High Risks Seen on East, Gulf Coasts : Hurricane Disaster in Booming Areas Feared

As Hurricane Elena bore down on the Louisiana Gulf Coast on Thursday, the people of this island city were remembering Alicia, the killer that struck here three years ago, taking 22 lives, crushing houses and roaring on into Houston to pop thousands of skyscraper windows and transform them into deadly projectiles.

Alicia, the last major hurricane to rip into the American coastline, was little more than a thunderstorm, however, when compared to the most violent of hurricanes, which can release energy equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of 400 20-megaton hydrogen bombs.

Those who study such storms fear that Elena--or another hurricane next month or next year--will hit one of the heavily populated areas along the Gulf or Atlantic coasts, where building booms in recent years have added greatly to the potential danger.

They cite another Galveston hurricane, the 1900 storm that killed more than 6,000 persons to become the worst natural disaster in American history, and they say that it could all happen again.

They point to the rapidly expanding communities along the coasts, the increasing number of hours that it would take to evacuate larger populations to high ground and the number of new residents who have never experienced a hurricane and might try to ride one out. And they warn that there is a calamity in the making.

“We are now more vulnerable to a hurricane in the United States than at any other time in our history,” Neil Frank, the director of the National Hurricane Center, said in a recent interview at his Coral Gables, Fla., office. “If we got a Force Five and lost 10,000 people, this society is not prepared to accept all the potential consequences.”

Alicia, the hurricane that tore into Galveston three years ago, was a comparatively mild Force Three hurricane. In a Force Five hurricane, winds exceed 156 m.p.h. and the huge tidal wave it generates, known as a storm surge, can be more than 18 feet high.

Frank, an outspoken critic of the building boom along the coasts, is also a man who believes that his warnings have gone unheeded. And that, for him, is frustrating. “You wonder if anyone ever listens to you,” he said.

Frank believes that there should be a moratorium on coastal development until evacuation procedures can be perfected, but he concedes that such a proposal would not be taken seriously by communities seeking to expand their tax bases.

“By and large, local governments are interested in development and very little else,” said A. R. (Babe) Schwartz, a former Texas state senator and one-time chairman of the Texas Coastal and Maritime Council. “There is almost a compulsion to show progress by building permits and development.”

“Nobody can overcome developers, real estate promoters and greed,” he said. “And no one can overcome the instinct of people to be lemmings and live by the sea.”

Computer Simulations

As a result, computer simulations of a Force Five hurricane show many areas that would be endangered. Areas that are at risk extend from Brownsville on the southern tip of the Texas coast all the way to New England, where it is almost forgotten that 600 persons were killed in a 1938 storm.

Along the great reach of American coastline between those two points, the danger zones include Corpus Christi, Tex., where major resort construction is under way on nearby Padre Island; the low-lying Houston-Galveston area; New Orleans, which could be hit by flooding from three sides, the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico; the Tampa, Fla., area and a 100-mile stretch of coast from Miami northward. And those are just the major areas.

Nevertheless, the experts say, little can be done to arouse most members of the public to the dangers of hurricanes until one is churning toward their own homes. And, even with modern meteorological forecasting, they say, it may be impossible to persuade many residents to evacuate until it is too late and coastal dwellers are cut off from high ground farther inland.

Other Worries Cited

“From day to day, people have other things to worry about,” said Donald Friedman, the director of the natural hazards research program of the Travelers Insurance Co. “The clothes need to be washed, and the car needs a new transmission.”

The potential danger, he said, “doesn’t generate enough emphasis. And, even if it did, not enough people pay attention--not only individuals, but also people in charge of emergency evacuations.”

Galveston, in 1900 the scene of the worst hurricane destruction ever, offers a recent example of how human error and the desire not to cry wolf too often can come into play. In 1980, when Hurricane Allen seemed to be churning directly toward the city, an emergency evacuation was ordered.

Thousands of cars poured onto the highways heading north, only to be stymied by traffic signals that were not adjusted to handle the massive flow. But Allen changed direction at the last minute, and it didn’t even rain in Galveston. Many angry homeowners returned to find that their homes had been looted in their absence.

Fiasco Remembered

In 1983, when Alicia hit, the city remembered the Allen fiasco and decided not to order an evacuation, only to have the hurricane take direct aim at Galveston and turn into a killer.

City Manager Douglas Matthews now contends that that would not happen again.

“We do not have a John Wayne approach,” he said. “If there is more than a 3% chance of a hurricane hitting Galveston, we’re going to tell the people to leave. We’re not going to be embarrassed if we’re wrong. I don’t want to have anyone on my conscience.”

But even with an evacuation order, Matthews said, studies done by the city show that only 40% of its 62,000 residents would leave. One reason is that it would take 36 hours to evacuate the island on which it is situated. Matthews said it is more than likely that the sun would still be shining when the evacuation order is given.

And those who planned the evacuation say they do not really know if their plan would work until it has been tried.

‘Shouldn’t Be’ There

“Who the hell knows?” asked Thomas E. Ryan, an officer with the Division of Emergency Management, a branch of the Texas Department of Public Safety. “People really shouldn’t be living there.”

Nevertheless, persons continue to flock to the coasts, and nowhere is that more evident than in Galveston. After the 1900 hurricane, the city erected a 17-foot-high sea wall to guard against another disaster, but Galveston has expanded so greatly that now only the downtown area is reasonably protected.

George Kraft, a city emergency preparedness officer, pointed to an area where dozens of bulldozers were scraping the earth in preparation for a multimillion-dollar development with a bay on one side and the gulf on the other.

“From here to the end of the island, about a 20-mile stretch, you’ve got troubles,” he said. “My guess is that, if we had a Force Five, these would be flattened.

“These are really the ones who need to know about the danger of flooding. If some fools out here stayed, they would almost surely die because there is no place to go, no high ground. A lot of people refuse to believe their houses will not withstand anything that comes along,” he said.

‘Packed With People’

“Everything you can see, as far as the eye can see, is going to be houses and marinas and a hotel,” he said. “It’s going to be packed with people. Anybody who moves out here, they better know what they are up against.”

He added: “You can only do so much and hope for the best.”

Other cities face other problems. New Orleans is protected from flooding by earthen levees, but there is no guarantee that they could withstand the power of a Force Five hurricane. Pinellas County, Fla., with its retirement communities of St. Petersburg and Clearwater, would have to evacuate 35 nursing homes because a severe hurricane would leave half of the county under water. The Northeastern coastline is so heavily built up that any evacuation would be a nightmare.

Frank, the director of the hurricane center, said one possible way of moving persons to safety is what he refers to as “vertical evacuation,” putting them in buildings that are designed to withstand even the worst hurricane.

Little Enthusiasm

But, so far, his idea has been met with little enthusiasm because of the legal hassles involved in, say, determining who would be at fault if someone in the shelter is killed and who would pay for vandalism to the apartments in the shelter during a hurricane.

Frank intends to continue to preach preparedness, all the while saying that local governments on the East and Gulf coasts just do not pay enough attention to the problems that he predicts.

“It’s a decision that a local government has to live with,” he warned. “We can decide that life on the waterfront is so attractive that we’re not going to do anything about it. We can say we are willing to take that risk and, when the big one hits, we are willing to live with 10,000 deaths.”