The Hurricane Effect

The NY Post reported on May 16, 2013 that hundreds of city Hurricane Sandy evacuees still in hotels won’t be put out on the street until they find permanent housing, a Manhattan Supreme Court judge ruled yesterday. About 395 families are still living in hotels, and were set to lose those rooms after May 31.

A source familiar with the damaged areas left by Hurricane Sandy stated that hardly anything is being done of significant scale in restoration and reconstruction of ravaged public and private property.

  

In research by an international general contracting firm several years ago it was said:

Due to the devastating damage from Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina and Rita, there will be a significant amount of rebuilding in the Southern United States in the near future.  This widespread destruction of residential and commercial buildings opens an opportunity for structural mitigation against future-hazard events, and therefore, potentially reduces future damages.  In addition to the recent hurricanes, the 2004 hurricane season and the Indian Ocean Tsunami have led to shortages of many essential building materials.  Due to the shortages, construction costs will be rising, both for in-kind replacement and alternative coastal construction. 

Hurricane Dennis

The effects of Hurricane Dennis in Florida included 14 deaths and $1.5 billion (2005 US$) in damage. The tropical wave that became Hurricane Dennis formed on June 29, 2005, and proceeded westward across the Atlantic Ocean. It became a tropical depression on July 4, a tropical storm on July 5, and a hurricane on July 7. Dennis rapidly intensified to attain Category 4 status on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, and made landfall in Cuba where it weakened to Category 1 status, before re-emerging in the Gulf of Mexico and re–intensifying. The storm made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on Santa Rosa Island on July 10.

As Dennis was impacting Cuba, the outer rainbands affected the Florida Keys causing moderate wind gusts peaking at 87 mph (140 km/h) on Sombrero Key. In central Florida, Dennis produced numerous tornadoes, one severely damaging a house. In Punta Gorda, three people were found dead in a car submerged in a ditch flooded by heavy rain. Dennis made landfall in the Florida Panhandle, causing moderate damage, although not as severe as previously predicted. Wind gusts peaked at 121 mph (195 km/h), and maximum rainfall reached 7.08 inches (180 mm). Storm surge of --15 ft (-0.91 m) inundated parts of St. Marks and nearby locations. During the height of the storm, approximately 236,000 customers in the Florida Panhandle were without electric power.

Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina was the deadliest and most destructive Atlantic hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall. At least 1,833 people died in the hurricane and subsequent floods, making it the deadliest U.S. hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane; total property damage was estimated at $81 billion (2005 USD), nearly triple the damage brought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005 and crossed southern Florida as a moderate Category 1 hurricane, causing some deaths and flooding there before strengthening rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico. The hurricane strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane over the warm Gulf water, but weakened before making its second landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on the morning of Monday, August 29 in southeast Louisiana. It caused severe destruction along the Gulf coast from central Florida to Texas, much of it due to the storm surge. The most significant number of deaths occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana, which flooded as the levee system catastrophically failed, in many cases hours after the storm had moved inland. Eventually 80% of the city and large tracts of neighboring parishes became flooded, and the floodwaters lingered for weeks. However, the worst property damage occurred in coastal areas, such as all Mississippi beachfront towns, which were flooded over 90% in hours, as boats and casino barges rammed buildings, pushing cars and houses inland, with waters reaching 6–12 miles (10–19 km) from the beach.

The hurricane surge protection failures in New Orleans are considered the worst civil engineering disaster in U.S. history and prompted a lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the designers and builders of the levee system as mandated by the Flood Control Act of 1965. Responsibility for the failures and flooding was laid squarely on the Army Corps in January 2008 by Judge Stanwood Duval, U.S. District Court, but the federal agency could not be held financially liable due to sovereign immunity in the Flood Control Act of 1928. There was also an investigation of the responses from federal, state and local governments, resulting in the resignation of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown, and of New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) Superintendent Eddie Compass.

 

Hurricane Rita

Hurricane Rita was the fourth–most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded and the most intense tropical cyclone ever observed in the Gulf of Mexico. The eighteenth named storm, tenth hurricane, and fifth major hurricane of the 2005 season, Rita formed near The Bahamas from a tropical wave on September 18 that originally developed off the coast of West Africa. It moved westward, and after passing through the Florida Straits, Rita entered an environment of abnormally warm waters. It rapidly intensified to reach peak winds of 180 mph (285 km/h) on September 20. After steadily weakening and beginning to curve to the northwest, Rita gradually weakened and made landfall on Sabine Pass, Texas with winds of 120 mph (195 km/h) on September 24. It weakened over land and degenerated into a large low-pressure area over the lower Mississippi Valley on September 26.

