Corps studying ways to limit devastation

At the Field Research Facility in Duck, N.C., Dr. Donald Resio and other experts from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are incorporating their research into a new hurricane model they hope will eventually be used by all federal agencies and coastal communities.

&#8220What we’re trying to do is find an optimal way to represent the hurricane risks in the coastal United States,” Resio said. &#8220Of course, the Corps is responsible for flood defenses in these areas. Hurricane Katrina changed things because, before then, the climatological information had not been updated.”

Resio is a senior technologist with Vicksburg’s Engineer Research and Development Center, representing the highest technical rank in the Defense Department’s civil service.

Today is the start of hurricane season, which extends to Nov. 30. The National Weather Service predicts 13 to 17 named storms, almost two years after Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,300 in Louisiana and 230 in Mississippi.

It’s that level of devastation the Corps wants to prevent, and Army officials said they believe this new hurricane model will do just that.

&#8220We have updated data and changed the way we do probability analysis,” Resio said. &#8220We consider a lot of different (storm) factors, such as dry air in the upper levels, increased drag, and less heat source over land. All these things affect coastal areas.”

Particularly on the Gulf Coast, Resio’s work is important, Corps spokesman Wayne Stroupe said. Findings by the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET) called for data on water levels to be used in hurricane modeling.

&#8220IPET uses the water levels over the geographic area of southeast Louisiana and the 350 miles of the protection system,” Stroupe said. &#8220Large storms tended to have tracks that had patterns. Understanding those patterns not only allows you to more accurately represent the behavior of hurricanes and better predict the future hazard, it allowed IPET to reduce the number of storm tracks we needed to run for the hazard definition.”

IPET was created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to determine what happened in the New Orleans hurricane and flood protection system.

Resio, with a national team of hurricane experts, &#8220found that many of the assumptions used in the past, such as randomness of storm tracks, simply were no longer valid,” Stroupe said.

Specifically, Resio said, hurricane modelers needed to gain a better understanding of storm surges and the factors that caused them.

&#8220We have learned over the last year that it’s very important to get hurricane size and intensity characteristics in estimating what the surge potential can be,” he said. &#8220A good example of this is that Hurricane Camille, a Category 5 storm, and Katrina, a Category 3 when it made landfall, had surges” inconsistent with the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.

The Saffir-Simpson divides hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and parts of the Pacific into categories of 1 to 5 based on intensity of sustained winds. The classifications are mainly used to measure damage potential and flooding.

Camille’s surge was 21 feet, and Katrina’s was 29 feet, Resio said. According to the Saffir-Simpson, Camille’s surge should have been no bigger than 18 feet, and Katrina’s should have been under 13 feet.

&#8220Most people thought that because they had lived through Camille, they didn’t have to worry about (Katrina),” Resio said. &#8220It killed more people because people did not realize how bad a storm it was and didn’t get out of the way.”

Camille reached the mouth of the Mississippi River on Aug. 17, 1969, flattening the Mississippi Gulf Coast and killing 259 people. Thirty-six years later, on Aug. 29, Katrina made landfall east of New Orleans, flooding about 80 percent of the city after its levee system failed.

In Vicksburg, though the storm’s brunt was felt more than 200 miles away, Katrina’s wrath was felt for weeks after its 60-mile-wide swath of hurricane force winds made landfall. An estimated 1,100 evacuees filled up five church shelters in three days before they were moved to the Vicksburg Convention Center for what turned into a three-week stay for some.

The measure of human suffering, not to mention New Orleans’ catastrophic levee breaches, helped lead to the development of a hurricane model that more accurately defines storm characteristics and helps government agencies prepare residents in harm’s way.

&#8220It helps us recognize a big storm is a very dangerous storm,” Resio said. &#8220We do appreciate we have to be wary of a large, intense storm, but most of the work we are doing is more long-term. What we are doing helps us understand what the residual risk is for the upcoming season.”

Stroupe called the new model &#8220a major effort – a giant leap forward in our understanding of hurricanes. We’re are trying to apply (our findings) for … protecting the New Orleans levee system.”

Vicksburg’s Engineer Research and Development Center was formed in 1998 and has seven laboratories employing about 2,000 engineers, scientists and support personnel with an annual research program of about $700 million. Four labs and the organization’s overall headquarters are based at Waterways Experiment Station, founded in 1928. The other three ERDC venues are in Champaign, Ill.; Hanover, N.H.; and Alexandria, Va.