Nature on the Rampage
This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s own kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally as it were—without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.
—Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, 1903
Residents of the southeastern United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean know it as “hurricane season.” Officially spanning June 1 to November 1, hurricane season is the time of year when most of the hurricanes come out of the equatorial Atlantic, sweep up the Gulf Stream, and strike the eastern part of North and Central America. This is when the heat of the summer has fully warmed up the tropical waters and built up enough energy to trigger hurricanes. In some years, only a few tropical storms become powerful enough to be called hurricanes, but in the past few decades, hurricanes have been more powerful with each season.
The year 2005 was turning out to be the worst hurricane season in recorded history. By the end of the season in January 2006, there were a record 28 large, officially named tropical storms, and a record 15 had become hurricanes. Of these, seven turned into major hurricanes, a record five of them reached Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricanes (extreme hurricanes with wind speeds exceeding 210 km/h (131 mph), and a record four of them reached Category 5 (catastrophic hurricanes with wind speeds exceeding 250 km/h, or 155 mph). Among these was the most intense storm ever recorded. There were even hurricanes in the South Atlantic, a phenomenon that scientists thought was impossible. There had never been a season like it, but there may be more of these in store.
The season got off to a rip-roaring start in June with tropical storms Arlene and Bret and Hurricane Cindy, which dropped 133 mm (5 inches) of rain on Louisiana and Mississippi and killed three people. On July 5, Hurricane Dennis struck Cuba, Haiti, and Florida, becoming a Category 4 storm with the strongest air pressure ever recorded in July in that region; it killed 89 people and caused $5 billion in damage. As people were recovering, Hurricane Emily closed in, setting the record for the fastest-moving storm. It hit southeastern Mexico on July 11 with Category 5 strength, killing 14 people and causing $400 million in damages. These storms alone would have made 2005 one of the worst seasons on record, but it wasn’t even August yet. August 2005 turned out to be much worse than even the most pessimistic forecasts. After tropical storms Franklin, Gert, and Harvey passed without major damage, Hurricane Irene was followed by tropical storm Jose, which flooded eastern Mexico even though the storm never reached hurricane status.
Then came Katrina (fig. 6.1). Forming over the Bahamas in mid-August, it became a Category 4 hurricane as it passed over Florida, reached the warm Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico, and built up even more energy. Meteorologists had been tracking it for days and sent out warnings to officials and the public that this was going to be a catastrophic storm, but neither the local authorities nor the Bush administration took the extra steps that were required: earlier and more urgent evacuations, sending relief aid as the storm approached, and so on. Local agencies warned most of the area in the storm’s path to get out of the way. When Katrina made its second landfall along the southern Gulf Coast on August 29, 80 percent of the people in the region had evacuated, but others were hunkered down, figuring they could ride out the storm. The evacuation order was useless to poorer neighborhoods of New Orleans, whose residents did not have cars, and no public transportation was provided.
Fig. 6.1. A NOAA satellite image of Hurricane Katrina before it made landfall in Florida, August 2005. In the next few days, it gained energy over the Gulf of Mexico and then slammed into New Orleans and the southern Gulf Coast. (Courtesy NOAA)
Katrina turned out to be much worse than anyone had anticipated (plates 9, 10). The damage from the heavy wind and rain was more severe than during any hurricane in recent memory, and buildings and trees up and down the Gulf Coast of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were devastated. Even more catastrophic was the huge two-story-tall wall of water, or storm surge, that poured inland due to the hurricane. This water broke through dikes and levees of New Orleans in more than 50 places and released a huge volume of pollution-laden water into the low-lying districts, flooding many houses to their rooftops, and inundating 80 percent of the city.
News was filled with images of people and their pets stranded on rooftops (plate 9B), awaiting rescue by helicopters and boats. There were images of evacuees crowded into the New Orleans Superdome, Civic Center, and the Houston Astrodome without adequate food, water, or medical care. As the waters receded, images of the Lower Ninth Ward completely under water were broadcast, and many other parts of New Orleans drowned in several feet of water. Most shocking were images of corpses rotting in the sun—drowning victims that could not be identified.
So far, Katrina had caused at least $82 billion in damage, the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, more than twice the previous record held by Hurricane Andrew in 1982 (calculated in 2008 dollars). Katrina killed at least 1,836 people (with more than 700 still missing and unaccounted for), making it the deadliest U.S. hurricane since the 1928 Lake Okeechobee hurricane. Katrina permanently transformed the city of New Orleans. Many poor residents moved outside of New Orleans because their homes were lost or damaged beyond repair. Even houses that had only seen moderate flooding were condemned because of water damage and pollutants that were mixed in, which made structures uninhabitable, especially after months of mold, mildew, and rot had set in. Katrina became a symbol of the Bush administration’s bungling and insensitivity to poor people, and a warning to New Orleans that a town built largely at or below sea level would always be vulnerable.
