- [Narrator] Hurricanes are the largest
and most destructive storms on earth.
- It's a feeling of helplessness.
Do a lot of praying.
- [Narrator] Exploding in size,
and packing a deadly punch.
- The storm surge just kept
coming and coming and coming.
- [Narrator] With an
ever-increasing warming ocean,
they can strike at any
time during their season,
putting more and more
of our coastline at risk.
- In the future,
and I like to say the near future,
we are going to have a severe hurricane.
- [Narrator] Anyone can
run from mother nature,
- It's like, oh boy.
- [Narrator] But no one can hide.
(screams)
Earth, air, fire, and water,
essential for human survival,
but in their extreme,
destructive to everything
and everyone in their path.
- [Man 1] Coming down
right now, major tornado.
- [Man 2] Man, that's a monster.
- [Narrator] These are stories,
- [Man] Oh big-time flashing clouds.
- [Narrator] Of Apocalypse Earth.
Tropical cyclones form in
various parts of the world.
Typhoons form in the
Northwestern Pacific basin.
Whereas hurricanes form in the Atlantic.
They all need warm, oceanic sea waters
to begin their journey.
From a collection of clouds,
to a crushing and many times deadly storm,
while hurricanes are a natural occurrence
that instill fear,
they arise to adjust imbalances
of heat in the atmosphere
and provide the ecosystem
with needed rainfall.
But too often nature's
benefit has a significant impact
on humanity and our environment.
Tree toppling winds, soaking rains,
and the most damaging and deadly,
huge waves of water called storm surge
that can overwhelm anything in its path
with an unrelenting blanket of seawater.
Now, armed with knowledge of
how these monster storms form,
scientists can better predict
when the next one may arrive.
Before a hurricane attacks,
one of America's East Coast states,
it quietly begins life thousands
of miles away in Africa.
- A hurricane basically,
as it starts out, it's a wave,
it's a buckle in the tropical easterlies.
And what happens is, as
that buckle starts to move
from East to West, it
develops some disturbances.
- [Narrator] A disturbance is
a small area of low pressure.
As these disturbances
move across the Atlantic,
they pick up more energy
as warm water evaporates
and is sucked up into the clouds.
After 24 hours,
these disturbances start to form into
clusters of thunderstorms.
- If a low pressure system develops
along these thunderstorms,
you're going to start to see a depression.
- [Narrator] A depression is a region
of low barometric pressure.
- As that depression intensifies
and the winds intensify
to tropical storm strength,
39 miles an hour or greater,
it becomes a tropical storm.
- [Narrator] Winds in
this type of depression
start to pick up as the size
of the thunderstorms increase.
- Once those winds increase
that low pressure has sustained
winds around it of 74
miles an hour or greater,
it becomes a hurricane.
- The American Southeast,
a prime target for hurricanes.
With more than 40% of all U.S. strikes
taking place in Florida,
the sunshine-state can
quickly turn into the storm-state
during hurricane season.
Hurricanes hit Florida
more than any other state,
as Florida suffers from
unfortunate geography,
with most of its landmass
directly in the path of destruction.
Bounded by the Atlantic on one side,
and the warm waters of the
Gulf of Mexico on the other,
Florida is a prime target
for weather catastrophe.
All hurricanes have a unique marker.
Hurricane Michael of 2018,
the first category five to hit the U.S.
since Andrew in 1992, was a crop k*ller,
costing Florida farmers
nearly $160 million.
Hurricane Irma slammed
into the Florida keys in 2017
before making another
landfall in Marco Island.
A record, six and a half
million people evacuated
in the days leading up to the storm,
in what turned out to be
Florida's largest evacuation.
Irma was a power k*ller,
wiping out electricity to
nearly a third of the state.
The worst ever to strike Florida, Andrew.
Deceivingly small in size,
but incredibly powerful.
This category five k*ller
took the lives of 63 people.
And at the time, becoming
the costliest storm
in the history of hurricanes,
making landfall in the United States.
It had been more than
25 years since Floridians
suffered a direct hit
from a major hurricane.
In that time, Florida's
population exploded,
with people migrating from
the Northeast and the Midwest.
In other words,
people with no history or experience
with the state's violent
history of tropical storms.
Andrew, the first tropical storm
of the 1992 hurricane season,
would forever alter the landscape.
Natural areas of vegetation and swamps
serve to buffer some of
the effects of hurricanes.
Newly developed areas close
to the coast were wiped out.
And for those who survived,
a new sense of what it
meant to stare into the face
of an historical wrecking machine
and live to tell about it.
(bold music)
- [Stan] Would you believe
this woman just went through
hours of labor and delivered a baby.
- [Narrator] Miami, Florida.
New father, Stan Goldenberg
thinks this day will be
one of the happiest in his life.
- At 4:35 that afternoon,
we had our first daughter, Pearl.
- [Narrator] But less than 300 miles away,
mother nature gives birth
to a far more ferocious
and violent offspring.
His name is Andrew.
- As Hurricane Andrew neared The Bahamas,
he intensified to category five status
with wind speeds near 175 miles per hour,
and hit The Bahamas.
- [Narrator] After savaging the Bahamas,
at Florida's East Coast.
Andrew takes dead aim
- [Narrator] As a meteorologist,
Stan knows how dangerous hurricanes can be,
but he also knows it's too late
to move his hospitalized
wife, newborn daughter
and three sons out of harm's way.
- I could not imagine
having to deal with the storm
deal with a birth. in the middle of having
- I, like thousands of other people,
really could not comprehend
how bad this thing would be.
- [Narrator] Believing his
wife and baby are better off
at the hospital,
Stan decides to weather
the approaching storm
at home with his sons.
Assuming the location is safe,
a group of friends and
relatives has joined them.
- [Woman] Say hi.
- Hi.
- Started to be gusty outside and breezy,
and start to hear the roar.
Looks like maybe 30 miles an hour,
maybe 40 mile an hour gusts.
- [Narrator] Sweeping in from the Atlantic,
Andrew slams into the
Southeast Florida coast
and starts to decimate
everything in his reach.
(thunder rumbling)
- This hurricane was a category five storm
when it went onshore,
with sustained winds of up to
185 miles per hour.
- In some ways, Hurricane
Andrew, being so small,
only 90 miles in diameter,
was a lot like a tornado.
An EF5 tornado with wind
speeds of 200 miles per hour
is comparable in some
ways to this hurricane,
because you had a very intense circulation
right in the center, just like a tornado.
(thunder rumbling)
- [Narrator] Stan videotapes
the storms approach.
- [Stan] Yeah, the power is out,
so I don't know if you
can see anything except
maybe a few lightning flashes.
- [Narrator] Totally unaware
that what's about to happen
will change his life forever.
- It is blowing out there.
I certainly have never
seen anything like it before.
I don't know if we've hit the worst yet.
We happened to be in
a concrete block house.
If I had had any idea how much devastation
the storm would have caused,
we would have probably been out of there,
but we didn't know.
