Lessons learned from the May 3, 1999 tornado
Storm Warning: The Story of a Killer Tornado, which I reviewed earlier this month, recounts the story of the May 3, 1999 monster F5 tornado that ripped through the southern suburbs of Oklahoma City. In addition to providing an exciting fast-paced narrative of the tornado's rampage, author Nancy Mathis also brings up a number of important lessons learned from this storm, which I detail below. With two strong spring storms capable of trigging tornado outbreaks expected to move through the Midwest U.S. Tuesday and Friday next week, everyone living in Tornado Alley would be wise to pay attention to these lessons learned!
A F-4 tornado rips through Kansas, May 8, 2003. Image credit: wunderphotographer Mike Theiss.
Reasons for the low death toll in the May 3, 1999 tornado
Considering that the May 3, 1999 tornado was the strongest ever measured (302 mph winds), hit a major metropolitan area, and destroyed or damaged over 11,000 buildings, the death toll of 38 was remarkably low. It's worth reviewing the major reasons for the low death toll:
1) National Weather Service Doppler radars. The NWS just completed installation of the new NEXRAD Doppler radars nation-wide in 1998. The NEXRAD radars increased tornado warning time from 5.3 to 9.5 minutes, and roughly doubled the percentage of tornadoes warned for from 30% to 60%. Warning times were as long as 39 minutes for the May 3, 1999 tornado. Mathis notes that the number of tornado deaths in the U.S. was cut in half, to roughly 80 per year, after the NEXRAD radars became operational. It took 20 years for the new radars to get procured, thanks to cost overruns and bureaucratic wrangling. Politicians, NOAA administrators, and private contractors involved during the procurement of the next generation of tornado detection equipment should seek to avoid a similar delay. The procurement process for the NEXRAD radars was a disaster that undoubtedly cost lives.
2) A great warning system. A coordinated warning effort by NOAA's Storm Prediction Center, the local NWS office, local media, and Oklahoma local government personel worked brilliantly. The big money and training pumped into tornado preparedness paid big dividends.
3) A tornado-savvy population. Oklahomans are the most tornado-savvy people in the world. They took warnings seriously, and acted on them. A survey of those injured found that the vast majority knew of the warnings and the tornado, but just did not have a proper place for shelter.
4) Luck. The tornado leveled schools that had already dismissed classes for the day, and a shopping mall that had closed earlier. Had the tornado hit several hours earlier, or late at night when its movement could not have been shown on live TV, the death toll could have been as high as 600, according to a NOAA study.
Highway overpasses are the worst place to shelter from a tornado!
Three people died at overpasses during the May 3, 1999 tornado. The presence of the bridge acts to focus the wind, making it stronger under the bridge. Some drivers abandoned their cars on the Interstate under overpasses, blocking traffic and creating a traffic jam where people were trapped when the tornado swept over. If you're caught in your car on the road and choose to abandon the vehicle, pull off the road and seek shelter in a ditch, not under a highway overpass!
Poor home construction contributed to the deaths and injuries
Tornado fatalities were primarily from those in mobile homes, cars, and homes without shelters. The tornado revealed many homes where builders had failed (illegally) to build up to code. Enforcing existing codes and mandating stronger building codes would have reduced the death toll. This, of course, is not popular with the powerful building industry, since better construction costs more.
Tornado forecasting is still in a primitive stage
A day before the May 3 tornado outbreak, the Storm Prediction Center was only forecasting their lowest alert level for severe weather, a "Slight Risk". The computer models were highly scattered in their predictions, and made significant changes with each new run. Nothing about the outbreak was textbook. Most supercell thunderstorms that spawn tornadoes form along a warm or cold front (or a "dryline" where a sharp gradient of moisture is present). However, none of the first few supercells in the May 3 outbreak were near a front or dryline. The classic clash of warm moist Gulf air with cold, dry Canadian air that usually provides the lift needed for supercells was not present. Researchers have a huge amount of work to do before they understand what causes tornadoes like the May 3, 1999 storm.
I'll be back Friday with a new blog.
Jeff Masters
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Nice little low to the West of the Keys!
Where?
Times Picayune
Corps' employees among those making claims
By Sheila Grissett
East Jefferson bureau
The Army Corps of Engineers has faced some mighty challenges since Hurricane Katrina battered its levees, breached its floodwalls and bruised its reputation. While not as dramatic, the latest challenge is unique:
How to respond in the workplace to its employees who filed claims letting them sue the corps for Katrina damage?
The corps employs more than 1,200 people in southeast Louisiana, and Col. Richard Wagenaar, the district commander, estimates that 600 to 700 of them lost their homes or sustained significant property damage due to Katrina flooding. It’s not yet known how many of the employees joined thousands of other people who recently filed Standard Form 95 asserting administrative claims for damage; the numbers are still being tallied.
But already corps lawyers and commanders are crafting a new set of regulations for those employees to follow at work — even if it means a reassignment of duties until all legal issues are resolved.
The new rules are aimed at eliminating any potential conflict of interest that could result from a corps employee taking legal action alleging negligence in the corps’ design and construction of the federal hurricane protection system, Wagenaar said.
Conflicts of interest are generally an issue when an individual’s personal interest and public duty are at odds, or when an outside observer perceives a conflict regardless whether it exists.
Cases at corps district headquarters on Leake Avenue will be decided individually, based primarily on the specifics of each corps employee’s normal duties, Wagenaar said.
For example, he said it is unlikely that a security guard or human resources supervisor, would face this dilemma because their duties don’t directly involve creation or management of the flood defense system. It is far more likely, he said, that an engineer, a corps attorney or any number of high-level managers would have a hand in financing, designing, building, maintaining the system, or defending it in court.