Lost in all the political finger-pointing was a larger problem: Katrina was more of a human-induced disaster than a natural one. Katrina was a strong storm, but it had dropped to a Category 3 hurricane before landfall, not enough to top the levees, which were supposedly built to survive a storm of that size. Katrina revealed that because of political bungling and pork-barrel spending billions of dollars had been spent on less essential projects like streets and sewers but not enough on the construction and maintenance of the levees of New Orleans. Geologists who studied the aftermath identified a larger problem: years of draining and developing wetlands along the Gulf Coast had worsened hurricane danger. At one time, natural wetlands absorbed the shock of hurricanes and prevented them from spreading their damage inland. A Time magazine article published on the second anniversary of Katrina in 2007 revealed that little had been done to mitigate the problem. The old levees had been patched up and billions of dollars that Congress and President Bush threw at the problem were wasted on temporary patch jobs and hundreds of unused trailers without really making New Orleans safer for the next big hurricane.
Even though Katrina dominated the news in the United States for months, the 2005 hurricane season was far from over. On September 2, Hurricane Maria became a Category 3 storm and then turned into a major extratropical hurricane, eventually reaching Iceland and Norway, where it caused death and destruction. Next were Hurricanes Nate and Ophelia, which slammed into North Carolina and rolled up the coast, making landfall again in Maritime Canada, causing $70 million in damages. The real kicker was Hurricane Rita, which hit the Florida Keys and became a Category 5 on September 21 (third largest hurricane on record) as it struck the Texas-Louisiana border region. Rita destroyed much of the oil infrastructure in the region and devastated the bayous of western Louisiana, killing at least 113 and causing $10 billion in damage. TV news was filled with images of thousands of people leaving Houston, Texas (fourth largest city in the U.S.), clogging the roads during the evacuation. Houston got lucky and was not hit as badly as was predicted.
By October, the Atlantic hurricane season normally winds down but not so in 2005. On October 2, Hurricane Stan struck the east coast of Mexico (already damaged from earlier hurricanes that summer) and caused intense flooding and mudslides, with more than 1,000 dead. Hurricane Tammy hit Florida on October 5, and eventually caused heavy rainfall and flooding on the northeast Atlantic Coast. Hurricane Vince struck Spain a few days later, the first hurricane in that region since 1842. Finally, on October 17 came the grand finale: Hurricane Wilma. It was the strongest hurricane on record in the Atlantic, with wind speeds of 185 km/h (255 mph) and pressures of 882 millibars, one of the highest pressures ever measured. First, it struck Cancun and Cozumel, becoming the most damaging storm in Mexican history, before curving back to pound Cuba and Florida. It caused 23 deaths and more than $29 billion in damages.
The standard system for naming Atlantic hurricanes uses 21 names in alphabetical order (see table 6.1), but the 2005 hurricane season was still not over. Hurricane Wilma constituted the 21st and last named hurricane. Afterward, Greek letters were used for the first time. Tropical storm Alpha flooded Haiti and the Dominican Republic and killed 42 people. Hurricane Beta hit Nicaragua on October 26 with Category 3 strength. Tropical storm Gamma killed 41 people in Honduras and Belize on November 15. Tropical storm Delta clobbered the Canary Islands on November 28, causing severe damage and many deaths. The final two storms, Hurricane Epsilon and Tropical Storm Zeta, were not as deadly, but Zeta became the latest tropical storm on record, finally dissipating on January 6, 2006.
After the 2005 season, the World Meteorological Organization retired five entries from their rotating list of tropical storm names (table 6.1). Future tropical storms or hurricanes will never be named Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Stan, and Wilma. Table 6.2 lists retired names, which are permanently associated in the memories of victims with particular catastrophic storms. When the old 2005 name list cycles back in 2011, the retired names will be replaced by Don, Katia, Rina, Sean, and Whitney. In the long tradition of male-dominated fields, where ships and hurricanes were named after women, the list originally had only female names. However, in recent years, the official list alternates between male and female names, using names from around the world, not only Anglo names. The letters Q, U, or X, Y, and Z are excluded. The compilation committee had enough challenges finding names for the less commonly used letters of the alphabet, let alone trying to find six or more male and female names that began with Q or X (table 6.2).