It got worse and worse
and scarier and scarier.
We lost plywood on the front window.
Then at a certain point, the eye wall hit.
(thunder rumbling)
(wind wails)
It just moved it to another dimension,
and things just started to rip apart.
We're sitting there,
and my brother-in-law
says the roof is gone.
And, the next thing
that happened is the wall
between the kitchen and
the living room fell on us.
(siren wailing)
- [Narrator] By morning,
Andrew has moved on,
leaving Miami ravaged beyond recognition.
- The most damage came
from the winds of the hurricane.
It looks just like a
series of EF5 tornadoes
went through that area.
You had trailers that were destroyed.
You had buildings that were
taking off of their foundation.
90% of the roofs in Dade
County alone were blown off.
- [Narrator] In his twisted fury,
the compact, but merciless
monster has smashed to bits
nearly everything the Goldenbergs cherish.
- [Stan] Our car, I believe
is smashed somewhat.
We are glad to be alive.
This is the wall, fell on top of us.
We were underneath here.
And this is where we crouched.
I was pinned very heavily down there.
- [Narrator] Miraculously, the Goldenbergs
and their friends all endure Andrew's wrath
without serious injury.
- We were scared. We
really thought we could die.
(tense music begins)
- Hurricane Andrew destroyed so many homes
that 180,000 people were made homeless.
And total damages in today's dollars
are approaching $50 billion.
- People who have not
been through a storm like this
cannot imagine what it's like.
- [Narrator] It's a lesson
to be remembered.
Anyone can run from mother nature,
- It was like, oh boy.
- [Narrator] But no one can hide.
Atures of the Gulf of Mexico are the fuel
that drives some of the most
catastrophic storms in the United States.
Florida's neighboring
States in the Gulf coast,
like Texas, also find
themselves in storm paths.
When hurricane Harvey
hit the Houston area in 2017,
no one expected, nor were
they prepared for the aftermath
that left the city under
four feet of water.
The crippling effects of
Harvey would be felt for days
upon days as the unrelenting wind and rain
pounded the Texas shoreline.
In late August, 2020, the same coastline
faced a rare occurrence.
Two storm systems, Marco
and Laura, struck just days apart.
Marco remained a tropical storm,
but Laura intensified to
a category four hurricane
just before it made landfall
over Western Louisiana,
as one of the most powerful
hurricanes to hit the coastline,
with a dangerous storm surge that flooded
many parts of the region.
Warm water, specifically a
stream pouring into the Gulf
and the Caribbean, called a loop current,
helped create one of
the biggest flood makers,
2005's Hurricane Katrina.
On Monday, August 29th,
the category three storm
made landfall over Louisiana,
bringing devastating storm
surges along the coast.
The city of New Orleans
was hit especially hard
as the storm breached
its massive levee system.
Katrina displaced tens
of thousands of people
who found temporary shelter
inside the New Orleans Superdome.
Hurricane Katrina was an event that altered
the face of America.
It also caused the most destructive flood
in United States history.
In the months following the disaster,
experts from both Northern
California and Louisiana
debated what had led
to the catastrophic failure
of the levees.
Some officials claimed that
the levees had been overtopped.
To investigate, a team of scientists
from Louisiana State University
went searching for new evidence as to why
the levees failed.
- The flooding of New
Orleans is a manmade disaster,
and the trigger was Katrina.
If the manmade levees hadn't failed,
Katrina would have been a
case of mopping up some water,
and that's it.
- [Narrator] New Orleans wouldn't exist
without its levee system.
The city was established in
1718 on the only high ground
adjacent to the Mississippi River.
This area became the French quarter.
- In the case of New Orleans,
we actually have a city that's in a bowl,
it's below sea level.
That is because New
Orleans was built on a swamp.
And as they drained the
swamp to allow the houses
to be developed, the swamp
soils contracted, they subsided.
And over the years,
the whole city has
subsided below sea level.
- [Narrator] The city didn't really grow
until the early 1900's,
when an engineer named Baldwin Wood
designed a complex system
of pumps and drainage canals
to keep the city dry by pumping
the water out of the marshlands.
The system is based on two key elements;
levees, which stopped
floodwaters from flowing
into the city,
and pumping stations
that pump unwanted water
out of the city.
New Orleans has some of
the largest pumping stations
in the world,
but they depend on the
canals to move the water
back into Lake Pontchartrain.
Each of these canals has a levee,
an earthen embankment
top by a concrete wall.
About 350 miles of levees
protect greater New Orleans.
The biggest threats of flooding
come from Lake Pontchartrain, to the North,
and the Gulf of Mexico,
to the East and South.
The Army Corps of Engineers was responsible
for the design and
construction of the levees.
But according to a post disaster report
prepared by the corps,
the system had a flaw.
It was only built to
withstand the storm surges
from a category three hurricane.
In August of 2005,
five hurricane, as Katrina, a category
bore down on New Orleans,
fears begin to mount that the levee system
wouldn't be able to protect the city.
- We had closed all of our floodgates,
we had inspected our levees.
And so with a storm of
this magnitude, you know,
all we could do at that point
in time was to wait and see
what was going to happen.
- [Narrator] State flood
manager, Mike Stack,
was ordered to evacuate to Baton Rouge,
about 60 miles North of New Orleans.
- Everybody's first duty, so to speak,
is to stay out of harm's way
so you can react to the situation.
It's a feeling of helplessness.
Do a lot of praying.
- [Narrator] At 6:10 am,
Monday, August 29th,
Katrina made landfall, 60
miles Southeast of New Orleans.
She had weakened to a category three,
with winds between 111
and 130 miles per hour.
- I thought the levees would
be able to withstand the storm.
I felt they were well engineered.
- [Narrator] During
the height of the storm,
all emergency workers had to take cover.
So they had no way of knowing what damage
to the levee system Katrina was causing.
- [Narrator] Hurricanes
spin counter-clockwise.
So the eastern part of
New Orleans was subjected
to the most devastating
elements of Katrina.
The 110 mile an hour
winds created a 20 foot
tsunami-like wave.
This massive storm surge
charged into New Orleans from the Gulf.
It traveled down the intercoastal waterway,
which funneled the surge
straight into the heart of the city.
- The design of the navigation
channels around New Orleans
have inadvertently created a funnel,
a system to inject the
surge right into the city.
So just imagine now the surge is building
on the East side of the city,
the winds are blowing
the surge in to this funnel.
- [Narrator] Like a b*llet
coming down the barrel
of a r*fle, the massive waves smashed
into the industrial canal.
The levees were first over
top by three feet of water,
and then scoured away.
The lower ninth ward was wiped out
by an 18-foot wave of water.
- For five blocks,
every single house was destroyed.
In essence, it looked like a tsunami wave.
Many, many homes shifted off their piles
or spewed out across the road,
motorcars totally overturned.
So that gives you an idea of how effective
this injection of the surge was.
