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Lessons from Katrina and Rita: Curtail coastal development

HOUSTON — Kaye Hairston recalls the way Houston looked 40 years ago: a modest downtown with a few skyscrapers surrounded by broad salt marshes and pine-covered lowlands that were just beginning to be touched by small pockets of suburban development.

Now her city is a huge, sprawling mass of shopping centers, tract housing and seemingly endless freeways teeming night and day with millions of residents drawn by a booming oil economy.

"That's why we have to run when the hurricanes come," said Hairston, 70, who, until Hurricane Rita, had never evacuated her home in four decades. "Everything is covered with cement. We don't have any ground left to soak all the water up."

Experts say Houston's boom — along with similar explosions of urban development in New Orleans, South Florida, the Tampa Bay area, Jacksonville and even smaller cities like Savannah, Charleston and Mobile — has dramatically increased the chance that mega-disasters like Hurricane Katrina may become all too common in coming years.

They also warn that the evacuation nightmares triggered by Katrina and Rita should convince emergency officials and individual families across the country to do top-down evaluations of their disaster plans, since cities not in the hurricane zone could be hit with a terrorist attack.

And with the recovery price tag from Hurricane Katrina expected to top $200 billion, many experts are critical of two federal programs that have helped spark the coastal development boom and that lay out billions in the aftermath of such disasters: flood insurance and beach rebuilding projects.

"Federal flood insurance makes a lot of this development possible in areas where people otherwise would've walked away," said Rob Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University. "And federal spending on beach replenishment encourages continued development of the coast, putting more people at risk. It's time for a national discussion about whether we should pull federal money away from certain areas of the coast."

As luck would have it, much of the coastal boom occurred during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a period that climate specialists say was a low cycle of hurricane activity, with fewer, less powerful storms.

Now the 20- to 30-year cycle of hurricane activity has shifted into an "up" mode, meaning we will probably get more storms — and more powerful storms — for the next decade, perhaps longer.

Some scientists also believe global warming is contributing to more numerous, powerful hurricanes, although others are not convinced of the link. Recent data, however, does show that sea surface temperatures have risen, and researchers are certain that warmer waters make for more powerful storms.

Whatever the causes, the result of more active hurricane seasons could well be repeats of the massive evacuation of Houston prior to Hurricane Rita, along with scenes of devastation rivaling those in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the Texas-Louisiana coastal area following Rita.

"Unfortunately, we've seen this over and over," said Andrew Coburn, a coastal policy expert at Duke University. "We have these disastrous storms and people say, 'Oh my God this is terrible,' and then within a few years those memories fade."

Geologists have known of the dangers for decades. The Gulf and Atlantic coasts are lined with barrier islands — narrow strips of sand that move, sometimes hundreds of feet, as storms erode them, cut new inlets through them and shift sand offshore or to new locations.

The barrier islands are nature's shock absorbers, taking the brunt of hurricane strikes, geologists say, while also acting as natural sand banks, with beaches building up during calm periods, storing sand that will be eroded during storms.

Now those barrier islands are home to millions of new residents, many of whom live in towering condominiums or expensive homes built directly on the waterfront. The buildings often go right on top of the sand dunes, wiping out the natural sand bank the beach needs to rebuild itself after storms.

Florida is a prime example. In 1960, the state was a sleepy agricultural and vacation spot of some 5 million residents. Today more than 17 million people call Florida home, with 13 million of them living in coastal counties, and most of those crammed inside sprawling urban areas like Jacksonville, South Florida and the Tampa Bay region.

Nationally, the number of people living in coastal areas has nearly doubled since 1960, jumping from 180 people per square mile to 275 in 1994. One study in 2000 found 1,000 full-time residents moving into coastal counties around the country each day. About 50 million people now live in the country's coastal areas.

Many of those people could not afford to live near the water without federally-underwritten flood insurance. The program provides relatively cheap insurance — about $400 a year for $100,000 in coverage — in an area where private companies will not write policies.

"The program was originally aimed at floodplains in rivers," Young said. "But it's been extended to the coastal areas, where private insurance would cost an unbelievable amount."