Table 6.1. Official alphabetical list of hurricane names (names repeat in six-year rotation)
Scientists worry that the 2005 season was part of a long-term trend toward more intense hurricanes over the past 20 years. That season broke the 2004 record, the previous worst season on record. The number of Category 4 and 5 storms between 1990 and 2006 increased dramatically compared with the interval between 1975 and 1989 (Curry et al. 2006). Emanuel (2005) showed that the power of the most recent hurricanes (as measured by wind speed and duration) had increased 50 percent since 1970. Nearly all the most destructive hurricane seasons on record had occurred in the past 20 years, with many of the years in the 2000s at or near record levels of major hurricanes. The ranking of seasons with the most major hurricanes has 2005, 1999, 1996, and 1994 in the top five. Of the seasons with the most named tropical storms in the Atlantic, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2008 are all on the top ten list, and only two years (1933, 1936) on the top ten list were before 1969. Only 2002 and 2006 have failed to make the list of the most named tropical storms in this decade. The 2009 season started late, but it had a record 7 named storms in August, and finished with 20 storms and 8 hurricanes altogether. The year 2010 was the most active season since 2005, with 19 named storms and 12 hurricanes.
Table 6.2. Official list of retired hurricane names
One criticism of efforts to identify whether hurricanes have become worse in recent years is the lack of a detailed historical record. Other than a few great storms of past centuries, there are almost no reliable historical records of hurricanes before 1900. A study by Mann and colleagues (2009) used cores taken from seven coastal locations (lagoons, lakes, barrier islands) on the Atlantic Coast of the United States and one site in Puerto Rico and identified the sandy storm layers, dating them by radiocarbon methods. They obtained a historical record of almost a thousand years of hurricane seasons on the Atlantic. They found that the past two decades have had the highest number of hurricanes, averaging 17 per year, more than twice the value of any previous decade. The last time hurricanes were this frequent was during the Medieval Warm Period.
Not surprisingly, this information has fueled the debate over climate change. That the sea surface temperatures in the tropical oceans have warmed dramatically cannot be disputed, even among climate skeptics. Warmer oceans, which generate hurricanes in the first place, produce more hurricanes and intense storms. Many top scientists argue that the connection between hurricanes and global warming is real (e.g., Curry et al. 2006; Emanuel 2005b; Webster et al. 2005), and most of these articles have been published in stringently reviewed, highly regarded scientific journals such as Science and Nature. However, climate skeptics are not convinced. The data for both oceanic temperatures and hurricane velocities do not go back far enough, so it is hard to establish past correlations.
Although Hurricane Katrina is deeply etched in the American memory, the deadliest hurricane to strike the United States occurred more than a century ago. It is also the deadliest of any kind of natural disaster (including earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides) to strike in the United States. It is only known from archival records because there are no survivors alive today from the storm that leveled Galveston, Texas, in 1900. At the turn of the twentieth century, Galveston was a boomtown, the “Jewel of Texas” and the home of Texas’s first post office, telephones, and medical college. It was a busy port town as well as a financial center, known as the “Wall Street of the Southwest.” Ships brought in goods from all over the world and exported tons of cotton from the Deep South. It was the largest city in Texas, with a population exceeding 43,000, and was still growing and developing.
In the summer of 1900, a storm developed 4,000 miles away, far across the Atlantic near the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa. Today, weather satellites, meteorological aircraft, and weather stations monitor every stage of a tropical storm; however, in 1900, there was no way to detect the storm in the open Atlantic except for the casual anecdotes of ship captains at sea. The first record was on August 27, 1900, when a ship captain mentioned “unsettled weather” about 1,600 km (1,000 miles) east of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean. By August 30, the storm had reached the Windward Islands and Antigua, where it was still a tropical depression with severe thunderstorms. By September 1, the U.S. Weather Bureau reported a “storm of moderate intensity (not a hurricane)” passing south of Cuba, which was drenched by the storm on September 3. By September 6, the storm was north of Key West, Florida, and on September 7, weather observers reported a severe storm had hit the Gulf Coast of Louisiana with heavy damage, but they were unable to pass the word to other areas because the storm had wiped out communications. The Galveston Weather Bureau issued hurricane warnings by the afternoon of September 7, and the ship Louisiana (which sailed from Galveston that morning) signaled that it was experiencing winds of 160 km/h (100 mph) as it passed through the storm. This would make the hurricane a Category 2 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, and it was still picking up heat and moisture from the Gulf and had not yet made landfall.
Even with all the warnings, however, most residents of Galveston were not alarmed. Galveston was built on a low, sandy barrier island that protected the Trinity River’s Galveston Bay, which flowed through Houston. At the time, its highest point was only 2.7 m (9 feet) above sea level, no match for storm waves of more than 4.6 m (15 feet) tall that would sweep across the island. Geographers assured Galveston residents that the long, gentle gradient of the continental shelf offshore would buffer the effects of the storm, dissipating its energy by the time it made landfall. A seawall to protect the island was proposed, but no one was concerned enough to build it. Residents were seduced by the myth that any future storm would be no worse than the previous storms they had experienced. In an 1891 article in the Galveston Daily News, the Galveston Weather Bureau section director Isaac Cline argued that a seawall was not needed to protect the city and maintained that it was impossible for a large hurricane to strike the island. Development of the island made it even more vulnerable. A large number of flimsy wooden houses were built in the sand, and most of the coastal sand dunes had been excavated as fill dirt for construction, which further eroded the island’s natural barriers.