- We're gonna try to set up that shelter.
- [Narrator] At emergency operation centers
across the city,
officials struggled to get a
handle on what was going on.
- Sometime after nine o'clock,
we began to get calls from
areas East of Parish Road,
which we all knew that we
were in for a catastrophic event
because the water was coming over
every single levee that we had.
- [Narrator] Then, the
building that Bob Turner was in
began to flood.
- The water came in and
created a whirlpool effect
in the lobby of the government complex
and just took all of the file
cabinets, all the computers,
all the desks that were
in the various offices,
swirled them around in the lobby.
- [Narrator] With communication
systems barely working,
officials were unable to get a complete
picture of the damage until 24 hours
after the storm had passed.
The first shock was the 17th Street Canal
that empties into Lake Pontchartrain.
There on the Eastern side of the canal
was 151 yard breach in the levee.
Water was rushing into
the nearby neighborhood.
Every single house was
inundated by 10 feet of water.
- We first became aware of
the levee breaches on Tuesday,
the day after landfall around noon.
At that time,
authorities were saying
that the 17th Street Canal
had failed due to overtopping,
that this was an act of God.
We had such a big storm,
such big surge that we'd
overtopped the levees,
and overtopping had
eroded the back of the system
and it had failed.
- [Narrator] Officials also discovered
two more levee failures on
the London Avenue Canal.
Water was streaming into the city,
and nobody could stop it.
80% of the city was flooding,
and it would take two
weeks for emergency crews
to plug the levees,
and then another month
to pump out the water.
But while emergency
repairs were progressing,
a storm of controversy was brewing.
There was no clear
explanation for the failure of both
the 17th Street and London Avenue levees,
which had inundated downtown New Orleans.
- I knew that there was a
potential for some of the walls
to be overtopped,
but I never thought we'd
have failures in a walls.
- [Narrator] Because they were on
the western side of the eye,
these levees were only
subjected to 70 mile per hour winds,
coupled with an 11 foot storm surge,
which engineers believe
they could easily handle.
- Unfortunately, the authorities
kept putting the spin out
that it was overtopping and, you know,
it's an act of God
and it it's not our fault.
And we started to feel,
hang on it is somebody's fault
because things shouldn't have failed.
Rina underscored the fragility
of the levee systems
that protect many cities.
- Levees are the ultimate
in engineering hubris.
These piles of dirt are
gonna hold back these floods,
which are capable of sculpting the earth,
we can't hold the water back.
All levees do is they manage it.
In Katrina's aftermath,
169 miles of the 350 miles
of levees around New Orleans
were either damaged or destroyed.
While the levees were being repaired.
The Louisiana State
University Hurricane Center
started its investigation.
The question. was this an act of God,
or engineering failure?
- This became a forensic study.
In fact, if you will,
we were looking at each of
the breaches as a crime scene
because we wanted to know
every little thing that we could.
Was it a failure because of design?
Was it a failure because
it was badly constructed?
- [Narrator] A team of
scientists and engineers
comb through the
destruction looking for clues.
Paul Kemp was one of the investigators.
- Now what we did was,
we came in with the same assumptions
that everyone else had.
That was, that the storm was so big
that the water went
over top of all the levees
and caused failures because the levees
were not built to
withstand that kind of storm.
And then when we came down,
we saw the evidence on the ground
and in the high watermarks,
that told us no.
What happened here was we had a big storm,
but it was not a storm
that should have caused this much damage.
- [Narrator] The biggest
clue as to what happened
at the 17th Street Canal
was the resting place
of the flood wall itself.
- Well, not every levee breach
leaves its own tombstones.
And these monoliths
that you see here say a lot
about how this particular failure occurred.
- [Narrator] The flood wall fell
backwards toward the canal,
which pointed investigators
to a flaw in its construction.
The 17th Street Canal was built
using an eye flood wall design.
A 17 feet into the levee. en
attached to the steel sheet.
Tadditional eight feetn
of flood protection.
Once the water got
underneath the earth and levee,
it lubricated the layers
of soil, so they separated,
then the pressure of the surge
removed the entire structure.
- The force of the water pushed the levee,
pushed the wall as one piece.
And it actually caused the ground
where we're standing here,
to start to wrinkle up and to push up.
And they call that a heave,
and some of these houses where heaved up
and moved laterally, and
they ended up on top of trees.
- [Narrator] At the London Avenue Canal,
the levees failed for an
entirely different reason.
When investigators arrived on the scene,
they were presented
with a mystery of sorts.
- Once we got here, we
were pretty shocked to find
beach sand everywhere.
And I'm a coastal scientist,
and I felt right at home.
This was a essentially the
kind of sand that we would find
on the beaches at Santa
Rosa Island in Florida.
Mounds and mounds of it everywhere.
Where did it come from?
- [Narrator] The sand came
from the foundation of the levee.
It provided an important clue as to why
the London Avenue levee failed.
- When the levee failed here,
it didn't fall over like it
did at the 17th Street,
here, the hole appeared
underneath the levee
and the levee fell into the hole.
- [Narrator] Engineers
characterize this as a blowout.
The levee was built
on a foundation of sand,
which was quickly washed
away by the rushing water,
creating a 35 foot hole
into which the levee wall fell.
The LSU team concluded
that all the levee failures
on both London Avenue and 17th Street
were caused by design errors
by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Corps had not taken
the weak soil conditions
into account when they built the levees.
They also learned that the corps was using
antiquated flood projections
from 1959 for its designs.
- As a consequence, they
design for a very weak storm.
Combine that with not
taking into account the soils,
cost cutting on the designs of the levees,
and we ended up with a
system that failed catastrophically.
- [Narrator] The LSU
team concluded that 87%
of all the water that flooded New Orleans
came from levee failures, not overtopping,
and these failures
unleashed a powerful force.
- When you look at a natural disaster
in terms of what is the most destructive,
it's invariably water.
Water's very heavy compared to air.
And as it moves, it has a lot of momentum,
has a lot of energy,
so it can knock down
buildings, motor vehicles,
scour huge holes.
In fact, it's far more
devastating than wind
or even fire.
- [Narrator] More than 160,000 homes
were destroyed by Katrina,
a testament to the devastating
destruction that happens
when a house is inundated by water.
15 years after Katrina,
many neighborhoods
are still only 90% occupied,
and many areas are still trying to recover
from the aftermath of the hurricane.
(wind rushing)
- Hurricane Katrina
really was in a lot of ways
kind of a worst case scenario
of a giant, powerful hurricane bearing down
on a very low-lying and unprepared city
with a high population.
- The National Weather
Service did a splendid job
of forecasting Hurricane Katrina,
warning people to leave well in advance.
There was plenty of knowledge out there
to anybody who wanted it.
- [Narrator] But, no amount
of knowledge or warning
can curb Mother Nature's fury.
(chopper blades whirring)
- This really is a wake-up call
for people not just in
the path of hurricanes,
but in any area where nature
threatens a natural disaster.
