For millions of Americans living in the hurricane zones on the Gulf and East coasts, recent decades have been quiet — maybe too quiet.
Cities like Tampa, Houston, Jacksonville and Daytona Beach historically get hit with major hurricanes every 20 to 40 years, according to meteorologists. But those same places have now gone at least 70 years — sometimes more than a century — without getting smacked by those monster storms, according to data analyses by an MIT hurricane professor and The Associated Press.
These are places where people may think they know what to expect from a major hurricane —with more than 110 mph winds, such as Katrina or Andrew — but they really don’t. They are cities where building construction has boomed but haven’t been tested by nature at its strongest. In the Tampa region, an Andrew-sized storm could cause more than $200 billion in damage, according to a local government study in 2010.
Few of Tampa’s current residents witnessed the last major hurricane that hit there in October 1921. Movies were silent, booze was illegal and Warren Harding was president. For northeast Florida and southern Georgia, the last major hurricane was sometime in the 19th century.
“We’ve been kind of lucky,” said MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel, who along with the AP crunched numbers on how often hurricanes have hit metro regions and compared them to when the last time they were hit. “It’s ripe for disaster. … Everyone’s forgotten what it’s like.”
“It’s just the laws of statistics,” said Emanuel. “Luck will run out. It’s just a question of when.”
This hurricane season, beginning Monday, doesn’t look to be as busy as past ones. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts a 70 percent chance of fewer than normal hurricanes, mostly because of an El Nino weather oscillation. But even a quiet season can have one devastating storm hit. That’s what happened when Andrew smashed parts of Miami in 1992; it was the second costliest hurricane on record, in a below average year for overall hurricane activity.
Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is preparing for the worst and worrying that other people aren’t.
Inexperienced people “generally underestimate how bad it will be and made decisions about staying when they should be evacuating,” Fugate said. “You have to accept the fact that every time a major storm threatens it’s a new experience for 99 percent of the people involved.”
And then there are the people who went through smaller storms and think that wasn’t too bad and misjudge the bigger storm. In that type of situation, that thinking can “get you killed,” Fugate said. “People don’t always understand the threat.”
Hurricane evacuation researcher Jay Baker, a retired Florida State University professor, said his studies and surveys show that people will still evacuate properly even if they don’t have recent storm experience.
But it’s not just people; it’s the officials who have to make the tough decisions and tell people what to do. Only one hurricane-prone state, Louisiana, has a governor who was in office when a major hurricane hit. The FEMA top management is different than in 2005, when the last majors hit.
Fugate, who was Florida’s emergency management chief during many state landfalls in 2004 and 2005, said “there are very, very few people who are working state government in Florida who were there in state government in 2004.”