Ironically, longtime Texas residents should have known better. Indianola, a nearby town on the Matagorda Bay, was built on a similar barrier island and was nearly wiped out during a hurricane in 1875. When a second, even more powerful hurricane struck in 1886, the town was destroyed, and survivors gave up trying to rebuild and moved elsewhere. Galveston residents did not heed the lessons of 14 years earlier, believing that their situation was different from Indianola’s.
As the storm approached, fewer than half of the island’s residents evacuated to the mainland, and some Houstonians actually came to Galveston to gawk at the storm. Early on the morning of September 8, a huge storm was brewing, and an evacuation order was given. It was too late because the waters of Galveston Bay were too rough for most boats to cross, and some ferries had broken loose from their moorings. One steamship floated away, out of control, and broke the three bridges that connected Galveston Island to the mainland, stranding the remaining residents.
Throughout Saturday, September 8, the Category 4 storm struck with maximum wind speeds of 240 km/h (150 mph). The barometric pressure plunged to such a low reading that the observers thought the barometer was broken; they had never experienced a low-pressure cell this intense. The huge storm surge 4.6 m (15 feet) tall formed a wall of water that knocked most of the buildings off their foundations and reduced the wooden ones to splinters. Brick and stone buildings remained but were largely ruined as well because the storm waves pounded them with debris from buildings and ships like battering rams. The rest of the town was turned into a pile of broken wood and rubble (fig. 6.2). The official death toll was 8,000, although most sources place it closer to 12,000. More people were killed in this natural disaster than in any other in U.S. history. Most were killed when they drowned in the storm surge or were crushed when buildings collapsed and waves pounded the debris around them. Many more died in the next few days because of injuries that could not be treated. Others were trapped in the wreckage and died of thirst and starvation. Damage was about $20 million in 1900 dollars, or $516 million in 2009 dollars.
By Sunday morning, September 9, clear skies and mild winds greeted survivors, who walked around in shock amid the rubble and attempted to pick through the wreckage to find survivors still trapped or to rescue their valuables. Meanwhile, the storm continued inland, where it pounded Texas and Oklahoma and reached Milwaukee with sustained winds of 40 mph. In New York City, sustained winds of 105 km/h (65 mph) tore down signs and awnings and killed several people. When it reached Halifax, Nova Scotia, on September 12, it clobbered the fishing fleet off Newfoundland before fading in the North Atlantic.
Galveston Island was isolated and lacked communications to the outside world; relief efforts to the island were difficult. A train leaving Houston for Galveston as the storm began on September 8 was forced to stop when it found the tracks washed out and the ferries gone. Some train passengers sought shelter in a Bolivar Lighthouse and survived, crammed like sardines amid the stench and smell of human excrement as 10 m (33 foot) waves pounded the walls of the lighthouse. But all those who stayed in the train drowned when the storm surge overran the cars.
On Monday, September 9, the ship Pherabe, one of the few ships originally docked in Galveston that had survived the storm, arrived in Texas City on the mainland and sent out messages, which soon spread to Houston and other cities. In a telegram, the governor of Texas, Joe Sayers, sent President William McKinley the following news: “I have been deputized by the mayor and Citizen’s Committee of Galveston to inform you that the city of Galveston is in ruins” (Green 1900, 126). G. L. Vaughn, the Western Union manager in Houston, sent the following message to the head of the U.S. Weather Bureau:
Fig. 6.2. Pictures of the devastation of Galveston after the 1900 hurricane. A, House blown over on its side. B, Ship pushed out into the wreckage of the city. C, Galveston was totally flattened into piles of lumber; a body lies in the wreckage of the wharf. (Images from old lantern slides; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
First news from Galveston just received by train which could get no closer to the bay shore than six miles where Prairie was strewn with debris and dead bodies. About 200 corpses counted from train. Large Steamship stranded two miles inland. Nothing could be seen of Galveston. Loss of life and property undoubtedly most appalling. Weather clear and bright here with gentle southeast wind. (Green 1900, 126)
Trains and boats from Houston and elsewhere soon rushed to the island to help survivors. Early messages estimated the death toll at only 500, and even that seemed incredible to outsiders. Little did they know that at least ten to fifteen times that many were actually dead. Almost a quarter of the population had died in one day, and there were not enough places to store the dead bodies (fig. 6.2C). It was impossible to bury the hundreds of bodies. When corpses were dropped in the ocean, they floated back to shore. Therefore, huge funeral pyres were set up to burn bodies for weeks to prevent the stench and to stop the spread of disease from the rotting corpses. The authorities passed out free whiskey to the men who had to throw hundreds of bodies, some of them their own wives and children, onto the bonfire.