(whooshing)
(wind wailing)
- [Narrator] When Hurricane
Katrina rears her head
just North of Miami Beach,
Theiss is on the scene. storm chaser Mike
- Before it plowed into the Gulf Coast,
Katrina crossed the state of Florida first,
which a lot of people don't realize.
They could see how powerful it was
and I just knew that this was gonna be
a once in a generation type of storm.
(people yelling)
(wind roaring)
- [Narrator] Not everyone
shares Mike's concern.
Some Florida residents treat
the violent wind as a novelty.
- People generally
underestimate the intensity
of almost every natural disaster.
They're having parties.
They're out in their front yard
and many of them are taken by surprise.
- [Narrator] Katrina spares these men,
but kills two others
while crossing Florida,
and she's only getting started.
- Katrina exits the West coast of Florida
and then experiences very
warm Gulf of Mexico water
in the loop current.
You need at least 80 degrees to create
and maintain a hurricane.
Water temperatures in the loop current
in the Gulf of Mexico were 85 degrees plus.
That's an enormous amount of heat.
(dramatic music)
Katrina greatly intensifies
from a Category 3
to a Category 5 in under nine hours.
That's significant.
- [Mike] Well, here's
one of the outer bands.
Look at that, this is Katrina.
- [Narrator] Mike Theiss chases Katrina
to the next spot where
she will make landfall,
Gulfport, Mississippi.
People are leaving. He arrives as most
- Gulfport had the bullseye on it.
That is where the right front quadrant
was gonna come on shore,
where you're gonna find catastrophic winds,
the extreme storm surge,
and basically, total destruction.
- [Narrator] A storm
surge is one of nature's
most devastating secret weapons.
- It is well known that the
high winds of a hurricane
can cause extreme damage when it hits land.
What is perhaps not
so well known is the fact
that the storm surge can be
just as destructive near the shore.
A storm surge is largely caused
by the water in the ocean
being piled up by strong winds
ahead of the hurricane
as it approaches the shore.
There's also the low atmospheric pressure
that causes a sort of a suction effect,
lifting up the surface of the ocean
directly underneath the hurricane.
That large amount of
water surges onto the shore
as a massive flood and can
cause significant damage.
- [Narrator] 80 miles to the West,
mandatory evacuations are ordered
for New Orleans and surrounding areas.
Many people comply.
Others do not.
- Hurricanes are a way
of life in the Gulf of Mexico.
2004, Hurricane Ivan caused
New Orleans to be evacuated.
One year later, 2005, here it comes again,
the exact same scenario.
We had the warning systems,
but so many people chose to ignore them.
- [Narrator] Back in Gulfport,
Mike and fellow storm chasers
commandeer a beachfront hotel
and brace for Katrina's approach.
- Okay, right now, the
time is 7:36 Eastern time.
- [Narrator] Though the
hurricane loses strength
as it heads toward land,
Mother Nature has no
plans to loosen her death grip.
(wind howling)
(dramatic music)
The water started off just a couple feet.
One wave comes in and then the water
stays at that height.
Next wave comes in on
top of the previous wave
and it goes up a little bit higher.
The storm surges came through
and just kept coming and coming and coming.
Well, there's the Gulf
of Mexico right there
coming into our parking lot.
- [Narrator] The water
slams into the hotel,
forcing the storm
chasers to retreat inside.
(water rushing)
(waves crashing)
- The entire building was
vibrating with every crash.
(waves crashing)
(background chattering)
(intense music)
You can here glass breaking in.
You can hear tree limbs breaking.
(waves crashing)
You could actually hear the automobiles
crashing into trees. as they were
(glass shattering)
- While we were in the hotel lobby,
one of those automobiles crashed
through the front glass doors...
- [Man] We gotta get outta here, guys.
(water rushing)
Oh gosh.
- [Man] Yeah.
- [Man] Oh my god.
(wall crunching)
hallway of the lobby... and came into the
- That was our cue that it's time to go up.
Watch this door.
(door banging)
- In this area, FEMA had done flood studies
and had set 12 feet above sea level
as the maximum surge
that this area would see.
- [Mike] Second floor,
the water's comin' up the stairwell here.
It's all the way to the first floor.
(dramatic music)
- [John] In reality, the surge
was more than twice that,
28 feet in some locations.
- [Narrator] The water
rises at deadly speed,
putting Mike and his
colleagues at even greater risk.
(water whooshing)
- [Mike] It started to get into
the second floor of the building.
The entire first floor was
just getting disintegrated.
(water roaring)
(dramatic music)
- Those waves have power on their own,
but they're also carrying debris.
Between the impact of the
water and the debris it carries,
that's a huge threat to life.
(water roaring)
- At the maximum extent of the surge,
we would seE a coastline
that, in some cases,
goes inland more than 12 miles
from where it is at normal tide.
- [Narrator] Once the storm surge
marches as far as it can inland,
it does an about face and starts attacking
from the other direction.
- The area's hit first by
winds going on shore,
but as the hurricane moves,
the rotating winds that are going there
are now ones going off shore.
- As it recedes, it takes
away cars, walls, partitions.
- What was amazing to me
was how fast the water receded.
It went from being 28 feet high
to being completely gone
within about 15 minutes times.
It was almost like somebody
pulled the drain in the bathtub
and all the water just went away.
- Water gets piled up fast,
also gets blown out fast
as different parts of the hurricane
go over the one site.
- [Narrator] Though the
bottom floor is decimated,
the structure is strong
because of local building codes,
preventing the hotel from collapsing.
- Buildings built in the surge zone
have breakaway walls in the first story.
So, by having the walls breakaway,
leaving just columns in place,
the overall force on the
structure is greatly reduced,
and the structures can then survive
storm surge flooding without collapse.
- [Narrator] Outside the
hotel, the majority of Gulfport
has been washed down to its foundation.
- It was unbelievable.
All that was left was concrete slabs,
just completely clean like a clean slate.
- We had floating casino barges
as large as a city block that came on shore
and completely crushed
reinforced concrete buildings.
So we're talking about
massive amounts of water,
huge forces affecting
hundreds of square miles,
just unimaginable surge from a hurricane.
(water whooshing)
- [Narrator] Just as in Gulfport,
thousands of victims in New Orleans
face a grim new reality.
- Given the fact that most of New Orleans
is below sea level,
once the water floods in,
it just stays there until it's pumped out.
(chopper blades beating)
Several thousand people had been trapped
on rooves and attics,
on freeway overpasses.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] For those
caught in Katrina's cross hairs,
life will never be the same.
- There are still large
areas of New Orleans
that are a ghost town.
Everybody that lived
there has gone elsewhere,
and they're probably not coming back.
May be more prone to hurricane landfall,
the Northeast has
seen its share of activity,
reaching up the East coast
as far as New Hampshire,
Northern states often finding themselves
in the cross hairs, most
recently and notably,
impacted by two of the last decade's
most devastating storms,
Hurricanes Irene and Sandy.
