HURRICANES
Hurricanes have always been fascinating as well as devas- tating. For example, the December 2007 holiday meeting of the Groundwater Association of California’s Sacramento Branch was co-hosted with AEG at Sudwerk in Davis. According to HydroVisions (quoted and paraphrased for clarity below):
About 100 attendees saw a sobering presentation by Dr. Raymond Seed, entitled “New Orleans Levee Performance in Hurricane Katrina: Lessons for California’s Levee Situation.” Dr. Seed is a Professor of Civil and Environment Engineering at University of California, Berkeley and led a National Science Foundation-sponsored team that completed a foren- sic analysis of the levee failures resulting from Hurricane Katrina. Their findings showed that although most of the levee failures in the central New Orleans area were thought to be the result of overtopping, many key failures were related to poor foundation soils that underlie the levees. The investiga- tion team made recommendations to improve the performance of the levees, and provided insights and recommendations for
mitigating potentially serious deficiencies in the emergency repairs at a number of breached sections. Dr. Seed discussed the precarious situation in northern California, where most levees are constructed of natural fine-grained clayey materials dredged from rivers and are structurally unsound. This could lead to devastation exceeding that observed in New Orleans.
Another note from Hurricane Katrina is drawn from a World Affairs Council-sponsored talk by Lord Peter Levene, given at the National Press Club in Washington, DC (January 12, 2007). He was the Chairman of Lloyd’s of London, and in charge of paying the insurance claims resulting from Katrina. One might ask why it is worth printing my notes from a talk given thirteen years ago about the world insurance industry’s recognition of the increasing costs of natural disasters – a talk which attributes a large part of that cost to global warming. The speaker noted that we were not having a serious policy debate about this in the USA in 2007, when the world’s insurers could already see the effects on their bottom line, especially in
Figure 1 - Increasing costs of natural disasters, especially those related to weather, from 1950 to the present. Note in Exhibit 50 that cumulative losses are climbing exponentially, and that flooding and hurricane costs are rising fastest.
www.aipg.org Jul.Aug.Sep 2020 • TPG 29
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