Document A
Hurricanes
Engines of Destruction
Hurricanes are giant, spiraling tropical storms that can pack wind speeds of over 160 miles an hour and unleash
more than 2.4 trillion gallons of rain a day. These same tropical storms are known as cyclones in the northern
Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal, and as typhoons in the western Pacific Ocean.
The Atlantic Ocean’s hurricane season peaks from mid-August to late October and averages five to six
hurricanes per year.
Hurricanes begin as tropical disturbances in warm ocean waters with surface temperatures of at least 80 degrees
Fahrenheit. These low pressure systems are fed by energy from the warm seas. If a storm achieves wind speeds
of 38 miles an hour, it becomes known as a tropical depression. A tropical depression becomes a tropical storm,
and is given a name, when its sustained wind speeds top 39 miles an hour. When a storm’s sustained wind
speeds reach 74 miles an hour it becomes a hurricane and earns a category rating of 1 to 5 on the SaffirSimpson scale.
Hurricanes are enormous heat engines that generate energy on a staggering scale. They draw heat from warm,
moist ocean air and release it through condensation of water vapor in thunderstorms.
Hurricanes spin around a low-pressure center known as the “eye.” Sinking air makes this 20- to 30-mile-wide
area notoriously calm. But the eye is surrounded by a circular “eye wall” that hosts the storm’s strongest winds
and rain.
These storms bring destruction ashore in many different ways. When a hurricane makes landfall it often
produces a devastating storm surge that can reach 20 feet high and extend nearly 100 miles. Ninety percent of
all hurricane deaths result from storm surges.
A hurricane’s high winds are also destructive and may spawn tornadoes. Torrential rains cause further damage
by spawning floods and landslides, which may occur many miles inland.
The best defense against a hurricane is an accurate forecast that gives people time to get out of its way. The
National Hurricane Center issues hurricane watches for storms that may endanger communities, and hurricane
warnings for storms that will make landfall within 24 hours.
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/natural-disasters/hurricane-profile/
Document B
The city of New Orleans is being evacuated following hurricane Katrina and rising flood waters.
Approximately 18,000 Hurricane Katrina survivors are housed in the Red Cross shelter at the Astrodome and
Reliant center. Volunteers from a number of agencies, including FEMA, the American Red Cross and a number
of local agencies were on hand to help. Photo by Ed Edahl/FEMA Houston, TX, September 2, 2005
Document C
Document D
Preliminary Estimate of Rainfall Amounts Associated with Katrina.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/tech-report-200501z.pdf3
Document E
ENN: Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
Published August 21, 2013 08:57 AM
Plans to Remap Coastal Areas after Hurricane
Sandy Announced this week
Preliminary U.S. damage from Hurricane Sandy that hit the East Coast in October of last year is estimated to be
near $50 billion, making Sandy the second-costliest cyclone to hit the United States since 1900. Full recovery
from Sandy will take years, but plans for remapping altered seafloors and shorelines were announced yesterday
by a joint collaboration between the USGS, NOAA, and the US Army Corps of Engineers.
The project includes acquiring data to update East Coast land maps and nautical charts by conducting a new
survey of coastal waters and shorelines.
Using ships, aircraft, and satellites, the agencies will measure water depths, look for submerged debris, and
record altered shorelines in high priority areas from South Carolina to Maine, as stipulated by Congress in the
Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013. The areas to be remapped will be based on their relative dangers to
navigation, effects from the storm, and discussions with state and local officials as well as the maritime
industry.
"Our approach is to map once, then use the data for many purposes," said NOAA Rear Admiral Gerd Glang,
director of NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey. "Under the Ocean and Coastal Mapping Integration Act, NOAA
and its federal partners are taking a 'whole ocean' approach to get as much useful information as possible from
every dollar invested to help states build more resilient coastlines."
"The human deaths and the powerful landscape-altering destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy are a stark
reminder that our nation must become more resilient to coastal hazards," said Kevin Gallagher, associate
director for Core Science Systems at USGS.
The USGS will collect very high-resolution elevation data to support scientific studies related to the hurricane
recovery and rebuilding activities, watershed planning and resource management. USGS will collect data in
coastal and inland areas depending on their hurricane damages and the age and quality of existing data. The
elevation data will become part of a new initiative, called the 3D Elevation Program, to systematically acquire
improved, high-resolution elevation data across the United States.
