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Hurricane Andrew brought flooding, high winds and tornadoes, such as the ones that raked through the LaPlace area, shown here.
(NWS ARCHIVE PHOTO)
Damage grows over U.S. history
For 300 years, people have worked to tame a vast, diverse and dangerous American landscape for settlement and safety -- often at the cost of lives and property when nature suddenly struck back.
A hugely powerful sequence of three earthquakes in 1811 and 1812 on the New Madrid fault running through the Midwest and South probably measured more than 8.0 on the Richter scale and was felt across the continent. But the earthquakes did little structural damage because there wasn't much to knock down. If a similar quake struck today, it would devastate St. Louis, Memphis and other large cities.
As the U.S. population increased, death tolls rose and damage worsened. When a hurricane hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900, the storm surge killed at least 8,000 people, 22 percent of the population of 35,000. More than half of Galveston's buildings were destroyed. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake measured between 7.7 and 7.9 on the Richter scale. The quake and subsequent fire killed more than 3,000 people out of a population of 400,000 and leveled portions of the city.
The 1927 Mississippi River flood inundated 27,000 square miles of the Midwest and South with water up to 30 feet deep. Although much of the flooded area was farmland, the water washed away 2,200 buildings and damaged thousands more. Early estimates put the death toll at 250, but some historians now say it was more than 1,000. About 700,000 people were left homeless in an event that prompted the federal government to launch major flood-control efforts along the river.
For the balance of the 20th century, the nation benefited from the innovations spawned by the industrial and electronic revolutions. Death tolls fell as building techniques and weather prediction improved and local governments developed ever more sophisticated civil defense and evacuation plans and the means to broadcast them.
Hurricanes, flooding, fires and earthquakes left their marks, but they have never surpassed the modern megadisasters that have taken place abroad. Hurricane Mitch, for example, struck Central America in 1998, killing more than 9,000 people and leaving more than 2 million homeless. The 1976 earthquake that leveled the entire city of Tangshan, China, killed more than 250,000.
But U.S. natural disasters have recently taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Though death tolls have remained low, the physical scale of destruction and its costs have shot upward. In the United States, for example, the total cost of all natural disasters averaged $10 billion annually from 1975-1989, according to a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report. But during 1990-1998, the figure climbed to $17.2 billion.
That means federal, state and local expenditures for preparation, cleanup and rebuilding are rising. The insurance industry has fretted and retrenched several times, cracking down on consumers each time, most recently after Sept. 11. Government policies and programs that once worked are breaking down or backfiring.
Landscape of risk
Louisiana is just one place where these trends have converged: Development and man-made alterations in the landscape have reduced natural protections such as wetlands. That process has outpaced the ability of governments to build new disaster protection such as levees and flood-control systems and to plan efficient evacuation routes.
These changes are shaping a landscape of risk across the United States, from the hurricane- and flood-prone Gulf and south Atlantic coasts to the annual ritual of wildfire evacuations in the West to the vast suburban areas on the West Coast vulnerable to earthquakes.
With an explosion of coastal development in the past generation, there are now more people living within a mile of a coastline than at any point in the past. In 1960, an average of 187 people were living on each square mile of U.S. coast, excluding Alaska. This population density increased to 273 per square mile by 1994 and is expected to reach 327 by 2015.
This trend puts more people in the path of hurricane winds and flooding. It also has made it harder to design evacuation routes that funnel large populations away from the coast quickly, as New Orleans area residents learned in 1998, when about 325,000 people fought traffic jams to get out ahead of Hurricane Georges.
Development has worsened erosion of beaches all along the coast, creating a slow but steady march of the sea inland, exposing more structures to hurricane-force winds and flooding.
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