove that the government was negligent in building its projects, and that this negligence, not a hurricane, was the cause of the damage.

The trial is expected to take four weeks. In his opening comments, Judge Duval, who is hearing the case without a jury, called it “significant” and “the first real trial” about Hurricane Katrina, the levees and the role of the federal government.

The canal has been controversial from the start; critics had long called it a “hurricane highway” and warned that it would help carry storm surges into New Orleans. The suit alleges that the channel killed the protective wetlands and cypress swamps to the east of the city by allowing the intrusion of salt water from the gulf and caused the adjacent levees to subside. That, the plaintiffs say, exacerbated the effects of waves coming across the channel.

The corps has consistently argued that the canal’s effect during Hurricane Katrina was insignificant. At the direction of Congress, however, the corps has begun to close the MR-GO canal using 434,000 tons of rock.

During the trial’s opening session, the plaintiffs’ expert on geology and the coastal environment, Sherwood M. Gagliano, cited reports from as early as 1957 that claimed the canal would pose a danger to the people of St. Bernard Parish and reports of his own dating from 1972 that warned of the increased flooding risk from wetlands destruction.

Mr. Gagliano testified that the corps was aware of such research and even prepared a report in 1988 that mentioned “the possibility of catastrophic damage to urban areas” from the channel but did little to reduce the risk.

Under questioning by Kara K. Miller, a lawyer for the government, Mr. Gagliano acknowledged that the corps had agreed to some of his recommendations to improve the canal, like planting grass atop some of the levees to stabilize them.

The plaintiffs say they hope a victory in the case can open the door for a broader class action in which more than 400,000 claims have been filed against the government. A financial projection by the Army has concluded there is a reasonable possibility that potential government losses could ultimately range from $10 billion to $100 billion.

Beyond the monetary damages, many in New Orleans hope the lawsuit could put an end to the search for someone to blame for the flood damage during Hurricane Katrina, a quest that has haunted many who remain angry at the loss of their homes and businesses.

Like so many in the New Orleans area, Lucille Franz, one of the plaintiffs in the case, lost everything in the storm. Mrs. Franz and her husband, Anthony, came back from their evacuation to Texas during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to find that their home on St. Claude Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward had steeped for three weeks in 18 to 22 feet of water. The water came three feet up the walls of the second floor.

“I’ve been through a lot,” she said in an interview.

The home, which the family owned, was deemed a total loss. The Franzes do not have the money to tear it down, much less to rebuild it. Family photographs, furniture and the accumulations of a lifetime were ruined; a community of neighbors was scattered.

Mrs. Franz is 75, her husband, 80. They were uninsured; she said that they did not have flood insurance, and that the $80,000 they received from the Road Home program was not enough to start again.

“You might purchase a trailer, but you can’t get a house,” she said. The money pays their rent for an apartment in Harahan, west of the city. “We need a home,” she said.

Jonathan Beauregard Andry, one of the lawyers representing the Franzes and other plaintiffs in the case, said the Franzes were typical of those who suffered damage and showed why the suit was important.

“Their whole life is changed,” Mr. Andry said, “and they should be compensated for that.”

Mr. Andry, whose father argued the Graci case in 1971, is a native of St. Bernard Parish and among more than 50 lawyers from 20 law firms around the nation working on the case. The people of the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish, he said, “don’t want sympathy, and they don’t want something for nothing.”

GROUP C: Source 1

Excerpt from Kates RW, Colten CE, Laska S, and Leatherman SP (2006) Reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: A research perspective. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103, 14653-14660.

…the long history of marginal increases in safety that encouraged new development made New Orleans a catastrophe waiting to happen. Its estimated pre-Katrina population of 437,186 (Frey and Singer 2006) lived in a bowl, half located below sea level, between the natural levees of the Mississippi River and the built levees (pierced by canals) along Lake Pontchartrain. In the 4 years preceding Katrina, there were extensive and repeated warnings from both scientists and the media that the “big one” would eventually hit the city. These included specific concerns for the evacuation of an estimated 130,000 residents without vehicles, homebound, or in hospitals and in-care facilities (Fischetti 2001, McQuaid and Mark 2002, Laska 2004, FEMA 2004).