Experts believe a Category 3 hurricane
could devastate New York City.
When this k*ller storm comes,
there will be massive power
outages and loss of life.
Debris-filled water will
flood lower Manhattan.
Fierce winds will rip apart buildings.
Prior to Hurricanes Irene and Sandy
striking the New York, New
Jersey and Connecticut area,
many in the tri-state may
have found it inconceivable
move that far North.
That a k*ller storm could
Bplagued the Northeaste
for hundreds of years.
- The great colonial
hurricane occurred in 1635
and was a complete
surprise to the English settlers
who had never seen a hurricane before.
Damage was reported in
the Providence plantations
and the Plymouth colony and in
the Massachusetts Bay colony.
- [Narrator] Major hurricanes also hit
New York and New England in the 1900s,
but the storm that struck Long Island
on September 21st, 1938, would define
the destructive potential of
a New York City hurricane.
(dramatic music)
A hurricane nicknamed
the Long Island Express
rammed into the South shore of Long Island
at 2:30 in the afternoon.
Within hours, over 700 people were dead.
More than 50,000 people were left homeless.
The storm of '38 is one of
the worst storms of the century,
an event almost forgotten today.
- It had sustained winds of
around 120 miles an hour,
with gusts to over 150 miles an hour.
- [Broadcaster] With 48
states, as the scene of...
- [Narrator] In 1938, meteorology
was a much more primitive science.
There was no Doppler radar.
The only protection against these storms
was individual storm trackers
watching the sky and sea.
Headed towards Miami,
butin Jacksonville, Floridackers
had started to veer North.
The churning wall of water and wind
reached Cape Hatteras,
North Carolina, a day later.
A high pressure system off the coast
and one along the
Alleghenies created a chute
for the storm to fly up the shoreline.
One of the factors
surrounding the surprise attack
of the storm was the lack
of eyewitness data and information.
One of the largest
hurricanes in recorded history
was moving up the coast and
nobody knew it was coming.
In 1938, meteorologists believed that the
colder water temperatures
of the North Atlantic
were incompatible with the energy needed
to produce a hurricane.
- A common fallacy in
thinking about hurricanes
in the North is that the cold water
North of the Gulf stream protects us.
It all depends on how fast
the hurricane is moving forward.
If a hurricane is moving
forward 35 miles an hour or more,
as it leaves the Gulf stream,
it's like a car out of control
and it's going to hit New
York and Long Island
with undiminished force.
- [Narrator] Richard Hendrickson was
18 years old in '38.
A native Long Islander,
he was a weather observer
for the US Weather
Bureau as well as working
on his father's farm.
- I woke up that morning
and did the morning chores
chicks and so forth.
- [Narrator] At 2:30 in the afternoon,
the storm hit Long Island.
Forward speed was 60 miles an hour
with sustained wind of 120 miles per hour
and gusts over 150.
- The worst conditions were over
the Eastern part of Long Island.
The Hamptons saw surges
between 15 and 20 feet of water
come in over the dunes and just envelop
many of the towns on the East end.
Few people actually saw the wall of surge
coming toward them and managed to live.
- [Narrator] Water
filled with deadly debris
pummeled dunes and buildings.
Onlookers tried to flee to higher ground
ahead of the roaring storm.
- It covered a tremendous
area of Long Island,
which is another devastating characteristic
of Northern hurricanes.
They expand and they move
faster as they come North.
- [Narrator] Each square yard of sea water
carried the deadly weight of 1,700 pounds
as the surge hammered to
pieces massive summer homes.
(eerie music)
(camera shutter clicking)
- They took the sand
dunes and the beach right out
and made an opening between
Shinnecock Bay and the Atlantic Ocean,
and I went down to check the buildings.
We had 25 buildings in six acres
and all the buildings were smashed.
- [Narrator] The howling storm charged
across Long Island Sound and smacked
Connecticut and Rhode Island in the face.
At rush hour, the storm crashed
into downtown Providence, Rhode Island,
then a city of 250,000.
One witness described the surge
pushing water from the bay into downtown
was as if someone had
turned on a giant water faucet.
People were clinging to lamp posts.
They drowned in their cars.
Plate glass windows of
department stores popped out.
Sofas and washing machines floated by
with people riding them like lifeboats.
A sporting goods store pushed its inventory
of small row boats out
the second story window.
Within hours, the same hurricane
also wreaked havoc in
Massachusetts and Vermont.
- Because it was so
fast-moving and so large
affected thousands of square miles
and it downed over 2 billion trees
and affected lots of properties,
all the way up inland into
Wooster, Massachusetts.
Every single property on Long Island
had some damage from this storm.
There was low level wind damage
all the way up into Canada.
Over 60,000 people were left homeless
from the 1938 hurricane.
- [Narrator] The widespread devastation
is vividly captured in this
extremely rare 1938 color film.
Almost 700 people were k*lled.
Thousands were injured.
Nearly forgotten over 80 years later,
it is still one of the largest hurricanes
to strike the United States,
but despite the devastation
this hurricane caused the Northeast,
this storm did have a positive impact
on the economy during the Great Depression.
- At that time, you could
get anybody to work
for two dollars a day.
People had to have their doors fixed,
their chimney rebuilt, the trees out.
I like to say that that was
the end of the Depression.
- [Narrator] In the decades
since this natural disaster,
there has been tremendous development
along the East coast.
In 1938, there were
less than 750,000 people
living on Long Island.
Today, there are close to
eight million people living there.
Fortunately, technology
has advanced since 1938,
and meteorologists use
devices to track storms
and their severity and alert the public
if they need to evacuate.
When 2011's Hurricane Irene
and 2012's Hurricane Sandy
barreled up the East coast,
the public was given advanced notice
that allowed for preemptive measures
and evacuations that saved lives.
Never believed a storm like Katrina
could ever hit their city.
Then came Sandy in 2012,
the biggest hurricane
ever to form in the Atlantic.
Measuring some 900 miles wide,
the unrelenting rain, the ferocious wind
and the flooding storm surge
serves a reminder that no area
on the US-Atlantic seaboard
is immune to hurricanes.
The Northeast saw a
glimpse of that destruction
just one year earlier in the form
of Tropical Storm Irene.
Irene's damage, the costliest
until Superstorm Sandy.
Before these storms, we'd
have to go back decades
to find one this strong
to batter the Northeast,
but wind, rain and flooding
are nothing new to the Big Apple.
In fact, New York has
a long history of storms.
In 1985, New York experienced
its closest call to date
with Hurricane Gloria.
- [Police] We are requesting area residents
to volentarily evacuate
- Gloria was a Category 3 storm
that started in the Carolinas
and moved North through New Jersey,
causing massive flooding.
Meteorologists and
emergency management experts
warned New York to prepare for the worst,
but the worst never came.
- We were watching the
storm very closely on the radar,
and we watched the whole
back part of Gloria fall apart.
