This Month's Story

As I write this the first storm of the season has appeared. So let’s stop a minute and talk.

What I am about to say may seem a little elementary, but bear with me, it’s important. Note also that what I am about to say deals mainly with the wind and the rain of a hurricane and the effect these two have on coastal evacuation. Surge is another monster and I am going to omit it from this discussion. If we don’t evacuate, then we will be forced to deal with storm surge. So let us concentrate on evacuation and the perils that that the wind and rain have on our attempts to evacuate.

Sometimes simple diagrams of complex mechanism can explain a lot. So lets begin this discussion by drawing a two-inch circle on a piece of paper. Draw a north - south line and an east - west line in the circle. You have drawn a circle with four quadrants, a northeast, a northwest, a southeast and a southwest quadrant. Mark them as such. Now draw a curved arrow with a long tail whose head is directed counter clockwise within the circle.

You have made a little hurricane. Cut out your hurricane and lay it aside.

Now take another piece of paper and in its center make a dot. Label that dot, “Gulfport.” Make a heavy east - west line just below the dot and label it, “Gulf Coast.” Go two inches north of the Gulfport dot and make another dot. Label it, “Hattiesburg.” Make another one two inches further north and label it, “Jackson.” Connect the dots with a north - south line and label the line “US 49.”

You’ve done very well. Now let’s expand ourselves just a little. Make a dot two inches to the west of Gulfport and label it New Orleans. Draw a double north - south line north of it and call it “I-59/55.” Draw another dot three inches west and label it “Mobile.” Its north - south line should be labeled, “I-65.” Now draw a line east - west connecting Mobile, Gulfport and New Orleans. Label it, “I-10.”

Congratulations, you have made a very nice map of south Mississippi, its immediate large metropolitan neighbors and the major evacuation routes a person must use in the event of a hurricane.

Now pick up your two-inch hurricane and place it three inches south of the coast. We’re going to move it against the coast in a moment, but first let’s let it spin there counter clockwise for a moment and talk about hurricanes in general.

Hurricanes are giant heat-dissipating machines crucial to the energy exchange between the oceans and atmosphere. Contrary to what most people think, it’s the oceans not the atmosphere that get most of the sun’s energy. In order to balance the heat budget of the earth (i.e., make the heat received from the sun equal the heat the earth loses to space), the oceans must release this energy into the atmosphere. It does this by evaporation and condensation. You see this process every day in the form of clouds forming over the water.

Sometimes there too much heat energy becomes located in one small part of the ocean and the thing we call a hurricane is the quick way the ocean has of speedily getting rid of this excess heat energy. It works sort of like a large, very efficient stovepipe.

Got that? All right, lets start moving your two-inch paper hurricane against the coast. Several things start to happen. The circulation winds start to feel the drag of the land and the wind slows down a bit and become turbulent.. The uneven topography of the land creates problems in heat dissipation and here and there tornadoes start to spawn.

But the worst problem is that with the removal of the ocean’s heat, the fire under the stovepipe going out, the hurricane starts to collapse. The winds begin to get more and more turbulent and the heavy moisture laden outer circulation bands of the hurricane, deprived of the uplifting effect of the ocean’s heat, start to drop their water. We have heavy rain. Very heavy rain.

All of this is most evident in the northeast quadrant of our paper circle. Things are bad there. If we move east away from the storm center say ten, twenty, or even thirty miles in this quadrant, things are still bad. In these areas, the outer bands release their uneven loads of rain and turbulent winds on the country and towns beneath them, soaking them and punishing them with strong uneven violent winds.

Conversely, in the northwest quadrant the circulation bands have already lost much of their energy and water, and here we find the winds are weaker and markedly dryer. Comparatively, this quadrant suffers the least damage from the storm. The further west one goes in this quadrant, even ten or twenty miles, the effects of the hurricane diminishes rapidly.

Now move your paper hurricane north so that it is entirely on land. Guess what? The people in Hattiesburg and Jackson will now begin to get hit and hit hard. Damages from flooding from rain and tornadoes will be as bad as they are on the coast. In Hurricane Camille, more people were killed in Virginia due to that storm’s rain created flooding than were killed for all causes on the coast. Katrina hit northern Mississippi hard as well.

But what does all this mean to us on the coast. Very simple, if a storm comes, move west. But in this we have a problem. All the evacuation routs are presently set up for the coastal people to move north!! We are told to head on all those routes you have on your paper map to Hattiesburg and Jackson!! We can’t go west because the people there are going north and the police and national guard won’t let us!

The evacuation routes as they are now designed are akin to a chicken trainer teaching his chickens to run down the railroad track to escape the train, rather than allowing them to jump off the track to the left or right. This would all be funny except it’s people that are being trained to run down the track and the train that’s coming after them is a nasty, house smashing, hurricane.

I’ve painted a very simplistic picture here. I know that things are more complicated and certainly, I-10 can’t handle all the coasts evacuees. But it is a major problem that must be addressed before the next major hurricane. I’m not giving any answers, just that we have a problem. While a great many of us evacuated for Katrina, many stayed and only luck and the fact that it was a daytime storm kept many of them alive. We are all nervous here now and a far larger percentage will evacuate with the threat of any good size storm this year.

Which way will we go!!!