Forecast is looking up: The coast’s nearly clear
Record-breaking and destructive: 2005 was a hurricane season like no other
What we know, from our current climate patterns, is that next year could be as active as this year.
- Conrad Lautenbacher Jr., administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Today marks the official end of hurricane season. It’s 41 degrees outside this morning, so you could be forgiven for thinking we’re out of danger…right? Well, just because November 30th arrives, it hardly means that we’re out of the woods. After the hurricane season we’ve had, the destruction and devastation, the death and uprooted lives…well, surely the 2006 season can’t be like this…can it?
New Orleans may never be the same…and even if it does eventually return to it’s previous grandeur, it will take years. People will have to convince themselves that they will be safe living in a city that it below sea level. They will have to be convinced that the levees will hold and that federal, state, and local governments will make living in New Orleans worth their while. Schools, businesses, and entertainment venues will have to be operational once again. These are not tasks that can or will be accomplished in the short term- if they can or will ever happen at all. The sad reality is that New Orleans is a mess and will likely remain so for at least the next few years.
Other parts of the Gulf Coast were devastated as well- Mississippi in particular. Towns like Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, and Biloxi were devastated. More than a few smaller coastal towns were obliterated entirely. What can and will happen to life along the Mississippi Gulf Coast is anyone’s guess.
Even Florida was hit again, after being devastated last summer. I spent August, 2004 working in Miami, and barely missed one hurricane that killed 22 people less than 2 hours west of Miami. This year, Wilma hit south Florida, leaving a trail of destruction and downed power lines. Even southeast Texas, which hasn’t been seriously hit since Alicia in 1983, got a taste. We faced the very real prospect of losing our home, as did millions of others in the Houston-Galveston area. That Rita devastated the Beaumont-Lake Charles area is small consolation to us and certainly no consolation to those whose lives were turned upside down in extreme southeastern texas and southwestern Louisiana.
Take this mind-boggling example of the 2005 season’s record-setting proficiency: Though minimum pressures of hurricanes have been measured for a century, three of the six most intense storms ever to form in the Atlantic did so this year. The most memorable, of course, was Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 people and sparked a devastating flood in New Orleans that triggered the nation’s largest migration since the Dust Bowl. A month later, Rita spurred Houston’s largest-ever exodus.
Six months from now, we get to do it all over again. Yeah, and this is called Paradise for a reason, right? Come June 1, 2006, we will all be wondering with the next six months will hold. Those of us who live along the Gulf Coast don’t live in fear, but we spend six months out of each year with one ear focused to each weather forecast, for the next one may be the one that warns you that you may well be losing your home and your way of life. Facing that reality this summer was one of the few times in my life that I have truly been scared. The uncertainty and lack of control only made a terrifying situation even worse. It would be easy to wonder and worry about next season, but living a life dominated by fear and trepidation is no life at all.
Whither Paradise?