The data acquired by the agencies, much of which will be stored at NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center,
and through NOAA's Digital Coast, will be open to local, state, and federal agencies as well as academia and
the general public. The information can be applied to updating nautical charts, removing marine debris,
replenishing beaches, making repairs, and planning for future storms and coastal resilience.
Document F
Nicole Gelinas
Katrina Refugees Shoot Up Houston
FEMA should help the Texas city control its crime spike.
4 January 2006
Houston had 336 homicides in 2005. The last two, which bloodied the earliest hours of New Year’s Eve, weren’t
interesting, except for two facts: Both gunshot victims—Keith Hayes, 19, and Calvin Clay, 23—were former New Orleans
residents, evacuees of Hurricane Katrina. And both men allegedly died at the hands of a third Big Easy evacuee, who
remains at large.
This city of nearly 2 million has experienced a marked uptick in its homicide rate since more than 100,000 of New
Orleans’s displaced residents flocked into town in late August and early September. While Houston’s murder rate is up
23 percent for all of 2005, it spiked 70 percent in November and December compared to last year’s levels. At least 35
percent of Houston’s December increase in homicides—five of 14 over last year’s level—directly stemmed from the
presence of Katrina evacuees.
Here are a few of Houston’s homicides of the past two months, as reported by the Houston Chronicle and by the New
Orleans Times-Picayune:
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December 29: A gun battle at a run-down motel ended with one young New Orleans evacuee dead, with a bullet
in the head.
December 19: A New Orleans evacuee was found shot to death in an apartment.
December 5: A New Orleans evacuee was shot to death near his car.
November 20: A New Orleans evacuee shot a fellow evacuee to death at a pool hall.
November 1: A New Orleans evacuee was stabbed to death by a Texan who, police have determined, was
defending himself from an attempted carjacking at the hands of the evacuee.
Houston isn’t exclusively blaming New Orleanians for its crime surge. One city councilman recently noted that Houston
had plenty of crime before Katrina. The mayor, Bill White, reasons that the higher murder rate is in part due to the
sudden increase in population without a concurrent increase in police resources, particularly in the low-rent, high-crime
districts many evacuees now call home. “We had criminals before the evacuation and we had some more criminals here
after the evacuation,” White said in December. And police officials have noted that gang activity was a growing problem
in Houston before Katrina hit.
This is all doubtless true. But it’s also irrefutable that when New Orleans was inundated with floodwaters, what flooded
out of the Crescent City was a core criminal underclass that, before the storm, generated the highest urban murder rate
in the nation.
The national media’s fixation on Katrina evacuees’ skin color, and the same media’s easy amnesia about the real
violence that plagued New Orleans immediately after the storm, obscured a burgeoning crisis that still demands
sustained attention: Katrina’s floods dispersed throughout the unprepared South the uniquely vicious New Orleans
underclass culture of drugs, guns, and violent death.
This is good news for New Orleans (for now, anyway): the few citizens who have repopulated the city thus far are
enjoying the newfound ability to walk around their streets without the once-pervasive fear of catching the glint of a gun.
But it’s bad news for cities like Houston, which inevitably must struggle with the overspill of New Orleans’s pre-Katrina
plague of violence.
Indeed, after New Orleans was evacuated, New Orleans’s FBI office sent out a bulletin quietly warning Houston and
other southern cities to look out for an increase in violent gang activity—and Houston’s police chief, Harold Hurtt, has
told the Chronicle since then that there’s no doubt that “gang members [from Louisiana] did relocate here to Houston.”
To combat its recent spike in violence, Houston has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for $6.5
million. It will use the money to step up policing in those already dangerous neighborhoods that are now home to
thousands of former New Orleanians.
FEMA should grant Houston’s request. Increased funding for properly managed policing will determine if Big Easy-style
violence becomes deeply rooted in vulnerable evacuee neighborhoods elsewhere, or if aggressive law enforcement
keeps it in check. Moreover, officials in Louisiana and in New Orleans should view the increased crime woes of its
western neighbor as a warning. As Louisiana begins to spend the $6 billion in federal grants for New Orleans’s
reconstruction, it should earmark some of that money toward building a top-notch justice system—or the Big Easy’s
displaced criminals will surely return home in droves from less hospitable climes.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2006-01-04ng.html
Document G
Document H
Funding approved to help storm-damaged farms
Friday, October 21, 2011
By PAUL POST, ppost@saratogian.com
SARATOGA SPRINGS — An additional $110 million in federal money has been made available to help farms impacted by Hurricane
Irene and Tropical Storm Lee.
