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Learning from Katrina

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hurricane katrina

As we look back upon the fifth anniversary of worst hurricane in U.S. history, two windstorms churn through the Atlantic. The first, Danielle, fortunately veered away from the coastline, its destructive power withering by the hour. The second, Earl, on the other hand, is strengthening, with sustained winds already reaching 135 mph and a trajectory that has the whole Eastern Seaboard on watch.

Katrina taught us many things about disaster preparedness and response. It gave us vivid, appalling visions of a new worst-case scenario. Even more powerfully, Spike Lee put together two gripping documentaries that unveil the true, long-term magnitude of the tragedy, the second of which, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise, recently premiered on HBO and is a much-watch look into just how much the city has suffered — without crumbling — since the floodwaters receded.

At Risk Management magazine, ever since the storm, we have tried to tell some of the city’s other stories. I wrote an article about the New Orleans Museum of Art’s harrowing days after the storm and the commando art restoration team that saved collections throughout the city. Another story detailed how a casino risk manager in the midst of a major merger had to deal with $1 billion in lost property after his company’s riverboat was thrown 2,000 feet by storm surge. And we tried to find some semblance of a silver lining by offering these lessons that all of us can learn from a disaster of this magnitude.

Unfortunately, it seems as though few lessons have actually been learned. Oh, they have been discussed ad nauseum and the outrage expressed has generally been genuine. But actual behavior has largely remained unchanged. Still, most people admit that they are unprepared for disasters.

Hopefully, most companies and organizations are more confident. But many are not — or at least have no cause to be. Along these lines, we plan to spend the rest of this week (and much of September, which is National Preparedness Month) remembering what happened on August 29, 2005, and emphasizing the importance of disaster preparedness and response.

I encourage you to click some of the links above and check back soon for more.

Hurricane Earl Projected to Possibly Strike Northeast

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There is a fictional book titled Landstrike that details the scenario of a disastrous hurricane striking the New York City area. From the book’s website:

Someday, a major hurricane will strike New York City. Government forecasters concede they’ll be unable to give the City much notice, while the City’s emergency planners admit evacuation is impossible. It’s a recipe for disaster on a scale to dwarf Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, potentially leading to the largest natural catastrophe in American history.

As we all know, NYC is very much unprepared for the type of storm that frequents the warmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

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Some may recall the story of the Great Hurricane of 1938 that struck eastern Long Island and New England, killing more than 700 people, destroying more than 50,000 buildings and knocking down more than a quarter billion trees.

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If a serious hurricane were to strike the NYC area today, it would undoubtedly be one of the most costly natural disasters in U.S. history. As the Insurance Information Institute states, New York has the highest total exposure to a storm.

Screen shot 2010-08-30 at 10.38.25 AM

Not to be a fear monger, but now let us look at the projected path of Hurricane Earl, courtesy of the National Hurricane Center (NHC). I understand that this is a projection through Saturday, which, when talking about the path of storms, is long-term and certainly not definitive.

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Still, the image is frightening (note how close to NYC the storm is projected Friday afternoon/evening):

Screen shot 2010-08-30 at 10.50.59 AM

Moments ago, Hurricane Earl reached category 3 status with winds near 120 mph, according to the NHC. We will keep an eye on updates from the center.

This is a good time for businesses to review their business continuity and disaster preparedness plans. There is no such thing as being too prepared.

Are Oil-Eating Bacteria Cleaning Up the Gulf?

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It appears that way.

So you know how BP and various others have been trying to sell us on the idea that the gargantuan oil plume in the Gulf of Mexico had somehow magically disappeared? Well, now some Berkeley scientists have confirmed that this actually may be happening, but it isn’t magic. A newly discovered microbe, a particularly gluttonous form of oil-eating bacteria that have existed for millions of years on the ocean floor, appears to have multiplied rapidly since the April 20 spill and gobbled up so much of the dispersed oil as to render the plume “undetectable.”

That is pretty amazing if this is actually going on. Nature, man. Truly remarkable.

Since scientists know science, I will cede all knowledge on the subject to the researchers doing the researching and hope to hear more good news about the Gulf cleaning itself. But, I think FSist’s take is pretty well aligned with my own.

We remain slightly skeptical, but consider our minds blown.

Blown indeed.

eat oil

The Next Frontier of Risk: Space Debris

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satellite

You may remember back in February 2009 when the Iridium 33 and Russia’s Cosmos 2251 satellites collided in orbit somewhere above Siberia. The crash of the two objects resulted in more than 600 pieces of debris larger than a tennis ball being strewn about in space, adding to what scientists and researchers call space debris or space junk.

The problem with the collision of satellites (many of which are non-working and have been abandoned in space to drift freely for eternity) is that it creates added debris in an already cluttered lower earth orbit, creating a hazard to operational satellites. The debris can also pose a threat to space stations — in March of last year, the crew of the international space station was forced to take cover in its escape capsule after learning that a piece of debris moving at 20,000 mph was heading towards them. Though the object missed the space station, it won’t be the last close call.

We covered space risk in our May 2009 issue, stating that scientists are concerned about the “dangerous and possibly irreversible cycle of wreckage.” The worst case scenario for the problem of space debris is known as the Kessler Syndrome (named after NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler), a scenario in which the volume of space debris in lower earth orbit is so high that the risk of further collisions increases to the point where launches become nearly impossible.

A space so cluttered with junk that the U.S. military (or any military for that matter), NASA or any weather, cable or GPS satellites cannot launch? Scary indeed.

The latest issue of the Economist explores the ongoing problem of space pollution, stating that:

At orbital velocity, some eight kilometers a second, even an object a centimeter across could knock a satellite out. According to the European Space Agency, the number of collision alters has doubled in the past decade.

But there are possible solutions to clearing the massive amount of space junk out there. The following are a few ideas put forth in the aforementioned article:

  1. Use ground-based lasers to change the orbits of pieces by vaporizing their surfaces. Apparently, the American armed forces claim one laser facility could complete the job in a matter of three years.
  2. Alliant Techsystems has proposed building special satellites enclosed in multiple spheres of strong, lightweight material. Debris that came into contact with the satellite would lose momentum and velocity with each collision. “As a bonus, many object large enough to cause damage would be shattered by the collision into fragments too small to cause serious harm.”
  3. Robots. That’s right — robots. Many space agencies are considering the option of sending robots into space to dock with dead satellites and fire rockets to either boost them into an uninhabited orbit or deorbit them completely.

Whatever these agencies decide, something should be done quickly to remedy the situation. For every day that passes, more space junk accumulates. Let us not come to realize the dreaded Kessler Syndrome.

From the August 21st - 27th, 2010 issue of the Economist.

From the August 21st - 27th, 2010 issue of the Economist.