Within days, the railroad lines and ferries were restored, mail and telegraphs were working again, and fresh water was accessible. A huge tent city, the “White City on the Beach,” was constructed from U.S. army tents. Many people built temporary houses out of “storm lumber” salvaged from the ruins. Eventually, bodies were all burned and the wreckage was cleared, but the storm changed many residents’ minds about living on Galveston Island. Development soon shifted to Houston, which was beginning to experience its first oil boom. Galveston was eventually rebuilt, with sand dredged from the island, raising the city higher above sea level, and a huge seawall was built to protect it. Galveston never recovered its status as the largest city in Texas. A hurricane in 1915 claimed 275 lives. Life on a barrier island is never safe from hurricanes.
The terminology of great tropical storms can be confusing. By convention, tropical storms that arise in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans become hurricanes, those that occur in the western Pacific Ocean are known as typhoons, and those that originate in the Indian Ocean are known as cyclones (fig. 6.3). They occur only in a belt just above and below the equator in these oceans, but not at the equator, since the prevailing winds do not form a strong spiraling pattern that promotes the spiral (“cyclonic”) flow of hurricanes. All tropical storms arise from similar forces: excess heat in the ocean. Heat that has built up in these tropical oceans over the long summer must be dissipated to higher latitudes because heat always flows from hotter to colder regions. Once the sea surface temperature has reached a threshold of 27°C (80°F) in the upper 60 m (200 feet) of water, conditions are right for a tropical storm. If the air above the ocean is also warm, humid, and unstable, and there are no strong upper-level winds to move the heat away, a tropical storm develops, typically when there is a large area of low pressure over the tropical Atlantic, Pacific, or Indian oceans.
This low-pressure zone begins with a series of small, disorganized thunderstorms with weak surface winds, known as a tropical disturbance. If the surface winds become stronger and better organized, they soon spiral around the area of low pressure in a cyclonic fashion around a central core, forming a tropical depression. These winds then converge on the spiraling area, with the core acting as a chimney, allowing warm moist air to rise quickly to the stratosphere and sucks more moisture out of the clouds that spiral around it. The rising moist air quickly cools and water condenses, releasing huge amounts of latent heat. This in turn warms the surrounding air and causes stronger updrafts, which in turn increase the rate of flow of warm moist air from below, creating a feedback loop that amplifies the storm until it reaches a massive size.
Fig. 6.3. Map where tropical storms occur. (Courtesy USGS; redrawn by Pat Linse)
As the converging winds spiral around the low-pressure center, they increase in strength. When winds exceed 63 km/h (39 mph), they have become a tropical storm. The system can grow even larger if it is fed by warm, moist waters and continues to grow in size and power, with higher and higher wind speeds. If it exceeds wind velocities of 119 km/h (79 mph), it then becomes a hurricane, a typhoon, or a cyclone. On the Saffir-Simpson scale, there are five categories of hurricanes, from Category 1 (wind speeds of 119–153 km/h, or 74–95 mph) up to Category 4 and 5, mentioned earlier.
Hurricanes are basically heat engines to transfer energy from the tropics to higher latitudes. An average hurricane generates energy at rates 200 times as fast as our worldwide capacity to generate electricity. The kinetic energy of the winds in a single hurricane is about half the worldwide global energy capacity, and the energy released in a hurricane through its clouds and rain is 400 times as powerful as the energy of its winds.
Once a hurricane develops, it becomes the huge spiraling mass of clouds familiar on satellite images (figs. 6.1, 6.4). Most hurricanes are made of a series of cyclonic rain bands that spiral counterclockwise around the eye and inward, pulling warm, moist air from the ocean. In the center is the eye of the hurricane, where the wind spirals up the “wall” of the eye in an intense updraft and cool air from above sinks rapidly down the center of the eye to counter the upward flow (fig. 6.4). They are then moved forward by the trade winds and their own energy, forming a curved path (fig. 6.3). In the Atlantic, the paths all move the same way, in a clockwise, recurved path toward the northeast and then out to the northwest, because the trade winds spiral around a large high-pressure cell in the north-central Atlantic called the Bermuda high. As long as these systems stay over warm water, they can increase in energy and develop higher wind speeds. Once they move over cold water or land, the energy is quickly dissipated, and the system breaks down and dies out.