The policies pay up to $250,000 for buildings, plus another $100,000 for contents. The program currently has roughly 4.6 million policies in place collecting some $2 billion a year in premiums on about $743 billion in assets.

But storms like Katrina quickly outstrip the premiums and reserves, with claims expected to climb into the billions. That means administrators will go to Congress for a bail-out, which in turn means that taxpayers, not policyholders, will foot the bill.

But there's more: a 1998 study by David Conrad of the National Wildlife Federation found some 32,000 properties covered by federal flood insurance for which owners have filed at least two claims.

Experts say the idea of paying multiple claims on flood-prone properties is something the private market would never do — at least without dramatically raising premiums.

"Nature is sending us messages," said Young, who calls for a national non-partisan commission to examine coastal properties and make recommendations to Congress about which ones should no longer qualify for federal insurance or rebuilding money. "The idea of repeatedly throwing federal dollars at rebuilding the infrastructure in some of these places is crazy. There are certain areas where we simply should retreat."

Experts say the same about federal funding for beach re-nourishment projects. While Presidents Bush and Clinton proposed heavy cuts in federal funding for these projects — in which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pumps new sand from offshore onto eroded beaches — Congress has always restored the funding, which fluctuates annually but in 2004 totaled $200 million.

Local governments invariably argue that their beaches are a national resource and treasure, and they have banded together to form a powerful lobby that so far has kept the congressional money pipelines open. Beaches stretching from New Jersey south around the Gulf Coast to Texas each year receive millions for sand pumping projects, even though some are back within a few years asking for more money after ocean currents and storms scour their rebuilt beaches.

"The problem is that none of this is market-based," said Coburn. "If individuals were responsible for insuring their homes and individual communities were responsible for restoring their beaches, it would be a whole different scenario."

While geologists say the recent run of devastating hurricanes should prompt the nation to ask tough questions about federal programs that encourage coastal development, emergency planners say the storms should spark a thorough examination of the nation's disaster plans.

Many experts are labeling the evacuations ahead of Katrina and Rita as qualified successes, but caution that there were serious problems that merit a review of evacuation plans across the country, especially since the risk of a terrorist strike puts nearly every city in peril.

"Our research shows that Americans are over-confident in the ability of government to respond," said Paul Light, a disaster and readiness expert at New York University. "But there are many highly probable scenarios that involve an almost complete breakdown of social order. Katrina showed us that all those structures we depend on can be swept away."

One clear lesson from Katrina is that many large cities may wind up with large numbers of poor people potentially left behind because they don't own cars, don't have enough money to buy gas, or have no place to go and no money to stay in a hotel room.

And while Rita sparked a painful, but eventually successful evacuation of around 3 million people in the Houston and Texas coastal areas, gas shortages left hundreds — perhaps thousands — of motorists stranded on the highways. Texas officials are already examining ways to avoid the problem in the future, although the solutions seem problematic, since gas tanker trucks get stuck in traffic just like evacuees.

Another disturbing point about Rita, the experts say, is that it was identified as a threat several days ahead of landfall. While that allowed time to get everybody out, many hurricanes don't blossom into mega-storms until just before striking, or they make erratic turns that can shift their zone of potential landfall by hundreds of miles in a matter of hours.

That means some cities might get only a few dozen hours to evacuate, a scenario that in Houston would mean hundreds of thousands would never make it, with many probably stuck on roads at the time of the storm's landfall.

Experts say the solution falls on the shoulders of governments, but also on individuals.

Governments need to do a better job of identifying precisely which residents live in flood zones and then should urge those who don't to stay in place if their homes are sound rather than jumping on the highways and adding to the traffic nightmare, Light said.

The main lesson for citizens, he believes, is that they should have their own plan in place, complete with details about whether the family needs to evacuate, where they'll go, what they'll take and what route they will follow.

"The effect of Rita following so closely after Katrina was to really sober people up," he said. "But our research shows these lessons fade quickly. A lot of governments are woefully ill-prepared. If you haven't been contacted by your local government about disaster plans, that's a good sign your government isn't ready."

Mike Williams' E-mail address is: mikew(at)coxnews.com