Experts discuss lessons from 2005 hurricanes Katrina, Rita

Experts discuss lessons from 2005 hurricanes Katrina, Rita

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

With the 2006 hurricane season just two months away, more than 100 experts convened at Rice University March 15-16 to discuss what lessons, if any, the Gulf Coast has learned from hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Katrina, which killed more than 1,300 and caused more than $100 billion in damage, is the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history. Rita, which arrived two weeks after Katrina, caused 2.5 million residents to flee the Houston metropolitan area in a mass exodus unlike any in U.S. history.

Rice flooding expert Philip Bedient, the Herman Brown Professor of Engineering, organized the two-day conference, “Severe Storms — Impact and Disaster Response in Gulf Coast Communities,” to compile and share information about the effects and long-term impacts of both storms. The conference brought together national experts on flooding, transportation, emergency management, storm forecasting, political science, public health, environmental science and more. Conference discussions included detailed analyses of the failures of the New Orleans levees, the evacuation orders and responses to both storms, the possible impact that climate change may have on future storms and the lasting impacts the storms had on the region’s oil and gas production.

As a result of the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, Bedient is attempting to organize a group of universities and other agencies involved in Gulf Coast storm research — including Rice, Louisiana State University, University of Oklahoma and others — to form a research consortium devoted to the study of Gulf Coast storms. Bedient said the scope of the consortium would be broad, including prediction, impacts, warning, evacuation and social/economic response.

This year’s conference brought together a number of those involved in the consortium discussions. Based on the positive comments received this year, Bedient said the conference will become an annual event.

Some participants were clearly pessimistic about the region’s readiness for the 2006 storm season. Frank Billingsley, chief meteorologist from Houston’s NBC affiliate KPRC-TV, noted that in December the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning in the New Orleans area, advising residents to abandon their trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and seek shelter in their damaged homes.

“If that’s the best advice we can give people, then I think we’re looking at a major evacuation if a storm of any size — even a Category 1 — hits New Orleans again this year,” Billingsley said.

Bill Read, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service’s Houston-Galveston office, said the scale of destruction by any hurricane striking a U.S. coastline today — when combined with the unfettered construction of new homes along virtually every U.S. coastline and the confusing and inadequate insurance options for coastal property owners — leaves him pessimistic.

“The billion-dollar disasters, in my opinion, show that we have not made any substantial gains in spite of our improving technology [to predict when and where storms will hit],” Read said.

Read said the Rita evacuation raised doubts about whether officials could expect the public to participate in an orderly, phased evacuation in the future. Phased evacuations are designed to allow residents in low-lying areas nearest the coast to move inland first, ahead of residents in less-vulnerable areas. In advance of Rita, all major evacuation routes became choked by residents fleeing from non-evacuation zones located further inland. Many coastal residents spent 16 or more hours in their vehicles waiting for roadways to clear.

Rick Wilson, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Political Science, chair of political science and professor of statistics and psychology, said survey data gathered from evacuees in the days immediately following the evacuation turned up marked differences from the extensive literature documenting similar evacuations.

Wilson said he and survey co-designer Robert Stein, dean of social sciences and the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science, expected to find that decisions to evacuate were influenced by factors predicting behavior in previous hurricanes, including gender, presence of children in the household and length of residency.

However, none of those factors predicted whether someone evacuated for Rita. Instead, the survey found that they were heavily influenced by the amount of attention paid to the news media and to their neighbors. People who said they paid close attention to media coverage of the storm were more likely to choose to leave than those who did not, even if they lived in a non-evacuation zone. Most surprisingly, residents in non-evacuation zones who said they paid close attention to whether their neighbors were leaving were 25 percent more likely to have fled than those who did not. Wilson pointed out that the traffic gridlock was not just an infrastructure problem.

“It’s not a matter of pouring more concrete and creating more evacuation routes,” Wilson said. “This is also a human problem in which people are making judgments based on limited information.”

The conference also saw the unveiling of new survey results from Stephen Klineberg, professor of sociology at Rice. He presented findings from this year’s 2006 Houston Area Survey (HAS), which included several questions about Houstonians’ attitudes toward Katrina evacuees and about Houston’s response to the Katrina crisis.

In its 25th year, HAS is the most detailed, long-term study of resident attitudes in any major U.S. city.

In the aftermath of Katrina, nearly 200,000 evacuees from New Orleans came to Houston. About 60,000 were housed in temporary shelters like the Astrodome and the George R. Brown Convention Center, but many more came by car and stayed in private homes.

Klineberg said the 2006 survey, which won’t be complete until early April, is uncovering striking differences in the degree to which Katrina impacted Houstonians. For example, while only 4 percent of white respondents said evacuees stayed in the resdients’ homes, that figure was 11 percent for blacks and 28 percent for Asians.

Klineberg said the results also reveal a marked ambivalence among Houstonians regarding the overall impact of Katrina.

An overwhelming 97 percent of respondents agreed that Houston “really came together” to help Katrina evacuees, and an equally impressive 86 percent said they had either volunteered time or donated money, food or other items to help the evacuees. At the same time, 76 percent believe the evacuees have put “a considerable strain on the Houston community,” and 66 percent believe a major increase in violent crime has occurred in Houston because of the evacuees.

“While an overwhelming majority of Houstonians are proud of the way the city came to the aid of Katrina evacuees, there are growing concerns about the cost and the long-term consequences,” Klineberg said.

Notably, 49 percent said Houston would be “worse off” if most of the evacuees decided to stay here, and 47 percent thought the overall impact of the evacuees on Houston was “a bad thing.”

Still, Klineberg said a significant percentage of Houstonians had a positive outlook on the impact of Katrina on the city.

“Well over one-third — 36 percent — say the overall impact of the Katrina experience on the city has been a good thing, in spite of the financial cost and the other perceived burdens on the community,” he said.

Klineberg said the statistic suggests there is a chance for Houston to recapture some of the civic energy seen in the immediate aftermath of Katrina and refocus it to address the long-term challenges Houston faces in providing all of its residents — including the evacuees — with improved prospects for the future.