Beginning on the morning of August 29th, 2005, Katrina brought severe but not catastrophic winds, record rainfalls (up to 14 inches in 24 h), and stormwater damage as the city's pumping system failed to keep up with the rain. Then, within hours of the initial impact, major floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal, London Avenue Canal, and Inner Harbor Navigation Canal (Industrial Canal) failed, allowing water to surge into ≈80% of the city and essentially fill the bowl to depths ranging from 5 cm to 5 m (USACE). Days later, parts of New Orleans would be reflooded from intensive rains accompanying Hurricane Rita.

As many as a million residents in the metropolitan area may have responded to public calls for evacuation on August 27th and 28th, leaving an estimated one-quarter of New Orleans residents unable or unwilling to leave. These residents took refuge in the Superdome, the Convention Center, in hospitals and nursing homes, in upper stories of their homes, or on elevated highways, or died during the week before full poststorm evacuations could be completed. The evacuated residents traveled or were moved to other cities, and within a month, refugees from New Orleans could be found in every state. Extensive media coverage shared the failure of complete evacuation, the plight of those remaining in the city, and the subsequent out-migration with a global audience. The burden of these failures fell heaviest on the African-American, poor, aged, and infirm members of the population. Four months after Katrina, the population was estimated at 158,353, only 37% of the pre-Katrina number (Frey and Singer 2006).

Frey WH, Singer A (2006) Katrina and Rita Impacts on Gulf Coast Populations: First Census Findings (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC) Available at www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20060607_hurricanes.pdf.

Fischetti M (2001) Sci Am 285:77–85.

McQuaid J, Mark S (6 23–27, 2002) The Times-Picayune.

Laska S (2004) Nat Hazards Observer 29:4–6.

Federal Emergency Management Agency (2004) Hurricane Pam Exercise Concludes (news release). Available at www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=13051.

Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (2006) Performance Evaluation of the New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Protection Sys-tem (US Army Corps of Engineers, Washington, DC) Available at https://ipet.wes.army.mil/welcome91.htm, Vol 1.

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GROUP B: Source 2

September 9, 1900

Galveston May Be Wiped Out By the Storm

Fear that the Island City Has Met with Great Disaster.

All Telegraph Wires Down

At last accounts the surf was breaking over the beach and entering houses in the town.

DALLAS, TEX., Sept. 8. – All Texas is in the keenest state of doubt and uncertainty tonight concerning the fate of Galveston Island and city. There is a suspicion that an awful calamity rests behind the lack of information from the Gulf coast. It is rumored here that immense destruction has befallen Galveston and other places.

It is said the bridges leading from the mainland to the island have been swept away by the rolling up of the water in the bay. The bridges are four in number, three for railroads uses and one the Galveston Country public wagon and pedestrian bridge. It seems hardly credible that all these bridges could be swept away without the city suffering tremendously in the loss of buildings, general property, and lives.

Not a wire is working into Galveston, either telegraph or telephone, and as all bridges carried wires, the fears that all these structures are gone is strengthened.

The Postal Telegraph Company started out a repair train from Houston, but it proceeded only a few miles before it had to stop because of storm obstructions and had to return to Houston without making an improvement in the service.

This morning the surf was breaking over the beach from East Broadway in Galveston, around the foot of Twenty-fourth Street, and water crept in several blocks, and in low places had crept up the streets a dozen blocks.

At noon the wind veered to the east, and the water on both the bay and gulf was rising and growing more boisterous.

September 10, 1900

Great Disaster at Galveston

Deaths May Be Over 2,600 - 4,000 Houses Ruined.

