What Can We Learn from Andrew?
Roger Pielke, Jr., Finds Out

This hurricane season has seen record activity in the tropical Atlantic, with twelve named storms developing before the season's midpoint of 10 September. The busy seas have made Roger Pielke, Jr., a timely expert. Roger is at NCAR's Environmental and Societal Impacts Group (ESIG), examining the human side of hurricanes and other mesoscale events.

Roger (whose father is a noted mesoscale meteorologist at Colorado State University) earned a doctorate in political science in 1994 from the University of Colorado. There he completed a dissertation on the U.S. Global Change Research Program and its links to policymakers. Last year he embarked on a two-year, NSF-funded project to evaluate three major weather events from societal angles: 1992's Hurricane Andrew, the 1993 Midwest floods, and the East Coast blizzard of March 1993. The project grew out of an NCAR/NOAA workshop held in 1990. The first of Roger's reports is "Hurricane Andrew in South Florida: Mesoscale Weather and Societal Responses," published by ESIG in June.

As one might expect, Andrew--the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, with some $30 billion in damage--yielded plenty of raw material for Roger to work with. He calls it "an extreme test of the plans and actions taken over several decades by Dade County to reduce vulnerability to hurricanes. There were both successes and shortfalls."

Foremost among the successes was the orderly evacuation of 700,000 people from the southeast Florida coast. "A million were ordered to leave and 300,000 stayed. The ones who left had plenty of time to get out." Those who stayed endured a terrifying night of winds gusting as high as 70 meters per second, but thanks to ample warning, along with televised instructions on how to barricade oneself inside a closet with mattresses, the death toll stayed below 50.

Andrew's track was well forecast, but the storm sped up unexpectedly before landfall and its winds increased from category 3 to category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. (The changeover occurs at around 60 m/s.) The high winds wreaked tremendous havoc in areas that were, ironically, evacuated for flooding that didn't materialize. Thus, says Roger, "evacuation of people out of the areas of greatest wind damage was largely a matter of good fortune rather than foresight."

Andrew turned many residents from hurricane skeptics into believers. "Personal experience with hurricanes is a poor substitute for general wisdom," says Roger. "When Andrew came, you had people saying, ÔI've made it through other big ones over 20 years,' but there hadn't been any really big ones in south Florida on the scale of Andrew since the 1960s." The residual effect of Andrew's wrath could pose a different set of problems later on. "More people in south Florida will evacuate next time when they don't need to, which might prevent people who actually need to leave from getting out in time."

The most glaring societal weakness laid bare by Andrew was the lack of building-code enforcement for hurricane safety. As much as 40% of the insured losses in south Florida can be attributed to poor compliance with Dade County's code, which is considered among the nation's toughest for hurricanes. Homes built before 1980 endured the storm with less damage than newer ones, and many of the worst-hit areas were miles away from the zone of maximum winds. "Even with strict enforcement of the building code," says Roger, "Andrew still would have been the costliest hurricane in history. It's frightening to consider the potential impact of an Andrew-like storm on other communities on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts."

Insurance companies--nine of which were thrown into bankruptcy due to Andrew--are thinking it over. In some areas, says Roger, insurers are factoring in an expected degree of noncompliance to hurricane codes and setting rates accordingly. Thus, he says, "insurance policies might actually provide a more accurate assessment of hurricane risk than city code in some places."

Roger sees this busy 1995 hurricane season as a window of opportunity through which coastal communities can examine their vulnerability to severe weather. After poring through hundreds of articles and documents on Andrew, he proposes that communities ask the following questions: "How vulnerable are we? What decision processes are in place with regard to hurricanes? How can we use the fundamental wisdom from 500 years of hurricane experience in North America, instead of ignoring or forgetting it?"

The risk remains not only of more 11-digit damage costs but of major loss of life, says Roger. Some metropolitan areas--in particular, Tampa and New Orleans--are frighteningly vulnerable due to geography, burgeoning populations, and lack of recent experience with major hurricanes. But Roger notes that some poorer, less populous coastal regions are also at risk due to outdated or inadequate evacuation plans.

Roger will continue his work as a visiting ESIG scientist through next summer. "It's so important to have a place like ESIG," he says, "where people can work on projects that might not be supportable in a university environment." He explains that weather and climate impacts research falls between the cracks of traditional academic disciplines such as geography, meteorology, political science, and sociology. "I thought this would be a well-covered field, but there really hasn't been much research done that looks at the entire process, from when forecasts are disseminated to how they're used by public and private decision makers in the real world."

Roger hopes that his work is a contribution to the U.S. Weather Research Program, a comprehensive mesoscale effort (with NCAR's Rit Carbone as lead scientist) that is still in search of steady funding. He sees usefulness in at least two directions. "Forecasters can benefit from a better understanding of user needs. Users can benefit from a better understanding of the challenges and difficulties faced by forecasters. Overall, it's an area that hasn't been mined as well as it could be." --BH

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