Hurricane Finis

Hurricane Finis

"But for the grace of God..." is the reaction of many that Hurricane Katrina did not make a direct hit on New Orleans as a Category Five. As bad as it is, and it may get worse, the doomsday scenario of tens of thousands of deaths thankfully seems to have been avoided.

However it says here that another piece of folk wisdom is more apt, "If we can land a man on the moon why can't we" blankety-blank.

All residents of southeastern coastal cities have a three month knot in their stomachs every summer. Last year four hurricanes hit Florida, two went through the same town.

During one of my twenty-three knots in Miami I had one of those Eureka flashes you sometimes get just before you fall asleep: Why not tow a big iceberg in the path of one of these storms?

It sounded stupid even to me the next morning but then last year someone wrote in one of the mainstream news publications about some of the scientific possibilities after talking to some actual scientists and the iceberg thing was one of the possibilities mentioned.

From memory another one was seeding the clouds with something which I believe they'd actually done experimentally. Another I believe was putting a big patch of iron shavings in the ocean path which would bring down the temperature of the water or air or both.

I think another was detonating a small atomic bomb in the eye of the thing. I may be wrong but honest to god I think that really was one of the proposals. I would certainly like to see that tried especially when the hurricane was close to an Islamic country.

All of the possibilities were ultimately dismissed by the 'tists as impractical, inefficacious, dangerous, whatever.

But look, let's approach this syllogistically:

(1) Hurricanes/tropical cyclones are the most dangerous storm systems on the planet. They cause billions of dollars of damage each year and kill however many people a year.

(2) They are as slow as Technology Review editor Jason Pontin on heroin. There's so much lead time. Hurricane forecasting is swiss watch precise compared to earthquake or tornado predicting.

(3) They are very quirky, fragile things. Katrina just dropped from a cat-5 to a cat-4 and then to a 3 before it hit land. They are at the mercy of steering currents, high and low pressure systems elsewhere, biorhythms, upper level wind shear or something like that, a zillion things. When Katrina was a 5, Max Mayfield said that conditions have to be perfect for a storm to develop to that strength.

A couple of years ago some monster was heading right up Cuba toward Miami when the damn thing just disappeared. It was wind shear or something.

(4) While you should be able to reduce the number of human casualties to near zero with better evacuation plans you cannot move buildings and offices so the economic devastation is still going to be there and when a major economic center like New Orleans or Miami gets hit, an entire state's or region's economy--and it's people--are going to suffer.

In my view the "therefore" that should get tacked onto the end of that syllogism is "we have to try something." The present manner of "dealing with" hurricanes is just unacceptable. If we can land a man on the moon we ought to be able to stop or degrade a hurricane.

Or at least try.

Louisiana and New Orleans are eccentric enough that I am surprised that either the governor or mayor didn't propose something...creative, when Katrina was at a five and experts were predicting 10,000+ deaths. Dump all the iron in Birmingham (if they still have any) in the path of the thing. Seed those clouds. Commandeer all civilian aircraft in the state to fly over the top of the hurricane to try to help that wind shear thing along. Do something. What have you got to lose? This is just not acceptable anymore. We have to try something else.

Americans have always been about trying. We conquered an entire continent (and seriously degraded its natives), we built a transcontinental railroad then a transcontinental highway, we invented flying, the telephone and the internet, we're 9-1 in wars, 9-2 at the very least. We try. We don't often take "it's impossible" for an answer.

Voltaire, although not American, said a wise thing once, probably more than once. He said that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." We just should not be deterred from pursuing a good solution to the hurricane problem because we don't have a perfect one. And anything would be "good" compared to what we're doing now.

-Benjamin Harris