A HEAVY PROPERTY LOSS

Storm Forced Hugh Waves Over the Island.

Water Six Feet Deep in the Streets - Many Smaller Towns Inland Wrecked - Relief Needed Urgently

… Reports are conflicting, but it is known that an appalling disaster had befallen the City of Galveston, where, it is reported, two thousand or more lives have been blotted out and a tremendous property damage incurred.

Conditions as Galveston

A report from an authentic source was received here this morning concerning the conditions at Galveston. The lower portion of the city was then all under water, and the waves were making rapid inroads toward the centre of the city through the sand banks which border the island proper. The citizens were all huddled together at the highest points in the centre of the town, and consternation and fear reigned almost to the point of madness.

The troops were called out, but even then is was with difficulty that the people could be made to control themselves. The railroad bridges have been washed away. It is feared that the city is washed away for the most part, and a large part of the population washed to death by wave and tide.

First Definite News

The estimate made by citizens of Galveston were that 4,000 houses, most of them residences, have been destroyed, and that at least 2,000 people have been drowned, killed, or are missing. Some business houses were destroyed, but most of them stood, though badly damaged.

It was reported that the Orphan Asylum and both the hospitals were destroyed, and if this proves true the loss of life will be great, as these institutions were generally crowded, as they were substantial buildings, the chances are that many had taken refuge in them.

Most of the small sailing crafts were wrecked, and were either piled up on the wharves or floating bottom side up on the bay. There is a small steamship ashore three miles north of Pelican Island …

In the bay the carcasses of nearly 200 horses and mules were seen, but no human body was visible.

The City of Galveston, he says, is now entirely submerged and cut off from communication. The boats are gone, the railroads cannot be operated, and the water so high that people cannot walk out by way of the bridge across the bay, even should that bridge be standing.

A relief train sent out tonight, the third, returned unsuccessful. It could not get closer than six miles of Virginia Point, where the prairie was covered with lumber, debris, pianos, trunks, and dead bodies.

Two hundred corpses were counted from the train.

September 11, 1900

Cotton Market Agitated

Liverpool Reports and Galveston Storm Have Marked Effect.

Two Failures Are Announced

September Closes 90 Points Advance – Excitement at Opening Unprecedented in Local History.

The effects of a further advance of 16 to 29 points in the Liverpool cotton market, greatly accentuated by the news of the Galveston storm, produced an activity of speculation and an intensity of excitement of the floor of the New York Cotton Exchange yesterday, which many old time traders declared to be without parallel in the history of the Exchange.

Fluctuations in the process were wild and irregular, and at one time were 100 points, or 1 cent a pound, above Saturday’s closing quotations. It was estimated that 1,250.000 bales of cotton changed hands during the day. This is 130,000 bales more than ever before recorded for a single day’s transactions.

…

Reports from Central Texas were vague and disquieting, and were followed by the receipt of dispatches from the South stating that there was enormous demand for spot cotton at an advance of one-half cent a pound, which intensified the bull movement. The market continued to broaden until it got beyond the control of the bulls. In the absence of better information, estimates based on meager reports placed the damage to the Texas crop at 750,000 to 1,000,000 bales of cotton, but little attention was given to these estimates.

September 11, 1900

Chief Moore on the Storm

First news from Galveston just received by train, which could get no closer to the bay shore than six miles, where the prairie was strewn with debris and dead bodies. About 200 corpses counted from train. Large steamship stranded two miles inland. Nothing could be seen from Galveston. Loss of life and property undoubtedly most appalling. Weather clear and bright here with gentle southeast wind.

"I fear." said Chief Moore, "that we have not yet begun to get any idea of the loss of life, but not only Galveston, but along the Gulf Coast generally. The telegram from Mr. Vaughan indicated that the waters from the Gulf encroached six miles inward. The sudden passage of the storm permitted. I am afraid, this water to recede rapidly, and in such case no one can estimate the damage to life and property done. I heartily trust my fears are groundless."

