Thoughts on Causes and Possible Mitigations, with Notes on an Insurance Industry View After Hurricane Katrina.
Hurricanes - Author Barney Paul Popkin
As just about everyone knows, hurricanes in the western hemisphere (typhoons in the eastern) are fascinating as well as devastating to people, structures, habitats, urban and rural areas, and insurance companies. If you live or work in the US’s Gulf of Mexico region, you’ve likely heard hurricane or tropical cyclone warnings on radio, television and smart phones, and perhaps tracked their progress on seasonal charts from paper market-shopping bags.
Hurricanes are caused by high winds over warm-surfaced seawaters, which expand and rapidly evaporate, giving rise to an atmospheric vortex that surrounds a tumbling eye and expands upwards and outwards to form an inverted cone of high wind and heavy rains. Tropical waters are generally warmer than others, and so are more susceptible to hurricanes than are other seas. Sometimes, hurricanes batter the coasts and even inland areas for hundreds to thousands of miles after they make landfall. They may even linger over an area for several days or weeks as did Category 5 Hurricane Harvey in September 2017 over southeast Texas, including metropolitan Houston, causing $125 billion in damage and 68 human fatali- ties. Hurricanes also may erode flood control structures and overtop lakes, canals and drainages as was observed twelve years earlier in Category 5 Hurricane Katrina (August 2005) in an area stretching from greater New Orleans, LA, to the Florida panhandle. This event also caused $125 billion in dam- age as well as 1,833 fatalities. Even milder hurricanes like the Category 3 Hurricane Sandy that hit metropolitan New York in October-November 2012 caused nearly $70 billion in dam- age and 106 fatalities. By comparison, the Category 4 Super- Durian Typhoon of November-December 2006 in Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia and Vap caused over $530 million in damage and 1,399 fatalities.
There is no current technology to stop the wind, the warm- ing of surface seawater, the rapid seawater evaporation, or the vortex and cone and its winds and rains. I suppose someday we might just possibly figure out how to monitor and control atmospheric winds and surface sea temperature, to cool down the sea surface temperatures, or to mitigate surface seawater expansion, evaporation and resultant hurricanes.
But the sad reality is: hurricanes are not mitigatable. However, their adverse impacts can be reduced by several means:
• Upgrade, operate and maintain early warning systems and evacuation networks
• Establish, operate and maintain emergency centers and shelters. Carry out regular training drills, and make provisions for counseling and grief management;
• Buy out developed land and its property owners, and return it to natural or enhanced drainage, especially urban and peri-urban historically impacted lands;
• Install rolling hills, berms, and flood detention and groundwater recharge basins;
• Recontour drainages and levees;
• Restore and/or establish wetlands and offshore barrier islands;
• Upgrade canal and drainage pumping and dewatering systems;
• Replace the existing surfaces of roadways, parking lots and driveways with water-permeable materi- als, and use them in constructing new such surfaces ;
• Upgrade codes to keep constructed permanent struc- tures from the historical impacted areas and well above the historical flood levels.
But these measures are hardly curative especially during a catastrophic hurricane or even extreme flood event.
Hurricanes over the past five to ten years have been no more frequent than in any previously recorded five to ten years. In fact, there have been fewer hurricanes over the past five to ten years than normal even though atmospheric temperatures are higher. There are more hurricanes during colder global temperatures than during warmer global temperatures. Also, hurricanes are enhanced in terms of frequency, extent and effect due largely not to the heating of the earth’s atmosphere per se but the heating and expansion of the sea surface which makes the expanded seawater more susceptible to high winds and creating of vortexes and hurricanes (Helfand, 2019).
28 TPG •
Jul.Aug.Sep 2020
www.aipg.org
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