- [Narrator] Hurricane Gloria broke up
as it passed over the cold Northern waters.
By the time it reached New York,
most of the winds had
decreased to Category 1.
There was a small swath of 15 to 20 miles
over Suffolk County that did see
sustained Category 2 type winds.
- It was very easy to
survive Hurricane Gloria,
and yet, parts of Long Island
lost power for seven days.
- [Narrator] Despite $900 million in damage
and destruction as far
South as North Carolina,
New York City had
dodged a b*llet this time.
- Go back to 1999 and we looked at Floyd
as it was coming up the coast.
As it came off of the Virginia capes,
it was no longer a hurricane.
We breathed a sign of relief
'cause that was pretty damn close to us.
Isabel, 2003, another one,
it hit down in the Carolinas,
but slowly made that Northwest turn
and we had damage all the
way up into Southern Jersey.
A couple o' hundred miles to the North,
that same type of storm,
that would've affected
significantly New York City.
- [Narrator] Statistics and weather data
indicate the next big storm
could be less forgiving.
To begin with, both the
Gulf and the Atlantic basin
have seen fluctuations
in water temperature.
- We're in the multi-decadal cycle
of warm surface
temperatures of the Atlantic.
We can go back to about 1870
and we see a cycle
of, every 25 to 30 years,
we go through temperatures
which are warmer than normal
for about 25 to 30 years,
and then colder than normal.
- [Narrator] These warmer/colder
and wetter/dryer cycles
may have been exacerbated
by global warming.
- Because of global warming,
because of our rising sea
level, our warmer ocean waters,
ito say the near future, e
a severe hurricane. e
- [Narrator] But, it is
not just the frequency
of these hurricanes during
the current warm period
that is causing concern.
There has also been tremendous construction
along the coast during
the last cold water period.
- We went through a period from the mid-60s
to the mid-90s, where the Atlantic Basin
was a little bit below normal
as far as water temperature goes.
- Now that's when the coast was developed
and people didn't have
the hurricane experience.
- [Narrator] Tremendous coastal buildup,
a complacent population,
increasing hurricane activity,
a deadly mix for the East coast,
but it is only in the last 20 years
that a scientist's best guess
was that the Northeast only experienced
these larger hurricanes
every 150 years or so.
That means the city would not be due
for a major storm until around 2075,
but even with recurring hurricanes
battering the Northeast,
scientists believed that the East coast
only experienced devastating hurricanes
every 150 years or so.
However, evidence found
on a New York City beach
challenged that hypothesis.
- We're in the Arverne section of Rockaway,
part of New York's public beach system,
and not many New Yorkers know
that after the Civil
w*r, out there 1000 feet
was a resort island called Hog Island,
and it had causeways and playhouses
and saloons and restaurants.
- [Narrator] The area just off shore
was dredged after a series of winter storms
in the early 1990s.
The sand was dumped on this
beach in Rockaway, Brooklyn.
- Here's a brick, a remnant of a brick.
- [Narrator] In 1995, Professor Nick Coch
and his geology students were collecting
sand and stone along this shoreline.
What they found would
change both the history
and the future of hurricane
prediction in New York.
- My students and I, after
the ocean was dredged,
found this material,
artifacts on the beach,
and in the process of dating it,
we rediscovered the great 1893 hurricane
that devastated the shoreline of New York.
- [Narrator] Dr. Coch's students were able
to cross reference the items
they found on the beach,
and determine a period in the early 1890s,
when it was possible that
all these different artifacts
could have been in the same location.
- The 1893 storm was forgotten,
but it's very clear in the New York Times,
all six columns of the front page
talk about the extreme devastation
that occurred on the New York shoreline.
- [Narrator] Hog Island
was completely destroyed
by the 1893 hurricane.
- That go anything, it's
a thick piece of glass...
- [Narrator] With the rediscovery of
this Category 2 storm,
Professor Coch now understood
that New York area storms
were much more frequent
than previously believed.
- We began to narrow
the recurrence interval
of a major storm on the New York shoreline
to something more like 75 to 90 years,
from 125 to 150 years.
- [Narrator] The near misses in New York
were getting closer and New York
had been lucky for many years.
- [Narrator] In 2011, New
York city would experience
the destructive nature of powerful storms.
When hurricane Irene hit the big apple,
it's brutal path was marked
with several landfalls,
starting with the Bahamas
and gaining strength
to become a category three,
traveling across the
Caribbean before making landfall
on the mainland in North Carolina.
Irene would weaken
every time it touched land.
By the time it made its
ninth and final landfall,
it had dropped in strength
enough to be downgraded
to a tropical storm.
Still, the effects were
enormous and widespread.
On Long Island alone,
the storm knocked out power to
350,000 homes and businesses.
In New York city, the Hudson
river overflowed its banks.
In New York, 10 people
died mostly due to flooding.
Irene's devastation led the
World Meteorological Association
to retire the name forever.
Irene is one of 100 names never to be used
for an Atlantic hurricane.
No one could predict what
would happen just one year later.
Another monster storm
would find its way once again
to New York's doorstep,
and this time the big apple
would be brought to its knees.
Despite Sandy hitting Cuba
as a major category three hurricane
and despite its mammoth size,
it had weakened to a category one status
by the time it made landfall
near Atlantic city on October 29th,
and made the short
trip up to New York city.
But Sandy's weakened state
had all the meteorological
ingredients in place
to become a crippling storm
for the millions that call
the Tristate area home.
First, unusually warm
sea surface temperatures
kept this storm primed with fuel,
and preventing it from doing
what most of these storms do
when they hit cold water, weaken.
Second, there was an
unusual dip in the jet stream,
those high altitude winds
that helped guide hurricanes,
that brought Sandy right into the coast
instead of out to sea.
Third, Sandy hit at
the worst possible time,
at a lunar high tide.
That tidal tug from a full moon
may have added a foot
of water to the storm surge,
which hit right at high
tide on the Atlantic coast.
Buildings in New York's most
flood-prone neighborhoods
were evacuated.
Still the wall of water that hit Manhattan
was like no other.
The storm surge measured nearly 14 feet
at New York's Battery Park,
easily swamping Subways,
car tunnels, and the
city's electrical grid.
Transportation in America's
largest city had come to a halt.
All along the East Coast,
airports were forced
to cancel 19,000 flights.
Amtrak canceled its service
on the Northeast corridor for days.
Gas stations were forced to
shut down because of shortages.
And even if you could drive around,
all the down trees and
power lines made it hazardous.
Sandy would even cancel Halloween
and the New York City Marathon.
It would be days before
the incredible destruction
from Sandy would be fully evident.
Entire beach communities gone
along with their boardwalks
and amusement piers.
Millions would stay in the dark
for days, some even weeks.
The intense wind and
catastrophic flooding from Sandy
k*lled 149 people.
But from the survivors stories
come valuable information
that could keep more people alive
in the face of future storms.