Fig. 6.4. Diagram of a hurricane, showing the structure and wind direction. (Courtesy USGS; redrawn by Pat Linse)
Although U.S. residents don’t pay as much attention to them, the typhoons of the western Pacific have recorded winds stronger than the strongest Atlantic hurricane. The Pacific also has the most intense storms on record anywhere in the world. They typically result in huge loss of life when they flood low-lying regions in Asia where hundreds of poor farmers and peasants live. Their damage to structures can be even more severe because they hit poorly constructed buildings in relatively poor countries. The name typhoon comes from Cantonese dai fung or Mandarin da feng, which means “big wind” in both dialects. Although they form year round, typhoons are most common from August to October, because the same peak of late summer and fall oceanic warming that drives the Atlantic hurricane season also produces typhoons. They originate in the western equatorial Pacific, then (like Atlantic hurricanes) trend northeast before curving back to the northwest (fig. 6.3), because they are driven by prevailing winds that wrap around a long-term high-pressure cell in the north-central Pacific. This means that they typically strike China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the smaller islands of the west Pacific, and especially the Philippines, which has been hit by more typhoons than any other nation. The list of names of typhoons was agreed to by the 17 Asian nations that experience them, with a five-year rotation before they repeat. Unlike the Atlantic hurricanes, which are all named after people, most typhoons are named after animals, flowers, astrological signs, and a few personal names. The Japanese, however, do not use the naming system and refer to typhoons by number in order of occurrence. Tropical storms in the Atlantic are similarly numbered and do not merit names unless they reach the threshold for a category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
Nina, a supertyphoon and one of the deadliest typhoons ever recorded, started out as a tropical depression in the north-central Pacific on July 30, 1975. A subtropical ridge of high pressure kept it from curving north to the Philippines, and instead, it went on almost a straight northwest-trending path toward Taiwan and China. On August 1, weather observers noticed a rapid, huge drop in barometric pressure and an increase in wind speed, from 120 km/h (75 mph) to as high as 250 km/h (155 mph), making it a Category 5 storm. As it approached Taiwan, it weakened slightly but still hit the island hard, although the damage was mostly in the island’s mountainous highlands. Then it skipped on to the mainland, coming ashore on the southeast coast of China in Fujian Province, before curving to the right (north) and hitting Hunan Province. As it did so, it set a record for rainfall in the region, dropping a meter of rain in less than 24 hours (more than a year’s typical rainfall), and flooding nearly all of coastal China. As it headed north toward Henan Province on August 5, it flooded the drainage of Huai River and caused the failure of Banqiao Dam, which collapsed and helped trigger the failure of smaller dams downstream. Meteorologists calculate that this was not a 500-year flood, but a 1-in-2,000-year flood. As the storm raged during the night of August 7, there were communication problems. No one told the workers to open the dam and release the water before the catastrophic failure. By August 8, 62 smaller dams downstream were failing, and by 1:00 a.m. the next day, Banqiao Dam collapsed. It released 78,800 m3/sec (64 acre feet/second) in a huge wall of water weighing 701 million tons, moving through the valley over a 6-hour span. Altogether, the combined dams released 15.7 billion tons of water in a few hours. The wall of water was 10 km (6.2 miles) wide, 7 m (23 feet) high, and traveled at 55 km/h (31 mph), making it impossible for most people below the dams to escape. Hundreds of thousands of acres were flooded, many cities were wiped away, and at least 6 million buildings were destroyed. The severity of this disaster was unknown to the Western world because China was still a closed country in 1975. The government strictly censored most news (especially bad news) from reaching the world or their own people. It was not until 2005 that details were declassified and westerners learned about the extent of the disaster.
Altogether, the flooding from Typhoon Nina and its side effects killed at least 170,000 people—26,000 from drowning, and 146,000 from disease and famine afterward. Nina caused at least $5 billion in damage in 2009 dollars, making it one of the most expensive natural disasters ever, as well as the second deadliest typhoon in history. The record is held by an 1881 typhoon that hit Haiphong in northern Vietnam, killing at least 300,000 people. Unfortunately, little is known about this record-breaking event because it occurred more than a century ago, and there were no records or meteorological data comparable to storms we have studied in the past 50 years.
If the deadliest storms occur in the western Pacific typhoon belt, a close second would be the Indian Ocean tropical cyclones. These monster storms often strike low-lying poorer regions of such countries as India, Burma, Bangladesh, and Thailand, and drown thousands of peasant farmers who have no place to escape. The deadliest named storm in all of history was Typhoon Nina, but the second deadliest was Cyclone Nargis in 2008. Nargis is the Urdu name for “daffodil” or “flower” and is a common girl’s name in parts of southern Asia. This Nargis was no flower or girl but a disaster that killed hundreds of thousands, and brought Burma to its knees.
