Experts: Don’t Underestimate Storm Surge
News-Press
Wednesday – July 13, 2011
Greatest hurricane peril often misunderstood
Although hurricane storm surge presents a far greater danger to life and property than hurricane winds, a recent study shows many coastal residents don’t understand its risks.
Storm surge is the dome of water pushed toward shore by a hurricane’s winds, and a Category 5 hurricane can produce a storm surge of more than 20 feet.
“Absolutely, storm surge is the thing you’ve got to worry about,” said Gerald Campbell, chief of planning for Lee County Emergency Management. “Wind is the manageable part of a hurricane. We can build structures to withstand wind or do wind mitigation to strengthen structures.
“But the nature of storm surge: Structures won’t hold up to that. You not only have flooding, but you can have wind-driven waves and debris. It’s a bad scenario all around.”
Despite the realities of hurricanes, a study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research indicates a significant portion of people don’t know what a storm surge is or realize their own vulnerability in the face of it.
“Unfortunately, that’s not that surprising,” Campbell said. “As we go out to hurricane seminars, we find that, despite 20 or 30 years of effort on our part, people still don’t understand storm surge.”
Oblivious to risk
For the study, researchers surveyed 1,218 people from 155 counties, including Lee and Collier, from Texas to North Carolina.
Among the findings was that 35 percent of those who live in areas that would be flooded by a Category 1 storm did not believe they would be affected by storm surge from a Category 3 to 5 storm.
“That’s something we see way too many times: A lot of times, people have no idea if they’re in an evacuation zone” said Jeff Lazo, the study’s principal investigator. “That’s a scary thought that people don’t know if they should evacuate or not when a hurricane is coming.”
People in storm surge areas also tended to believe hurricane winds are a greater risk than storm surge.
“People understand wind,” Campbell said. “They see wind on television or experience wind through thunderstorms.
“But storm surge is not real for most people. If you do a Google search on ‘storm surge,’ you won’t find a lot of videos. If you experience storm surge firsthand, you probably won’t survive.”
A large number of those surveyed believed storm surge is the same as a tsunami, that storm surge can’t travel farther than a mile from the coast, and storm surge is caused by rain.
“You don’t have to be a scientist to understand it,” Lazo said. “You just need to know enough to know how you are threatened and what to do.
“It’s not that everybody doesn’t get it. It’s that enough don’t get it that raises concern. If that many people don’t get it, and you get a major hurricane, you might have 100,000 people who don’t understand the risk and don’t know what to do.”
Another misconception is storm surge always equates with the strength of the storm: A more powerful storm should produce a bigger storm surge.
But Hurricane Ike, a Category 2 storm, produced a 20-foot storm surge when it made landfall in Texas in 2008, while Hurricane Charley, a Category 4 storm when it made landfall Aug. 13, 2004, in Lee County, produced a storm surge of about 7 feet.
“We had more water on Sanibel from Tropical Storm Gabrielle than from Charley,” said Erick Lindblad, executive director of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. “That was real telling for me. Storm surge is a real thing, and you don’t necessarily have to have a large storm if the wind direction and timing are right.”
Unlike Campbell, Lindblad was surprised so many people surveyed for the study were so ill-informed about storm surge.
“I think most people who live on the coast are very weather-aware,” he said. “Maybe a lot of people come from up North, and for them, storm surge doesn’t compute.
“Of all the preparations we make for a hurricane, it’s all centered on storm surge.”
By Kevin Lollar