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From: Everything New Orleans. www.Nola.com

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GROUP B: Source 1

Henson, Robert (2008) “From Galveston 1900 to New Orleans 2005: The process and people involved in disseminating U.S. hurricane warnings”, 88th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society.

When a hurricane threatens, mass media are one of the main conduits for getting information to those at risk. Modern U.S. hurricane forecasts are the product of research, operational, and communications work carried out by many people. Satellite images and forecast graphics have become a vital tool in conveying hurricane risk. Yet the individual forecaster/spokesperson also continues to play a highly visible role--perhaps more so than for any other weather threat.

At the start of the 20th century, before electronic mass media were part of everyday life, warning dissemination was relatively haphazard. At the time of the 1900 Galveston hurricane, warnings were coordinated from the U.S. Weather Bureau's office in Washington, D.C. Isaac Cline, of the Bureau's Galveston office, issued a unauthorized warning shortly before the city was struck by what became the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

From 1935 to 1955, the U.S. Weather Bureau's hurricane functions were decentralized. During this period, Grady Norton, the Bureau's chief Florida-based forecaster, became a fixture on area radio broadcasts, praised for his ability to communicate the forecast in simple terms and his skill at enlivening the science of hurricane behavior by ascribing human qualities to each system.

A string of intense hurricanes struck the U.S. coast in the 1950s, a period that also brought the recentralization of U.S. forecasts through the National Hurricane Center (NHC), the advent of the current watch-warning system, and the meteoric growth of television. Despite these advances, problems remained, as with the deadly Hurricane Audrey (1957), where warnings were inadequately disseminated to vulnerable residents of southwest Louisiana.

By the 1980s, local TV and radio stations and national networks routinely broadcast hurricane information. The arrival of The Weather Channel (TWC) in 1982 made hurricane expert John Hope a popular and trusted presence for millions of viewers. Similarly, the introduction of satellite-linked interviews allowed NHC director Neil Frank to address millions of local viewers in dozens of separate segments for each hurricane, making him the most-recognized NOAA employee in the nation. The centralized nature of hurricane warnings, with the NHC the only source of official advisories, may have facilitated the rise of spokespeople such as Frank and Hope, who delivered consistent messages that emphasized risks yet remained avuncular and reassuring in tone.

Innovations in the graphical presentation of hurricane information include satellite loops (introduced in the 1960s and refined thereafter) and the NHC's “cone of uncertainty” graphic for storm motion (introduced in 2002). These tools vividly showed the risk to the central Gulf Coast as Hurricane Katrina approached in 2005. Moreover, TWC's Steve Lyons and NHC's Max Mayfield stressed the dire nature of the threat in widely viewed television segments. Yet Katrina resulted in more than 1,800 deaths, the largest such toll in more than 75 years. The case of Katrina emphasizes how the presence of accurate and widely disseminated warnings is a necessary but insufficient factor in reducing hurricane death tolls.

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Post-storm rebuilding considered 'Galveston's finest hour'

By MICHAEL A. SMITH

GALVESTON - The great storm that came roaring out of the Gulf of Mexico 100 years ago, destroying this island city and assuring its place in history, deserves its due.

But the wind and water and death brought by the unnamed hurricane, even the acts of courage and sacrifice played out in its face, are only half the story.

For while the story that began Sept. 8, 1900, is one about the fate of people at the hands of nature, it's also one about people altering their own fates by changing the face of nature.

Storm and early aftermath

Historians contend that between 10,000 and 12,000 people died during the storm, at least 6,000 of them on Galveston Island. More than 3,600 homes were destroyed on Galveston Island and the added toll on commercial structures created a monetary loss of $30 million, about $700 million in today's dollars.

The Great Storm reigns today as the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. But while the storm was phenomenal, so was the response of the people who survived it.

