It's Raining Fish and Spiders (16 page)

Katrina's death toll was made slightly higher because those who survived Camille—with no flooding and little damage—believed Katrina to be a less serious threat. This false sense of security among Camille veterans accounted for as many as 7 percent of those who chose not to evacuate. An innkeeper at the Harbour Oaks Inn, Tony Brugger, was killed when his inn collapsed.

Before 1969, many residents of the Gulf Coast had weathered the effects of Hurricane Betsy, a strong, Category 3 hurricane that had made landfall in 1965. Betsy, up until that point, had been the benchmark for Gulf hurricanes and many people ignored the warnings for Camille, believing that a hurricane could not get any stronger. Unfortunately, when Katrina hit, the same mentality persisted, and those who survived Camille felt that they could survive Katrina and thus did not evacuate.

You should always have a plan for when a storm like Camille or Katrina is coming. Almost always, if you live on the water, you will have to evacuate. Make a plan. Make it today, because when the storm is coming, it's already too late.

Trinity Episcopalian Church before Camille
National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

Where Will the Next Big Storm Strike? Could There Be Another Katrina?

I write this section not to scare the people I am about to talk about, but to make them aware, so they can be prepared. I, along with Marianna Jameson, wrote a thriller called
Category 7
. It's a great story, which you should read. It's about an evil guy who figures out how to create and manipulate weather. In a psychotic rage, he creates a hurricane and points it toward a particular city: New York City.

I wrote the book not only to entertain, but also to make people aware of the vulnerability of the New York City area to a major Category 3 hurricane striking and creating catastrophic devastation to life and property.

There are two different and important parts of meteorology. There's weather, and there's what's called
climatology
. Weather is what's going on outside right now. Climatology is weather that has taken place over a number of years, decades, or centuries.

Trinity Episcopalian Church after Camille
National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

Climatology shows us that weather events like hurricanes repeat over and over in certain areas. The number of years between events may be shorter or longer, depending on where they take place.

Let's take tornadoes. If you live in Oklahoma, you know that every one out of two years, you are going to be involved with a tornado. But if you live in Brooklyn, New York, a tornado like the EF1 funnel cloud that touched down in 2007 is a surprise—because the last time a tornado appeared in Brooklyn was in 1907, a hundred years earlier.

Obviously, tornadoes happen more frequently in Oklahoma than in New York, but the history of weather shows us that though it might be a hundred years before you see one, tornadoes do happen in Brooklyn, New York.

The next job of climatology is to teach us about frequency: How much time goes by before a hurricane strikes a particular area? If you live on the U.S. Gulf Coast, that frequency is more often than if you live in the mid-Atlantic or the Northeast. But just because hurricanes strike less often in the mid-Atlantic or the Northeast doesn't mean they won't strike again. Climatology teaches us that there may be a gap of many years between storms, but they have happened and they will happen again. Weather repeats itself.

What does climatology teach us about hurricanes in the Northeast? It tells us that every 70 years a major hurricane strikes the region. The last storm was the hurricane of 1938, called the Long Island Express. This Category 3 storm had winds of 121 mph when it made landfall in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York. Blue Hill Observatory in Massachusetts recorded a wind speed of 186 mph. The previous storm of that size had taken place in 1869, nearly 70 years before. You can see that climatology shows that every 70 years, a major hurricane of Category 3 strength strikes the New York City area.

Hurricanes in the Northeast are totally different animals from hurricanes in the South. Where a storm has an average forward speed of 8 to 14 mph in the southeast United States, a storm in the Northeast has a forward speed averaging 45 mph. The Long Island Express had a forward speed of 70 mph due to the Gulf Stream, the powerful, warm, and swift ocean current that runs south to north from the Florida Keys to Newfoundland and across the Atlantic.

National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

The eye of the storm was 55 miles in diameter. This huge storm caused tremendous devastation in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, as well as Vermont and New Hampshire. A single meteorologist, Charlie Pierce, at the time a junior forecaster working for what was then called the Weather Bureau, predicted that the storm would head straight north to New York. His warning never went out because he was overruled by the chief forecaster, who believed the hurricane would curve out into the Atlantic as most storms do.

