Hurricanes: Preparing for the next big one
By Susan Llewelyn Leach

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It’s a potentially dangerous combination: big hurricanes that rarely make landfall, untold damage when they do and a population largely blasé about the whole prospect. In the Gulf of Maine, where the last Category 3 hurricane (winds of 111-130 miles per hour or 96-113 knots) hit more than a half century ago, mobilizing public interest has been a slow sell. David Vallee knows. The National Weather Service meteorologist, who is located in Taunton, Massachusetts, has been chipping away at that nonchalance for 10 years now. With another hurricane season set to begin June 1, he said, “We have a very inexperienced population that has not had to deal with the impact of a major hurricane. People haven’t considered being without electricity for a week or two,” he said.

The challenge of raising public awareness is perhaps even more acute in the Canadian provinces. When Peter Bowyer, the program manager of the Canadian Hurricane Centre (CHC) in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, introduces himself to people, he says they look at him as though he just said, “I’m the coach of the Jamaican bobsled team.” The unspoken question is always, “Why would Canada ever need a hurricane center?”

An Environment Canada study in 2004 answered that question. Called A Climatology of Hurricanes for Canada: Improving Our Awareness of the Threat, the study looked at the frequency of hurricanes in the Atlantic over the last 50 years of the century. The numbers near Nova Scotia were on par with Florida and Cuba. And the highest count in the entire Atlantic fell inside the CHC’s Response Zone. The difference was in the strength. On the coast of Nova Scotia there were no Category 3 to 5 hurricanes (see Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale box) during those 50 years, whereas Florida and Cuba saw many major storms.

But it’s a different confluence of events that is making Bowyer’s and Vallee’s job of educating the public easier. In 1995, after a lull of two decades, hurricane activity in the North Atlantic showed a marked uptick that continues unabated; global warming and the environment are no longer the domain of scientists and tree huggers—the public has tuned in. And a couple of spectacular hurricane disasters in 2005–namely Katrina and Rita in the Gulf of Mexico, which almost fulfilled the worst-case scenarios of the regions they struck—brought the importance of preparedness into startling view.

In the two generations since the last huge hurricane hit the Gulf of Maine, meteorological science has made quantum leaps in forecasting with the aid of satellites and sophisticated software. But predicting the path of a hurricane and its landfall still comes down to the last 24 hours. That short timeline combined with a densely built-up coastline means the vulnerability of the Gulf’s waterfront communities has grown significantly. Now even small storms can cause considerable damage.

For coastal zone managers, none of this is news. What is new is a unique Massachusetts program, which went live in May, called StormSmart Coasts. It is based on the premise that coastal resiliency and storm readiness rests largely in the hands of the 78 communities that dot the state’s 1,500-mile (2,414-kilometer) shoreline. These towns, often with limited staff, lack the know-how and resources to prepare for storms and reduce their exposure to potential damage in the longer term.

StormSmart hopes to fill that gap. What it will offer municipal officials is an interactive Web site covering everything from “mitigation and shore protection” to “hazard identification and mapping” and “emergency services.” All are backed up by access to technical assistance, legal guidance and funding sources.

If successful, the program could become a national model for coastal states, said Andrea Cooper, the Shoreline and Floodplain Management Coordinator for the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM). She explained that the concept for the Web site was disarmingly simple. Most of the information on the site was already available to the public either online or in hard copy, but rarely in a digestible form. In some cases, Cooper said, it would have required reading through hundreds of pages of technical documents to find the relevant nugget. Over a two-year period, CZM pulled that data together into a user-friendly format, along with fact sheets that explain available tools and provide case studies of towns in Massachusetts that have implemented mitigation efforts.

Chatham’s zoning law, for example, prevents development in the town’s 100-year floodplain. When a local landowner legally challenged that bylaw, the case went as far as Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and ended in a landmark ruling in 2005 that affirmed the authority of towns to regulate flood-prone areas.

In Scituate, where the floodplain is already well developed, town planners in 2006 started informing owners of their property’s flood history and showing them how to apply for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding to elevate their utilities, if not the homes themselves, above flood level.

With a highly developed coastline and little slowdown in demand for waterfront property, it might seem like the horse has already bolted from the barn. But much can be done, Cooper said, to retrofit houses, tighten building codes and mitigate a storm’s impact, as well as conserve the natural environment. For example:
• Lawns in coastal floodplains act like asphalt in a storm, and can be re-landscaped with native vegetation to reduce flooding and stop erosion.
• Freeboarding a home by raising it two feet (0.6 meters) above flood level can cut home insurance so much that the owner ends up saving money, despite the initial upfront cost. Cost is key for people who might not be “big” on the environment, Cooper said.
• Replacing paved surfaces with pervious ones like gravel, which lets excess water drain away naturally, also saves costs by reducing maintenance and the inevitable job of repairing potholes.
• Rain gardens that absorb runoff from roofs, driveways and walkways can help storm water percolate into the ground and reduce flooding. To illustrate their efficiency, Cooper recalled Mother’s Day last year when parts of Massachusetts were hit by 13 inches (330 millimeters) of rain in 48 hours. The rain gardens, she said, absorbed all the excess water, while elsewhere sewers overflowed and rivers flooded.

Hurricanes produce three types of hazards: high winds, inland flooding and storm surge. Television footage of half-submerged houses is perhaps the most stark image of what a single storm surge can do. But even heavy rains can overwhelm storm drains and cause rivers and streams to overflow their banks and flood communities miles inland.

Besides costly property damage and the destruction of public infrastructure, storms also throw oil, sewage and other contaminants onto the shoreline and farther inland as storm surge washes into fresh water areas. Some species can’t survive high concentrations of salt, and freshwater grasses sometimes die off. Dunes can take years to recover from erosion.

While scientists study prehistoric storm data and how the shoreline has shifted over the centuries (see sidebar, “Core Samples”) to gain clues about future hurricane activity, preparedness is still king. In the late 1990s, mitigation and retrofitting were in high gear. That changed after 9/11 with an unexpected twist. Homeland Security funds, designed to improve technology and tracking, lead to better hurricane emergency response, which depends heavily on communications, notification and monitoring, said meteorologist Vallee. For example, cross-border communications between utility providers in Canada’s Atlantic provinces and New England’s coastal states are now more sophisticated, and in the event of a huge hurricane, trucks would be pre-positioned to help if power got knocked out. Interstate communications are also more established.

In the end, however, nature has its own way of realigning the coast, in spite of human intervention. Whether the next big hurricane is around the corner or decades away, coastal communities’ ability to use and adapt nature’s own defenses, such as marshlands, dunes and rain gardens–along with building for the biggest storm in mind—should help contain its impact.

Susan Llewelyn Leach is a free-lance writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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