"Sunday morning, the day after the disaster, began with the sound of bells from the ruined Ursuline Convent calling people to worship," wrote historian David G. McComb in "Galveston: A History."

It was a fitting beginning.

Despite the unimaginable devastation and what must have been a hard realization that it could happen again, the city immediately began pulling itself out of the mud.

By 10 a.m. Sept. 9, Mayor Walter C. Jones had called emergency city council meetings and by the end of the day had appointed a Central Relief Committee.

Ignoring advice from its sister paper, The Dallas Morning News, that it move temporarily to Houston, The Galveston Daily News continued publishing from the island and never missed an issue. Sept. 9 and 10, 1900, were published together on a single sheet of paper. One side listed the dead. The other reported the devastation of the storm.

In the first week after the storm, according to McComb's book, telegraph and water service were restored. Lines for a new telephone system were being laid by the second.

"In the third week, Houston relief groups went home, the saloons reopened, the electric trolleys began operating and freight began moving through the harbor," McComb wrote.

Residents of Galveston quickly decided that they would rebuild, that the city would survive, and almost as soon, leaders began deciding how it would do so.

The two civil engineering projects leaders decided to pursue - building a seawall and raising the island's elevation - stand today and are almost as great in their scope and effect as the storm itself.

Raising the grade

It's impossible to stand anywhere in the historical parts of Galveston and get exactly the same perspective a viewer would have gotten 100 years ago.

Everything is higher than it was back then, and some spots are much higher.

The feat of raising an entire city began with three engineers hired by the city in 1901 to design a means of keeping the gulf in its place.

Along with building a seawall, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and H.C. Ripley recommended the city be raised 17 feet at the seawall and sloped downward at a pitch of one foot for every 1,500 feet to the bay.

The first task required to translate their vision into a working system was a means of getting more than 16 million cubic yards of sand - enough to fill more than a million dump trucks - to the island, according to McComb.

The solution was to dredge the sand from Galveston's ship channel and pump it as liquid slurry through pipes into quarter-square-mile sections of the city that were walled off with dikes.

Their theory was that as the water drained away the sand would remain.

Before the pumping could begin, all the structures in the area had to be raised with jackscrews. Meanwhile, all the sewer, water and gas lines had to be raised.

McComb wrote that some people even raised gravestones and some tried to save trees, but most of the trees died. In the old city cemeteries along Broadway, some of the graves are three deep because of the grade raising.

The city paid to move the utilities and for the actual grade raising, but each homeowner had to pay to have the house raised.

By 1911, McComb wrote, 500 city blocks had been raised, some by just a few inches and others by as much as 11 feet.

The Seawall

The most apparent of Galveston's efforts to prevent a repeat of 1900's devastation is the seawall, which today runs from just past Boddeker Drive on the east end to just past Cove View Boulevard on the west.

The current span of just more than 10 miles was built in six sections in a period of almost 60 years, said County Engineer Mike Fitzgerald.

The oldest part of the seawall still visible runs from Sixth street to 39th street and was built between 1902 and 1904, he said.

"The original seawall ran from Eighth Street at the Galveston Wharf front to Sixth Street and from Sixth to 39th," he said.

The next section, which runs from 39th Street to 53rd Street, was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect its property at Fort Crockett and was completed in 1905.

In the early 1920s, the county and U.S. Army extended the original wall eastward to protect Fort San Jacinto. That project took a sharp northward curve that originally ran from Sixth Street to Eighth Street out of the seawall.

The eastward run of the wall was extended again in the late 1920s and by 1926 ran all the way to the bay just past Boddeker Drive.

In 1927, a section of wall running from 53rd Street to 61st was completed, and the final run of the wall, from 61st to its current end, was built between 1953 and 1961, Fitzgerald said.

Fitzgerald, whose crews are charged with inspecting and maintaining parts of the wall, said he always was impressed with the engineering and construction of the wall.

"They did a great job," he said.