Thus the Long Island Express was the greatest unforeseen natural disaster in the history of Long Island. It caught everyone by surprise and hit at high tide to boot. The storm surge averaged 18 feet on the eastern end of Long Island, and 50 feet in Massachusetts. The hurricane killed 682 people. The damage was all due to the storm surge and wind. The storm's fast-forward movement did not allow for a huge amount of rain, so there was minimal inland flooding.

At a cinema in Westhampton, Long Island, the surge carried twenty people at a matinee out to sea. It carried the theater, projectionist and all, 2 miles out into the Atlantic where they drowned. The storm destroyed two billion trees throughout New England. You can go to Vermont today and still see where trees were destroyed by the 1938 storm.

The New York City area has a history of being ravaged by hurricanes. Talk about bizarre—the only known incident of a hurricane wiping out a whole island happened in New York City. Hog Island, originally used by the Indians to raise pigs and later developed with casinos and bath houses, lay just to the south of Long Island. In the middle of the night on August 23, 1893, a Category 2 storm washed Hog Island from the face of the earth and erased it from every map.

What makes New York City so vulnerable?

Geography and geology. The landmass from New Jersey to New York City to Long Island creates a right angle. There are only three right-angle landmasses where hurricanes strike. Northwest Florida, New York, and New Orleans all have right-angle landmasses. Research Katrina and you'll see how devastating that can be.

Hurricane winds move in a counterclockwise rotation. The storm surge pours water right to left into that right-angle landmass. The water has nowhere to go except inland.

The numbers indicate the five most densely populated coastal areas in the United States.
Frank Picini

The other factor, geology, has to do with the bottom of the Atlantic. In the southern United States, the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is sand, which absorbs a good deal of the energy a hurricane forces into the water. In the northeast, the sea floor is a stone called
schist
, which absorbs nothing. The hurricane forces energy into the ocean and every bit of this energy is forced upward and onto land.

This causes the storm surge to be worse in a northeastern storm. In terms of storm surge, the geography and geology combine to make a Category 1 storm actually a Category 2, a Category 2 becomes a 3 in terms of storm surge, and so on. A northeastern hurricane is very different from, and can be more dangerous than, a Gulf storm.

There are other factors that make New York City the most vulnerable city on Earth for catastrophic devastation from a hurricane.

Everything that is vital to life in New York City sits on the water. It's easy sometimes to forget that New York is a port city, but it is, and it's surrounded by water. Waste water treatment plants, coal and garbage-burning electrical power plants, a nuclear power plant, military bases, police and fire stations: all the major infrastructure sits on water. It's the most densely populated stretch of coastline in the country.

Airports like JFK and La Guardia, which did not exist at the time of the 1938 storm, now rest beside the waters of Flushing Bay and Jamaica Bay.

It's all a recipe for disaster.

Just look at the population of Long Island alone. In 1938, there were just 200,000 residents; today there are two million. Add in the summer tourists and you have nearly three million people inhabiting a long, skinny island with few access routes. The East End, where all the “beautiful” people go in August, has only
one
road out! The loss of life during a major hurricane on Long Island might eclipse the 1,836 lives lost in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

I see two great problems for New York City.

The first is lack of experience. Residents have to go back 70 years to recall such a great storm and that is a very long time. Most of the people living in New York now had not yet been born or had moved to the city long after 1938. Generations go by without the experience of dealing with a monstrous Category 3 hurricane. Many people believe that hurricanes of that nature never strike New York. Even at the time, the city was unaware of what it was in for. The main headline of
The New York Times
that day read N
EVILLE
C
HAMBERLAIN TO
M
EET WITH
H
ITLER
. Not long ago, I took a TV crew and went out on the streets of New York City to do a story for a hurricane documentary we were doing. I asked residents where they would go if a hurricane was about to strike the city. The answer I got was astounding. The overwhelming majority answered that they would seek refuge from a Category 3 hurricane by going down into the subway, where they would inevitably be drowned by the storm surge.