But hearing the stories
and heeding the warnings from survivors
may save those in the path
of the next deadly storm.
(intense music)
Toms River, New Jersey.
Mike is alone at his
grandparents' house by the Bay,
he decides to ride out the storm at home
but has a change of heart.
- The whole first floor was flooded.
I still had the second floor,
I was still roaming around,
I knew that I had to keep myself calm.
- [Narrator] Alone in the house,
Mike has a change of heart.
- I though maybe I should get out of here.
I mean, I have a better
chance of swimming out there
than if this house collapsed on me.
When I went out the front door,
I didn't realize that the water
was eight feet in the streets,
and it kind of sucked me out.
- [Narrator] Battling the current,
Mike grabs hold of his car.
- I'm hanging onto my
windshield wiper on my car,
I can't hold on too much longer.
Before you knew it, the
windshield wiper broke
and I got sucked out into the Bay.
The current was so strong.
The more I tried to swim towards land,
the more I got knocked out into the Bay.
The waves are crashing over your head,
you're panicking, you're
crying, you're screaming for help,
and there's nobody out there to help you.
The water was so cold,
all I remember was
swimming with the current,
trying to get anywhere.
And this one wave
just put me into this white
pillar of somebody's house.
And I just held onto it as long as I can.
It's a life and death situation
I need to break into this lady's house.
I'm driving this brick
into this lady's door,
and I had no strength,
it had to take me at least 20 to 25 times
even to break the door.
Their basement was all flooded
and their first floor
wasn't flooded at all.
When I went in there, I'm crawling around,
first thing I do is take my clothes off
and I saw this white blanket on this couch
and I wrapped myself around it.
My pulse was slow, my
vision was going in and out,
I was so clumsy, I was
bunging into everything.
I knew I had hypothermia at the time.
I was freezing, I was
never this cold in my life.
I'm trying to feel around
for any clothes in the house,
I got a pair of jeans, a black jacket,
and I put everything on me at once,
and I just curled up in a ball.
A half hour later, my
body wasn't warming up,
I was so tired, I thought if
I took a nap on the couch
that I wouldn't wake up.
- [Narrator] Mike passes out,
but a loud alarm awakens
him 10 hours later.
- I went upstairs and saw
this carbon monoxide detector.
And, you know, I said to myself,
there's no way I'm dying like this.
You can't smell carbon monoxide.
I went on the top balcony
and I keep on hearing this
wave runner motor, jet ski.
And I'm screaming, "Help,
could somebody help me,
could somebody help me."
I don't know how I made it, but I made it.
I didn't give up.
(dramatic music)
,
But the West Coast experience
is another kind of storm
that is just as devastating.
- The pineapple express
is the weather system
that can create some of the
worst flooding in California.
- [Narrator] The pineapple
express is a super storm,
a series of rain storms that
only happens during the winter.
It's a weather system that
stretches thousands of miles
out into the Pacific ocean
lasting seven to 10 days.
- Once the flooding starts,
the last thing you want is more rain.
Then in the pineapple express
that's exactly what you're going to get
because you have this
very long fetch of moisture
that is still aimed at California,
and so you're still going to get
more waves coming through.
- [Narrator] To make matters worse,
the storm picks up warm
moisture from the Hawaiian islands,
which it dumps on the
Sierra Nevada mountain range
only 75 miles East of Sacramento.
The warm rain can melt the snowpack,
sending up to 16 million
tons of water into Sacramento.
- It's a double whammy.
You get a warm, intense storm
and catastrophic melting of the snow.
- [Narrator] This is a serious threat
to a city like Sacramento, California.
The downtown area is next to the confluence
of two major rivers, the
Sacramento and the American.
Both of these rivers are fed
by the Sierra Nevada snowpack.
To control the water coming
down the American river,
the State of California built Folsom dam.
The nine mile long earthen
dam with a concrete spillway
holds about 10,000 surface acres of water
and protects a million
people who live downstream.
When the dam was completed in 1955,
state water experts predicted
it would take a year of storms
to fill the reservoir.
Seven months later,
a storm came through and
filled it within two weeks.
The dam was designed so
that during a monster storm
its large capacity could
hold back floodwaters
and protect the Sacramento levee system.
In recent years,
experts have found
some flaws in the design.
- The dam, when it was designed,
really wasn't designed
as a flood control structure.
That is you can't do emergency
releases from this dam
until it's practically full.
If you know a storm is coming,
you can't rapidly empty this dam
because they never designed it that way.
- [Narrator] Experts are also worried
that the dam isn't big enough
to control the mega storms
that could roll in on the Pacific ocean.
(water gushing)
Jeffrey Mount and his colleagues
at the University of California at Davis
are attempting to come up
with a more realistic flood model.
(fast-paced music)
- Sacramento's history
of a flood management
is a classic case of using
the past to predict the future
and getting it wrong.
(rumbling)
(jack hammer poping)
When they built Folsom dam in the 1950s,
their understanding of the
hydrology of that system
was relatively short.
They really hadn't been paying attention
but for about 50 years,
and in that 50 years it had been kind of a,
what I'd call a kinder, gentler climate
with not big floods, not big droughts.
We had a series of floods
in modest size before 1950
and everybody who assumed
the hydrology would be the same,
but right afterwards, starting in 1955,
in the '70s there were several floods,
of course there was a big flood in 1986
and then a whopper in 1997.
So the climate in the
second half of the 20th century
has almost nothing to do
with the climate in the first half.
Regrettably, we designed
our flood control system
based on that first
half of the 20th century.
- [Narrator] Adding to this thread,
global warming maybe
increasing ocean temperatures
causing bigger and more
powerful storms in the future.
Based on this flood data,
scientists fear the
reservoir behind Folsom dam
isn't big enough to handle
such a high volume of water.
Engineers are addressing this concern.
The State of California is
raising the dam by several feet
to increase its capacity,
breaking ground in early 2020.
(thunder rumbling) (water rushing)
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Amazingly,
the design and construction
of levees in and around the Sacramento area
hasn't changed much
since the original construction
over 160 years ago.
- We've improved the technology of levees,
but it's still an antique design.
I mean, you basically
are putting a big pile of dirt.
There's a large mass out
there that holds the water back.
- [Narrator] Like New Orleans,
Sacramento has a history
of devastating floods.
The city was founded
during the California gold rush.
It began to grow next to the
confluence of the Sacramento
and the American rivers.
These rivers were key to economic success,
but they also brought devastating floods
during the springtime snow melts in 1850,
'51, '52, and '53.
In the aftermath,
the local government took
its first steps of flood control.
- The city took the unusual step
of filling in the streets in
the center of Sacramento
so that what was previously the basement
became the first floor.
- [Narrator] Even with the
city buildings raised 10 feet,
they kept flooding.
- Sacramento has got a
long history of flooding.
The legislature in the 1800s
would commonly after row boats to work.
- [Narrator] To control the flooding,
the city began to build levees,
but it wasn't a coordinated effort.