He said that aside from paving and painting stripes on Seawall Boulevard, there is very little to maintain. But while the engineers and builders did a good job, he said there are some glitches with the wall.

One is the fact that it's only 15.6 feet above sea level, when it was supposed to be 17 feet.

"These were marine engineers who were accustomed to measuring from mean low tide," he said.

Because of the difference between sea level and mean low tide, the seawall came out a little short.

One of the most important aspects of the seawall often goes unnoticed, he said.

"In a severe Category 4 or a Category 5 hurricane there will be some over-topping of the seawall," he said. "What a lot of people don't know is that the ground across Seawall Boulevard is sloped upward so it is 4 or 5 feet higher on the inland side than at the top of the concave surface."

The slope helps to break the action even of waves that manage to top the wall, he said.

The wall got its first real test in mid-August of 1915 when a hurricane of severity comparable to the 1900 Storm blew across the island.

While much of the city was flooded and most of the structures outside the protection of the original wall were destroyed, those behind it fared well.

The cost of such protection was high, though.

McComb estimated that it cost about $16 million to build the seawall and raise the grade.

For comparison, Fitzgerald said it would cost $10 million a mile to build the seawall in today's dollars - or more than $100 million total.

While Galveston received financial help from the county, state and federal governments, a large portion of the burden had to be carried by the city itself, at the expense of other projects.

McComb sums it up about as well as it can be:

"Human technology made it possible - for the city of Galveston to remain on such unstable land. The city did not flourish. Houston - left the island city far behind. Galveston simply survived.

"The public defenses against nature came at a high cost, but they succeeded for the most part. Its struggle for survival against nature through the application of technology represents the strongest tradition of Western civilization. Galveston's response to the great storm was its finest hour."

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Excerpt from “Galveston, 1900”. Chapter 13 of “The Divine Wind” by Kerry Emanuel, Oxford Press, 2005.

The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 was by far the worst natural calamity in U.S. history. The city itself was almost completely destroyed, and the death toll of between 8,000 and 12,000 exceeds that of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the 1889 Johnstown Flood, and the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane combined. Between the badly bungled forecast of September 6 and the tragedy at Galveston two days later lies a tale of individual courage and misjudgment, of bureaucratic envy and xenophobia.

In 1900, Galveston was the premier city of Texas, the “New York of the Gulf” as the New York Herald proclaimed. It was competing with Houston to become the dominant city of the region, on par with New Orleans. It exuded an air of terrific optimism and boasted an annual population growth of almost 3 percent. The city was built on Galveston Island, a narrow, low sandbar separating the Gulf of Mexico from Galveston Bay, its developers having ignored stories that an 1841 storm had submerged the entire island to such a depth that ships could cross it.

Sparse ship reports suggest that the storm that was to destroy Galveston formed in the central North Atlantic, about four hundred miles west of the Cape Verde Islands, on or about August 27. A ship encountering the storm the next day recorded winds of about 14 m/s (30 mph). By Thursday the thirtieth, the tropical storm was near Antigua in the Leeward Islands, where the observing station at St. Johns recorded a minimum pressure of 1010 mb (29.83”). Proceeding westward on September 1-4, the storm grazed the south coasts of Hispaniola and Cuba, inundating Santiago, Cuba with 87 cm (24.34”) of rain in just two days. Many miles of railway bedding were washed away in Jamaica as the storm passed by to its north.

The forecasters at Havana’s Belen Observatory monitored the storm with interest. Father Gangoite, the observatory’s director, issued a statement on September 1 expressing his view that the storm, while small, was of a type known to produce heavy rain in Cuba and to intensify rapidly after passing into the Florida Straits. The tropical storm crossed over western Cuba during the fourth, and the next day the Belen observers reported it near Havana, moving northwestward into the Gulf of Mexico.