In most cases, immediate supervisors will apply the new regulations to their staffs. If corps ethics lawyers decide that there’s a signficant conflict of interest for senior management, Wagenaar himself will review those cases.
“They might be temporarily reassigned,” he said. “We have very restrictive ethics rules.”
In other cases, a corps spokeswoman said, the restrictions might call only for certain adjustments — not an all-out job change. A budget analyst, for instance, might be required to leave meetings when the discussion turns to the subject of how to divvy limited money between hurricane protection projects.
Wagenaar said he thinks the new list of dos and don’ts represents a neutral position that will serve to protect both the ability of the corps to do its job and employees’ 1st Amendment rights to seek redress of grievances — even from the very government agency that issues their paychecks.
“We put out a general memo telling employees there was no prohibition against them filing a claim,” he said. “And now my Office of Counsel is working through a standard operating procedure that lays it all out so empoyees can understand potential restrictions.”
The restrictions apply not only to the regular corps workforce in the New Orleans area but also to any contract employees brought in temporarily to help with the post-Katrina work load. “We don’t want to infringe on employees’ rights, but we also don’t want to impact the district’s ability to peform this mission,” he said.
In a Feb. 27 in-house e-mail, corps employees were told that there is “no prohibition” against filing an SF-95 claim against the corps. But they were also told that the corps would need to determine whether filing the claim presents a conflict of interest for the employee’s position.
Wagenaar said he and others found nothing comparable in corps history to help them fashion the new guidelines. Like much else that has happened in metropolitan New Orleans as a result of Katrina, the need for such guidelines is unqiue.
“We’re bulding this from scratch,” Wagenaar said. “There is some precedent for filing (job discrimination) and sexual harassment claims.
“But joining a class action lawsuit against the agency? That’s never been done before,” he said. “We’re writing those rules right now.”
Sheila Grissett can be reached at sgrissett@timespicayune.com or (504) 717-7700.
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$400 billion in claims agains corps, and that's only half those filed
By Sheila Grissett
East Jefferson bureau
Only halfway through the process, Army Corps of Engineers officials who are examining claim forms filed by tens of thousands of people over Hurricane Katrina flooding estimate the alleged damages have already passed the $400 billion mark.
The demands run the gamut, from damages for the loss of a pet to a $200 billion claim by the state of Louisiana — the single largest to surface thus far. In some cases, claims were filed by residents whose property didn’t flood but who seek compensation for mental or emotional stress created by multiple breaks in the federal hurricane protection system, corps officials said.
Col. Richard Wagenaar, commander of the corps’ New Orleans District, said his agency won’t identify claimants by name to protect their privacy. But he confirmed that the $400 billion estimate so far doesn’t include $78.1 billion of previously announced claims: $77 billion from the city of New Orleans, $655 million from Entergy and $460 million from the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board.
“We haven’t found any of those claims in the envelopes opened to date, but we’re probably only maybe 50 percent through them,” Wagenaar said this week.
Representatives of the three entities have said they submitted the federal government’s Standard Form 95, preserving their right to sue the corps.
A spokeswoman for Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. confirmed Thursday that he signed a state claim for $200 billion in damages that Louisiana officials say they suffered as a result of the corps’ alleged negligence in “the building, design, etc. of the MR-GO and the levee system in general.”
Foti’s office said the claim is intended not only to provide the federal government notice of potential damage requests, which is required as part of the administrative claims process, but also to give the corps time to investigate the claim and consider settlement before litigation.
The filings of SF-95 began slowly after a Feb. 2 ruling by U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval that the corps is not automatically immune from lawsuits involving its navigation projects.
Duval’s decision breathed new life into a suit filed by WDSU television personality Norman Robinson and two couples who lived in the flooded Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish. They accuse the corps of negligently building and maintaining the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet.
The ruling also raised the prospect that new suits would be filed, including a similar challenge involving the corps’ work on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals.
The trickle of SF-95s roared into a deluge with the approach of the March 1 filing deadline.
In a scene reminiscent of last-minute income tax filers who jam the post office on April 15, roads leading to the corps’ Leake Avenue district headquarters during the 48 hours preceding the deadline were clogged with drivers seeking to drop off their forms. To help move along the process, supervisors sent shifts of corps employees to stand alongside the streets and hold U.S. mail bins from the agency’s mail room, fulfilling a requirement that the forms be treated and safeguarded as U.S. mail.
In some cases, motorists asked to borrow corps employees’ pens to fill out the two-page forms on the spot. Examining the forms these days, corps employees said they occasionally find one bearing only a signature, perhaps a testament to the haste with which documents were submitted. In one instance just before the filing deadline, a motorist thrust a blank form from a vehicle window, saying her attorney told her to be sure to get it filed before March 1, said a corps employee who asked not to be identified.
Wagenaar estimates it will take two to three more weeks to complete inspecting and tallying all the claims. He said the paperwork is enough to fill an 8-by-10-foot room.
Sheila Grissett can be reached at sgrissett@timespicayune.com or (504)¤717-7700.
Not to say the corps didn't screw up. I wish you'd been here before this storm hit. We reviewed the research & the plans, we knew what was gonna happen, it looked like leeve failer was emenent & was appauld the plans weren't put into action.
CB~ shear is way high
Pace of rebuilding after Katrina slows
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I couldn't help to read about the law suit against the Corps of Engineers and this placed myself back in time when I was following Katrina before it landed in New Orleans. At the time and before the leeves broke, I read an article talking about the desperate call from the Corps of Engineers done repeatedley since many years before to pinpoint the leevies problems and how it would brake. I wish I could find it now. In that article, the prediction of what later happened was shocking. I don't work the Corps, neither I have any interested in defending them, but I do know how tied the hands of governmental engineering is, and very well. And this comment is not an insensitive view to the people that suffer so deeply during that time. I spent many days with my heart in pieces.
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