Nargis started as a strong tropical depression that developed in the center of the Indian Ocean on April 27, 2008. By April 28, it had stalled and was building up energy, reaching Category 1 status. At first, it appeared to be headed north for India or Bangladesh, but on May 1, the storm intensified and headed northeastward instead. Eastern India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka were not in the storm’s direct path, but they experienced severe flooding from the edge of the storm and a great loss of life and damage. On May 2, Nargis reached the coast of Burma (Myanmar) as a Category 4 storm, with wind speeds clocked at 215 km/h (135 mph). As it went ashore, it brought the waves of a huge storm surge over the low, swampy Irawaddy River delta region, where millions of Burmese eke out a living growing rice. By the time it passed the capital of Yangon (Rangoon), it had slowed to 130 km/h (80 mph), but it still did massive damage to the city. Then it moved inland to the Thai-Burmese border, where it lost strength and fell apart after May 3.
The Burmese living on the Irawaddy delta had no chance. The winds and rain destroyed any shelter they sought, and the storm surge wave drowned people by the thousands and washed many out to sea. The military junta that ruled Burma refused to count the dead and gave lowball estimates of 80,000 deaths to minimize international criticism of their lack of relief efforts. This number was clearly fabricated because 80,000 died in the Labutta Township alone and another 10,000 died in Bogale. Most sources estimate the total number of dead and missing at close to 300,000, and some estimates were as high as 1 million. The true number is unknown because many bodies washed away or were buried. Besides, Burma is a closed society with no press scrutiny or access to sources of information. Another 2–3 million people were left homeless.
Once the storm had passed, it was clear from the few press accounts that got past the government censors that the scale of devastation and misery was unimaginable (fig. 6.5). At least 95 percent of the buildings in the Irawaddy delta were destroyed, as well as more than 1,400 temples. The storm surge not only wiped out the buildings and drowned millions of people but also destroyed most of the crops, because sewage from ruptured pipes washed across the fields and made the surviving rice and other food plants inedible.
More appalling was how the tyrannical regime used the disaster to destroy political opposition in the region. At first, they refused any aid from foreign countries, even though people were dying from the hurricane, from lack of clean food and water, or from rapidly spreading diseases. The government kept the world’s news agencies away from the devastation and repeatedly denied its seriousness, to make their regime seem less incompetent. Foreign aid planes and ships were immediately mobilized and waited days for permission to land or dock. Still the military junta refused permission on the grounds that these foreigners were violating their sovereignty. Finally, on May 7, 2008, the Burmese government allowed the United Nations to authorize relief efforts, and on May 8, the first aid from India was allowed into the country—more than a week after the hurricane had struck. Relief efforts were still slow and cumbersome because the Burmese junta hampered travel. Visas were denied and reportedly a large share of the relief supplies were stolen to enrich the government. By late May and early June, a much larger volume of supplies reached the disaster zone but it was already too late for much of the country. Only the hardiest survivors remained; other survivors had finally succumbed to disease or starvation.
The cruelty and incompetence of the Burmese junta will probably go down as one of the greatest acts of tyranny carried out by rulers against their people. It compares to the genocide by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 1970s or the massacres in Darfur in Ethiopia.
Fig. 6.5. Images from Cyclone Nargis. A, Satellite image of the cyclone as it headed east over the Bay of Bengal. (Image courtesy NOAA) B, The cyclone at full strength in Yangon (Rangoon), blowing trees apart and destroying buildings. C, A Buddha statue is all that stands among the ruins. (B and C courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Damage to Burma from Nargis was staggering. Yet Bangladesh always suffers the worst loss of life. Seven of the nine more deadly weather events ever recorded have hit this country. It is a densely populated region built on the low delta deposits of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, with no natural barriers to prevent flooding. More than 35 percent of Bangladesh is no higher than 6 m (20 feet) in elevation, so any rise in sea level, caused by a large storm or flood, washes across this vast low-lying area and can cause unspeakable misery. Its large (131 million), desperately poor, and rapidly growing population tries to eke three crops of rice out of the flooded fields each year, earning a household annual income of about $500. When a storm hits, 20 percent to 60 percent of the country goes under water. When cyclones hit, storm surges are 6 m (20 feet) high and drown more than 35 percent of the country. Compounding the problem is that the coastline is like a funnel, catching the cyclones and diverting them over the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal. In a typical year, Bangladesh has five cyclones in April–May (before the monsoon season) and again in October–November (as the monsoon season ends).
