Experts Say U.S. Playing Disaster Roulette

Have we seen America’s future through the eyes of Katrina and Rita?

Monster hurricanes drown cities and obliterate coastlines. Jobs vanish and prices rise as ports and pipelines close. Millions flee. Too many remain, risking and often losing their lives. Chaos reigns, paralyzing government and leaving the world’s wealthiest nation humbled and frightened.

Some experts say the United States can expect to be pummeled by more of these mega-catastrophes over the next 20 or 30 years in a nasty conspiracy of unfavorable weather patterns, changing demographics and political denial.

Soon after Katrina and Rita, it’s not clear how the nation will play the new hand that nature has apparently dealt.

“Are we prepared to lose a major city every year?” asks Baruch Fischhoff, a risk strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “It’s cowardice not to ask the question, and cowardice on the public’s part not to get engaged in the answer.”

“We failed quite significantly,” says sociologist Havidan Rodriguez, director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware in Newark, Del. “Will what we’ve seen over the last few weeks continue to be the case? It could, unless we prepare. People tend to forget lessons learned. Governments tend to forget.”

Others cautiously see some hope in the waterlogged ruins of the Gulf Coast. They describe the latest hurricanes as a turning point that could lead to improved public safety and infrastructure.

“We often need events like this to change the mind-set,” said Mary C. Comerio, an architect at UC Berkeley. “And it’s very hard to stop private investors and entrepreneurs from seeking opportunity. It’s an amazing part of the American spirit.”

New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast might even become a living laboratory for sustainable development and commerce that could withstand future calamities. For example, New Orleans’ ruined neighborhoods could be rebuilt on safer, firmer ground using more efficient 21st century technologies.

The city’s historic core and the new parts of the city could be linked by a train, one expert suggested. Oh, and better make it elevated.

“The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them,” said environmentalist Paul Hawken, a leading voice in the green design movement. “There is no reason to go backwards in redesigning the city.”

America’s eastern and Gulf coasts always have been in the path of powerful storms. The nation’s weather history occasionally has been punctuated with other Category 4 and 5 hurricanes -- the strongest storms, which pack the punch of hundreds of nuclear weapons and have the most potential to devastate huge swaths of land.

Since 1995, hurricanes have become more frequent and more intense. Some scientists say the United States is on the bad side of a natural storm cycle. Other scientists go further, saying the trend may coincide with the recent increase in air and sea temperatures attributed to global warming.

Statistics show the planet to be increasingly unsafe. Globally, more than 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003, a 60% increase over the previous two 10-year periods, U.N. officials report.

And those numbers don’t include the millions displaced by December’s tsunami, which killed about 180,000 people.

Natural disasters’ damage to insured property around the world in 2004 totaled $49 billion, according to the insurance giant Swiss Re, which is based in Zurich. That figure doesn’t include the tsunami either. Of the total, some calculations suggest that as much as $45 billion in losses came from a quartet of Florida hurricanes -- Charley, Ivan, Frances and Jeanne.

The overall insured loss for 2004 is more than twice the $23-billion annual average in property losses since 1987, confirming a “discernible upward trend,” Swiss Re said.

So what makes natural events potentially more disastrous now? The climate might be changing. But the real difference is demographics.

How and where Americans are living make the nation especially vulnerable to these unstoppable events.

In the last several decades, the population has migrated toward the coasts. At the same time, the value of its possessions has increased substantially.

More than half of the country’s 297 million people live in coastal areas. Florida’s population has increased fivefold since 1950, and 80% live within 20 miles of saltwater. According to the Census Bureau, seven of the nation’s top 10 fastest-growing states are coastal, including California, whose population has increased from 10 million in 1950 to more than 33 million.

It’s not just coastal populations that are at risk. Infrastructure supplies food, energy and materials nationwide, like the body’s circulatory system distributes blood and nutrients. If the New Madrid fault ruptured in the Midwest, the loss of key roads, railways, power grids and pipelines over the Mississippi River would probably choke off vital supplies to distant cities for months, including Washington and New York City.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency bases much of its planning on 100-year storm estimates that are decades old and don’t always account for today’s more intense storms and increased urbanization.

