Which US cities are most vulnerable to a major hurricane?

Friday, August 17, 2007

(5/31/07) -- Just because Katrina was the perfect storm -- a catastrophic combo of the wrong hurricane in the wrong place at the wrong time -- doesn't mean that history can't repeat itself, leaving another city obliterated by another tempest.

It can.

And as we enter what weather prognosticators are euphemistically calling another "active season," citizens and civil servants from Texas to New England are asking themselves: Where's the next New Orleans?

The Associated Press has pinpointed five of the most vulnerable U.S. coastal spots.

Among them: Galveston, Texas, sitting uneasily by the Gulf of Mexico, its residents limited to a single evacuation route; Miami, full of elderly people and others who might be trapped; and New York City, long spared a major storm but susceptible to a calamity of submerged subways and refugees caught in horrendous traffic jams.

Like so many other places, they are vulnerable because of geography. But mostly, they are imperiled because Americans have a love affair with the coast.

The Census Bureau estimates that 35 million people -- 12 percent of the population -- live in the coastal counties most threatened by Atlantic hurricanes. That figure has more than tripled since 1950, and the Census isn't even counting the Northern coastal states.

"When I was growing up on the Redneck Riviera, most of the stuff we built was built out of plywood, and you built it with your cousins on a weekend," says Margaret Davidson, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coastal Services Center. "And if it blew away, you got yourselves a keg of beer and you got your relatives together and you went out and built it again.

"And what we now have strewn across the coast is a bunch of McMansions."

And according to William Gray, a researcher based at Colorado State University, those hulking houses may face a battering this year.

In an updated forecast released Thursday, he predicted a 74 percent chance of a major hurricane hitting the U.S. coast in the season that begins Friday. He foresees 17 named storms and nine hurricanes, five of them intense.

So, where's the next New Orleans? Pick a place on the coast, and there's a worst-case scenario. The calamities they face are less about Mother Nature's caprices than they are about the human variety.

"If we really want to stop hurricane losses, we really have to slow down the kind of growth that's happening along the coast," says Jay Baker, a geography professor at Florida State University, "rather than worrying about how many hurricanes are going to come."

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