The Bhola cyclone of November 12–13, 1970, was a Category 3 storm that swept over East Pakistan during high tide and built a storm surge 7 m (23 feet) tall, with wind speeds reaching 255 km/h (155 mph). The wall of water drowned 500,000 people and most of their farm animals, making it the deadliest Indian Ocean cyclone of all time. The damages reached $500 million in 2009 U.S. dollars. George Harrison, formerly of the Beatles, organized the Concert for Bangladesh, which occurred on August 1, 1971, to raise money for disaster relief. It was the first in what has now become a long succession of celebrity rock concerts to raise funds and public awareness for the less fortunate. Images of starving children orphaned by the storm were used to promote the concert, which raised more than $243,000 (in 1971 dollars) for disaster relief.
The storm had an even bigger political effect. After World War II, India finally won independence from the British Empire. It became a Hindu nation, and its Muslims were sent (or migrated) to two regions: West Pakistan (what is now Pakistan) and East Pakistan on the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta. For years, East Pakistan had been trying to break away from West Pakistan. The clumsy handling of the Bhola cyclone disaster by the Pakistani government caused tremendous worldwide criticism and energized the separatist movement in East Pakistan. A year after the cyclone, East Pakistan won its independence from West Pakistan and became Bangladesh. Great storms do have consequences: not only do they kill people and force cities to be abandoned but sometimes they change the political landscape. If only the Nargis storm had done for Burma what Bhola did for Bangladesh!
As we review case histories of famous storms, patterns may emerge. First is the inherent foolishness of people who refuse to evacuate before impending disaster, especially when they have been fully warned. For events before the twentieth century, it was impossible to gauge a storm’s size or to warn people adequately. Nowadays, satellites, meteorological aircraft, and ground observers closely watch every storm, so we usually know what to expect. Stubborn types insist on hunkering down through a storm, and gawkers and thrill-seekers want to experience a monster storm firsthand but often die in the process. There always seem to be incompetent officials who fail to send out proper warning or are unprepared to handle the disaster relief efforts after the storm. There are governments, such as those in China or Burma, that have a sorry history of covering up their incompetence and failing to serve their people. These unfortunate examples of human behavior result in far greater loss of life.
The larger question, however, is the wisdom of countries and communities that build on storm-prone coastlines and encourage growth on barrier islands, deltas, low-lying coasts, swamps, and other regions likely to be hit sooner or later. This is especially true of the runaway growth on the coastal barrier islands of Texas and the Carolinas, or over much of coastal Florida. People like to live near the beach, and don’t think of long-term consequences or inherent risks in living in storm-prone areas. As geologists who work in these areas know, all you need to do is dig a trench down through any barrier island and layers of storm deposit are visible. Virtually an entire barrier island consists of stacked storm deposits, but almost no deposits form during the years of fair weather between storms. These risks are no secret. They are mentioned in most introductory geology textbooks. Yet people are still willing to gamble on the significant risk that they will be hurt in a natural disaster, all for the joy of living close to the beach before the next hurricane strikes.
If governmental officials allow runaway development of coastal regions and especially barrier islands, who is liable when an evacuation order results in gridlock? Hurricane prediction is much more precise than earthquake prediction, but it still has its own uncertainties. Even the best forecasts can give only a probabilistic estimate of how strong a storm will be and where exactly it will make landfall. Many storms have surprised weather watchers by suddenly changing course or by strengthening. Yet people have a short fuse for false alarms and seem intolerant when nature surprises the experts. Sometimes they even sue when a storm fails to hit as predicted because of the time and inconvenience of evacuating unnecessarily. As with earthquakes, disaster prediction in a litigious society is a no-win situation: scientists are damned if they predict the storm but people don’t heed your warning, and they are damned if they don’t and people sue because of the false alarm.
If people ignore warnings and build in dangerous areas, who should pay when disaster strikes? Do property owners deserve to be bailed out by private insurance companies? Do they deserve taxpayer-paid disaster relief? What happens when the impending global rise in sea level drowns these coastal communities? What happens when global warming triggers frequent and more violent storms? These issues swirl around every major disaster, but great tropical storms bring them to the fore more than any other hazard.
Center for Public Integrity. 2007. City Adrift: New Orleans Before and After Katrina. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.
Cyson, M. E. 2006. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. Perseus Books Group, New York.
Davies, P. 2000. Inside the Hurricanes. Holt, New York.
Emanuel, K. 2005a. Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Emanuel, K. 2005b. Increasing destrictiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years. Nature 436:686–88.
Larson, E. 2001. Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. Crown Random-House, New York.
Norcross, B. 2007. Hurricane Almanac: The Essential Guide to Storms Past, Present, and Future. St. Martin’s Griffin, New York.
Spielman, D. G. 2007. Katrinaville Chronicles: Images and Observations from a New Orleans Photographer. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.
Webster, P. J., et al. 2005. Changes in tropical cyclone number, duration, and intensity in a warming environment. Science 309 (5742): 1844–46.
Williams, J. 2001. Hurricane Watch: Forecasting the Deadliest Storms on Earth. Vintage, New York.