And, some experts warn, these future calamities don’t factor in larger environmental influences that are lurking, such as global warming.

“In the decades to come, the equation will be completely different from what it is now,” said Robert Muir-Woods, London-based research director for Risk Management Solutions, consultants to the insurance industry on natural catastrophes and terrorist strikes.

“So much of what you see in the United States now was built when hurricane activity was low and there was a Category 5 storm once every 30 years, not every year or two,” Muir-Woods said. “Your investment decisions need to be revisited.”

Other demographic changes not often associated with natural disasters are an aging population, the growth of assistedliving communities and nursing homes in warm-weather states, and the increase in immigrant populations where English is not widely understood. All of which will make evacuations even more difficult, researchers say.

“All of the plans have assumed that people have cars and they speak English,” said Rodriguez of the University of Delaware disaster center. “If you forget the population in your planning, the population will ignore your plans.”

So how can the United States cope with a more dangerous future?

There is no single solution, but recommendations by architects, civil engineers and sociologists can be roughly sorted into a few categories.

* Begin with infrastructure: Communications systems, power grids, roads and flood-control measures -- especially levees -- should be expanded and hardened, they advise.

New Orleans’ levees were built to withstand a storm surge from a Category 3 hurricane. Nationwide, levee construction largely has been deferred. In June, Congress and the White House slashed the Army Corps of Engineers’ request for levee improvements in New Orleans from $105 million to $42.2 million.

Staring at a $200-billion cleanup tab, the original request now looks like a bargain.

Roads, bridges and other key features have been equally neglected. The interstate highway system that was clogged with evacuees is 50 years old.

“Katrina is a great example of how deteriorating infrastructure actually created more damage,” Comerio said. “If the levees could’ve protected us just a little more, the flood would not have happened and we would not have incurred the enormous costs of a displaced population.”

* A second priority: turning knowledge into real improvements.

Katrina was perhaps the most expected natural disaster in history. Scientists forecast the hurricane accurately, but elected officials and top bureaucrats were reluctant to act aggressively on their advice.

Last year, public officials war-gamed a fictional Hurricane Pam in New Orleans. “We made great progress this week in our preparedness efforts,” Ron Castleman, the regional director of FEMA, said at the time. The real disaster mocks his comments now.

Other exercises focusing on terrorist attacks and infectious-disease outbreaks have pointed out similar flaws in communications, medical care and timely evacuations in other cities. But the real-life storms suggest that few improvements have been made as a result of any dress rehearsals.

* But perhaps the biggest question confronting the nation, according to disaster experts, isn’t about building bigger dams or even reserving more buses and boats.

It’s whether the nation has the will to squarely face more natural catastrophes. No one interviewed expressed any confidence in the special House committee created to investigate the Katrina response, in part because of political infighting.

Several experts suggested more public officials should be booted after Katrina. Both FEMA director Michael D. Brown and New Orleans Police Supt. Eddie Compass resigned.

“What we are missing, utterly and completely in this government, is accountability,” said Hawken, the environmentalist.

“I don’t see anybody talking in terms of shame,” said Fischhoff , the Carnegie Mellon strategist. “I don’t see any soul-searching.”

Many recommended an independent commission led by an unimpeachable figure outside of government. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker’s inquiry into corruption at the United Nations was one example cited. Another was the investigation into the space shuttle Columbia disaster led by Retired Navy Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr.

Even while the Katrina investigation is ongoing, experts say, America should prepare for future disasters using a new set of conditions that consider factors such as the predicted effects of global warming.

Farfetched? Even oil companies that have strongly opposed climate-based environmental regulations are raising their offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico by 15 feet in anticipation of higher storm surges.

Just in case.

History is littered with the bones of great cities built in defiance of nature, most prominently ancient Alexandria, Egypt, with its great library and a lighthouse that was considered one of the wonders of the world. That was another city built in the squishy mouth of a great river. Two millenniums later, some truths don’t change, said Muir-Woods, who raised the comparison with New Orleans.

“Climate change will have its greatest impact at the coastlines,” Muir-Woods said. “And the risk will go up higher than people think.”