A total of $437.2 million has now been allocated to support the Emergency Conservation Program and Emergency Watershed Program
that provide emergency services for agricultural communities following natural disasters.
Nearly $40 million of this funding will go to New York where it will help farmers to rebuild their farms, U.S. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand
and Charles Schumer have announced.
"New York’s farmland endured some of the worst of Hurricane Irene, and much of our farmland is badly damaged," Gillibrand, a Senate
Agriculture Committee member, said in a statement. "When our farm families suffer, our whole state and whole economy suffers.
We need to provide our agricultural communities with all the resources we need to dig out and rebuild from these devastating storms."
Schumer added, "Irene drowned crops, killed livestock, and spoiled milk from the Hudson Valley through Schoharie on up to the North
Country. This bill would help the federal government do its part and step up to the plate to provide relief for New York’s hardest hit
farms. New York’s farmers can’t afford to wait. We need to get this aid on the ground as quickly as possible."
URL: http://www.saratogian.com/articles/2011/10/21/news/doc4ea21335258da886343635.prt
Document I
Document J
The Economic Impact of Hurricane Sandy
By CHAD STONE
November 2, 2012
Chad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Hurricane Sandy's devastating effects on people and property will likely be large—though, at the moment, they seem unlikely to
approach those from Hurricane Katrina. Economic forecasters expect a dip in economic activity followed by a recovery that's fueled by
repair and reconstruction efforts that, in some cases, could replace old buildings, machines, and infrastructure with newer, better
ones. But no one should think that natural disasters are good for the economy.
The Wall Street Journal reports estimates from the disaster-modeling firm Eqecat Inc. of $10 billion to $20 billion in losses insured by
private companies, plus additional losses insured by the National Flood Insurance Program as well as uninsured losses, bringing total
estimated losses to $30 to $50 billion. By contrast, the two costliest storms on record were Katrina, in 2005, which racked up over $100
billion in losses, and Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, which generated $46 billion in inflation-adjusted losses, according to NOAA
estimates. For Sandy, we have only informed guesstimates at this point.
Of Sandy, Eqecat wrote,
Economic damages include property damage from wind, rain and flood, and also include intangibles such as business interruption and
additional living expenses. Damage to infrastructure utilities include roads, water and power, and municipal buildings which may or may
not be insured. Economic damages are by their very nature very approximate [emphasis added].
Natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes damage or destroy productive physical assets like factories, stores, housing, and
public infrastructure (the capital stock); they interrupt economic activity (the flow of goods and services produced in a quarter, as
measured by gross domestic product or GDP). During the disaster and in its immediate aftermath, economic activity will likely be
depressed below what it otherwise would have been, and it takes time to repair and replace damaged physical assets.
Some of the depressed spending during the crisis is merely postponed and made up later. Meanwhile, the repairing and rebuilding of
housing, buildings, and infrastructure generates jobs and greater demand for building materials and other goods and services. Those
activities may well generate enough jobs and economic activity to boost GDP above what it otherwise would have been for a while after
the initial dip. Obviously, these effects are largely concentrated in the affected region and, for Sandy, economic forecasters expect only
a modest effect on overall GDP in either the fourth quarter or early next year.
How quickly the capital stock, especially New York and New Jersey's transportation infrastructure, is repaired could affect how quickly
the regional economy bounces back. On one of my favorite economics blogs, Econbrowser, Jim Hamilton makes that very point, noting
evidence of Katrina's lasting damage to offshore oil-producing infrastructure and the Louisiana economy. Repaired and rebuilt homes,
stores, and infrastructure may well be better built and sounder than what they replace but, in the meantime, the economy will not be as
productive as it would have been without the damage.
People will get back to work and economic activity should start to rebound fairly quickly in the areas that Sandy hit hard. But, we should
remember that, while it's welcome, the GDP generated by repairing damage is not the same as economic stimulus; that is, it mostly just
returns the affected region to where it was before the storm, rather than giving it—much less the economy writ large—an economic
boost.
Document K
Path and Intensity of Hurricane Katrina.
Document L
Saffir-Simpson Scale for Hurricane Intensity.
Document M
Document N