Joe Mario Pedersen
Orlando Sentinel
“It’s just a Category 1.”
Ken Graham, director of the National Hurricane Center, flinches every time he hears that knowing that Category 1 hurricanes were directly responsible for 175 deaths and $103 billion worth of damage in the last 10 years. Most of those deaths Graham believes could have been avoided if the public had been better educated about the power of tropical storms.
Changing the public’s assumptions on hurricane threats is an uphill battle Graham is determined to win by changing the way meteorologists and state leaders talk about incoming storms.
Graham and the NHC are exploring social sciences to understand the best way of communicating the full threat of an incoming storm to the general population.
Part of the problem lies in what residents have already lived through.
“Public perception of risk is based on a different experience. Every time we get a new experience it reshapes our perception of hurricanes,” Graham said.
Living through multiple storms without seeing much damage, injuries or death creates skepticism and a wall of disconnect between what meteorologists are saying and what homeowners may be thinking.
“Even when a governor says, ‘Get out now,’ some decide to stay for a wide swath of reasons,” said Laurence Barton, a professor and expert in crisis management and threat assessment at the University of Central Florida. “It’s difficult for informed scientists to motivate when people have the perceived right to put their life at risk.”
After interviewing 80 people in hurricane-effected states, Barton found the most common reason people stay in an evacuation zone is based on economics. Persons with high net worth stayed to protect their home from looters, while those on the other end of the spectrum lacked the financial means to leave the area.
The second common denominator is a lack of knowledge.
Fugate’s work in FEMA involved looking at many indicators to get an idea of how severe a storm might be, including predictions of wind, storm surge, inland flooding and tornadoes.
While other indicators can be extremely helpful in painting a picture of how serious a tropical system is, meteorologists are trying to make adjustments on their end of how information is disseminated.
Most people who have watched the projections for an incoming tropical storm have seen the cone graphic detailing the probable path of a system, but what viewers may not realize is areas outside of the cone can suffer massively, said Michael Brennan, branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the NHC.
““There’s still high wind and storm surges affecting areas outside of the cone,” he noted.
A popular misconception the NHC has tried to combat is that only coastal communities are affected by storm surges. However, the highest storm surges seen during Hurricane Florence in North Carolina were 100 miles inland where water traveled up rivers.
To communicate the significance of surges, NHC started producing storm surge watches and warnings in 2017 detailing the areas that will be affected outside of a projected cone track.
About 90 percent of deaths were water related in the 2017-18 hurricane seasons, according to the NHC.
“Freshwater flooding doesn’t get as much attention as it should,” Brennan said.