It was during this time that politics threw a nasty wrench into the already shaky machinery of turn-of-the-century hurricane forecasting. Officials of the Washington D.C.-based U.S. Weather Bureau Central Office, headed by Willis Moore, had grown increasingly exasperated with Cuban forecasters, whom they regarded as inferior and alarmists. In reality, the Cubans had achieved a well-deserved reputation for skill in hurricane observation and forecasting, and the Weather Bureau sought to curtail the competition.

…

Whatever its cause, the animosity of the U.S. Weather Bureau toward its Cuban colleagues no doubt contributed to serious forecast blunders made in the succeeding days. The track of the storm through late on September 5 showed it gradually turning north. Once they begin to recurve, most hurricanes continue to do so. Thus Weather Bureau forecasters were very much within their rights to predict on September 5 that the storm would move northward and pose a threat to Florida and the East Coast of the United States. They shrugged off the Cuban forecasters’ suggestion that the storm would move northwestward into the Gulf….As late as that Thursday afternoon (September 6), the Bureau was warning fishermen in New Jersey to stay in port.

Introduction to Heat Wave Science Concepts

Although there is no universally accepted definition of the term heat wave, it is commonly used to describe extended time periods of abnormally warm air temperature. More specifically, it is when heat stress (body’s difficulty in regulating temperature) is elevated. Heat wave conditions usually impact large regions (e.g., the Midwest); however, within the affected region, there can be large variations in the heat index due to differences in land surface characteristics. Most commonly, cities experience more severe heat index values due to the urban heat island effect, an increase in temperatures in urban areas that results from the abundance of non-natural surface and building materials (see Figure 1). In some cases, the urban heat island effect can add several degrees to the air temperature and heat index resulting in substantially higher heat stress. Coupled with high population density, and often, poor living conditions, the urban heat island effect makes cities considerably more vulnerable to heat waves than surrounding rural areas.

Figure 1. A schematic of rural (left) and urban (right) landscapes depicting one contribution to the urban heat island effect. In the rural environment, moisture is present at the surface, either in the soil or transpired by plants. In contrast, surface moisture is deficient in the urban environment. If moisture is present (rural), available energy will go toward evaporation rather than warming of the air. The absence of surface moisture in urban areas, combined with retention of heat by urban building materials, results in elevated temperatures.

While extreme warm temperatures can cause heat stress, the effects are usually worsened by high humidity, which can vary considerably from place to place. This has led to the phrase “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” The negative impacts of heat waves on people range from short-term behavioral change to serious health consequences and even death. So why is humidity an important component of heat stress? The importance of humidity is actually related to the process of evaporation. Because evaporation is a cooling process, the human body is able to use evaporation to regulate temperature by sweating. This is similar to the process that occurs when you get out of a swimming pool or shower. You initially feel cold, but after drying (removing the cooling influence of evaporation), you are more comfortable. This evaporation and cooling process can only occur if the air is sufficiently dry. When warm temperatures are coupled with high humidity, our ability to regulate body temperature through evaporation is limited (Figure 2). This can potentially result in heat stroke or death. Because of the importance of humidity for heat stress, extreme warm conditions are usually characterized by the heat index, a numerical measure that combines temperature and humidity into a single number that reflects heat stress.

Figure 2. When the air contains little water vapor (left), perspiration on the skin readily evaporates, cooling the skin and reducing heat stress. When the air contains large amounts of water vapor, evaporation of perspiration from the skin is limited, causing heat stress.

The July 1995 heat wave impacted the Midwest United States and resulted in more than 700 deaths in Chicago. In this exercise, you will examine different accounts (newspapers, excerpts from journal articles, etc) and assess how well they communicated the major contributors that caused a week of tragedy in Chicago: the urban heat island effect and the combination of heat and humidity. You will learn that the physical characteristics of heat waves described above only partially explain the overall impact of heat waves on humans. As you will also learn, preparation and response are important components of overall heat wave impacts. To understand heat waves and avoid their negative consequences, the physical and social conditions must be considered.