In Louisiana, the storm surge from Rita inundated low-lying communities near the coast, worsening effects caused by Hurricane Katrina less than a month prior. The surge topped levees, allowing water to surge further inland. Lake Charles suffered from severe flooding. Areas in Texas suffered from extensive wind damage. Nine counties in the state were declared disaster areas after the storm. Electric service was disrupted in some areas of both Texas and Louisiana for several weeks. Texas reported the most deaths from the hurricane, where 113 deaths were reported.

Moderate to severe damage was reported across the lower Mississippi Valley. Rainfall from the storm and its associated remnants extended from Louisiana to Michigan. Rainfall peaked at 16.00 in (406 mm) in Central Louisiana. Several tornadoes were also associated with the hurricane and its subsequent remnants. Throughout the path of Rita, damage totaled about $12 billion (2005 USD, $15 billion 2013 USD). As many as 120 deaths in four U.S. states were directly related to the hurricane.

Clearly hurricanes are storms of such enormous dimensions affecting regions across state and national boundaries that although the federal government is uniquely resourced to initiate relief to these areas affected, it seems nowhere is there expertise in the public or private sectors to implement and manage a program that automatically encompasses the logistics, materials, labor and costs for services providing disaster recovery, emergency relief through reconstruction and restoration across the different jurisdictions.

 The international general contracting firm concludes:

Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina and Rita passed over the Southern United States in August and September of 2005.  Although these storms weakened in the hours before they made landfall (Katrina and Rita from a Category 5), major beach erosion, storm-surge flooding, over wash, torrential rains and high-wind damages occurred along a stretch of shoreline extending from the

Florida panhandle to the Texas coastline, a distance of some 800 miles.   The damages from Katrina were considered the worst in US History, eclipsing all other disasters in American history by more than an order of magnitude.  Media sources have reported that private insurance estimates were varying from $100 to $200 billion.  Devastating storm surge from 10 to 30 feet above normal tide level washed over southern coastal areas and inundated coastlines, including the central business districts of Biloxi, MS and Gulfport, MS.  High-water levels of nearly 30 feet were measured locally in Biloxi Bay.  About fifty percent (50%) of the housing stock in the coastal counties sustained major damage or was destroyed.  Eighteen-thousand wooden power poles were wrecked by winds and downed trees in New Orleans alone, about one hundred thousand collectively from Texas to Florida.

 

Obviously, hurricanes are known to cause damage due to high wind and high-velocity water.  However, areas such as Mobile, AL, Biloxi, MS and New Orleans, LA will likely have a large number of homes destroyed by slow flooding.  Unlike the high winds and fast-moving waters, the slow floods did not rip off roofing, destroy walls or cause immediate structural damages.  However, many homes will be permanently uninhabitable because the water carried contaminants that that cannot be removed easily from wooden structures.  Long-term submersion in fresh water will make most structures un-repairable.  This is a likely scenario for a large share of the two-hundred thousand homes in the Crescent City, New Orleans.  In Mississippi, reports indicate that more than eighty percent (80%) of the estimated one-hundred seventy-one thousand homes on the coast were heavily damaged or destroyed completely.

Many parts of the country have dealt with frequent hurricanes.  After major events such as Hurricanes Andrew, Camille, Charley, Frances, Hugo, Ivan, some areas were able to enact more-stringent building-code standards.  In an ideal world, at the minimum, hurricane standards should be based on the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 7-1998 standards.  Still, realistically, building codes are often the minimum standards that are the maximum politically feasible.  They may fall short of standards like those of the ASCE.  However, this is a substantial improvement over having no codes.

 

One example of improved building code is when homeowners may be required to meet the increased wind standards by using impact-resistant doors and windows that use laminated glass similar to that found in car windshields.  This type of building code improvement can be also achieved by persuading contractors and homeowners to build structures to these higher hurricane standards or by getting local officials to adopt part or all of the higher-performance standards.  Building codes may not and do not restrict people from building stronger.

 

 

 

The CT/NY/NJ tri-State area has the same exposure to hurricane forces as the Gulf Coast. The population has even higher degree of exposure because Mid-Atlantic and New England have a higher total population, aggregate property values and a colder climate.  Further studies on the best land use of the shoreline might determine its suitability for habitation in terms of cost, safety, and sustainability.