(helicopter blades chopping)
- These levees, many of
them began over 100 years ago.
They were originally built by farmers
and then later enlarged
and incorporated in the state
federal flood control system.
At the time they were built,
they basically dredged
the materials from the river,
muck, sands, whatever that what was there,
plopped them on the bank, shaped them up,
and that became the levee that we have now.
It used materials and techniques
that we would reject
today as being inadequate.
- [Narrator] Then in 1917,
the Army Corps of engineers,
the same group that built
the New Orleans levees,
began rebuilding and expanding
the Sacramento levee system.
It covered approximately 1100 miles.
At the time they started, 90%
of the levees that exist today
were already in place.
So most of their work involved repair
and reduction of flood risk.
City officials know
that they are facing a dangerous situation.
The levees are subject to constant erosion
in everyday wear and tear.
As fast as they can
repair one section of levee,
another erosion appears.
- If you have an area which is surrounded
by 20 or 30 miles of levees,
it just takes one, one weak link,
one beaver hole or one
squirrel, one tree that falls in,
the whole thing fails when one part fails.
- [Narrator] Officials have
discovered hundreds of locations
where there is severe erosion
and degradation of the levees.
(fast-paced music)
The most disconcerting
thing about this levee
is the type of material
used in its construction.
The portion of the London
Avenue levee in New Orleans
that failed, also was built on top of sand,
which was washed away by floodwaters
and led to its collapse.
- This sandy material
here that's eroding away
is actually eroding the base of the levee.
The water is literally washing away
the foundation of the levee.
And if this continues to
happen the levee will collapse.
- [Narrator] The Sacramento doesn't get
the deadly high velocity winds
that occur during a hurricane,
so emergency crews can be on the job 24/7
fighting to keep the levees intact.
- The job of these flood fighters
is to identify a problem with the levee
and then to attack that problem.
- [Narrator] The city also has helicopters
equipped with infra-red cameras
that can inspect each and
every levee from the air.
Any underground leakage
invisible to the naked eye
will show up on the heat seeking camera.
- We're not going to take the attitude,
well the levees' gonna
fail, so, we'll just let it fail.
We're going to attack that problem.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] With the
lessons of hurricane Katrina
still resonating in the public mind,
the city and state government in Sacramento
are actively taking measures
to avoid a similar fate to New Orleans.
r
That feeds the so-called pineapple express
gets its origins from the
warm waters adjacent
to the Hawaiian Islands.
Those waters while
feeding the flooding rains
of the West coast are also fertile ground
for some of the worst
hurricanes of the Pacific.
Hurricane Iniki is by
far the worst storm ever
to hit Hawaii.
It struck the Island of
Kauai in September, 1992,
just 18 days after Andrew
ripped through Southern Florida.
Strong waves of up to 35 feet
crashed the shoreline for hours.
Because it moved so quickly,
flooding rains were not a problem,
but its fierce winds
caused billions in damage
making it Hawaii is costliest storm.
(wooshing)
- [Narrator] Hurricane Iniki,
a devastating category four hurricane,
packing wind gusts up to 200 miles an hour
is bearing down on the
Hawaiian Island of Kauai,
and destroying everything in its path.
(people screaming)
Roofs blow through
neighborhoods like tumbleweeds.
- [Woman 1] Oh my God!
- [Woman 2] The neighbor's
roof is now blowing off their house.
- [Narrator] Palm trees
are snapped like toothpicks.
Even a two story concrete
steeple crumbles to the ground.
50,000 terrified residents
on the Island hunker down,
hoping to ride out the massive storm,
including Tony Wichman, his
wife, and three young children.
They're hold up in the family's
120 year old beloved home,
terrified they won't make it out alive.
- [Man] Whoa, our roof is going.
- [Narrator] By day's end,
hurricane Iniki will become
the most devastating
and deadly hurricane in Hawaiian history.
(dramatic music)
- Hawaii just doesn't
see a lot of hurricanes.
- [Narrator] Chief
Meteorologist, Mark Jackson,
says Hawaii sees only about
three hurricanes every 15 years.
So when forecasters first spot Iniki,
it's a tropical storm
off the coast of Africa,
11,000 miles away from Kauai.
They don't see it as a
threat to the tropical paradise,
but as the system travels over the Atlantic
through central America,
and across the unseasonably
warm waters of the Pacific,
the winds converge and form the walls
of the enormous cyclonic storm.
- It's very rare for a
hurricane of that magnitude
to make it that far North
in the central Pacific.
- [Woman] Oh no!
- [Narrator] By early morning
on September 11th, 1992,
Iniki, Hawaiian for sharp and piercing wind
makes a beeline straight for Kauai
and grows to a terrifying category four.
- [Woman] Oh my God!
- It'll tear roofs off at that speed,
it will totally destroy mobile homes,
waves of upward, you know,
50 to 100 feet in the open ocean.
- [Narrator] But getting
50,000 people off an Island
within a few hours, proves impossible.
Most residents have no
choice, but to stay put and pray.
- I'd never seen anything
like it before in my life.
(woman screams)
- Oh my gosh (laughs).
- [Narrator] News cameraman Sisto Domingo
had no idea he was recording
one of Hawaii's darkest days.
- There were cars that
looked like Tonka toys
that were just piled on top of each other.
It was just amazing to
me, the power of Iniki.
There were trees flying
in the middle of the road,
people were taping up their windows.
- [Narrator] And then
at 3:15 in the afternoon,
hurricane Iniki makes
landfall with a vengeance.
- [Man] There it goes.
- [Woman] Oh my God!
- [Narrator] Tony Wichman, his wife,
and three young children
are trapped inside their home
that's been in the family
for three generations.
(intense music)
- [Man] Honey, this whole
house is going to go down.
Look at the roof already.
- [Man 2] Just grab
things and walk right now.
I'm gonna grab the TV over there.
- [Narrator] 145 mile
an hour sustained winds
batter the Wichman's
one-story wood plantation home,
four by six tin panels peel off the roof
like layers of an onion.
- [Narrator] Tony's laughing
to keep his kids from panicking,
(Tony laughs)
but he knows his family is in real danger.
All that's protecting them
is what's left of the roof,
and six inches of drywall
covering the false ceiling.
- [Tony] The whole sheets are gone already.
- [Narrator] Fearing his
family will be crushed
by their own home, Tony
sends his wife and kids
to huddle in the bathroom
of a newly built bedroom
located on the side of the house
that's shielded from the piercing wind.
Suddenly a 200 mile an
hour gust hits the house.
The walls begin to tremble,
as seams began to shake.
And then the inevitable happens.
(wall crumbling)
- I turned around and that beam
just came right in front of me
and slammed the door on me,
and I barely got out of there.
- [Narrator] Tony's life
is speared by just inches.
- I cried in that moment.
Yeah, I didn't believe it.
- [Narrator] A beam identical to this one
is actually what saves Tony.
When the ceiling begins to buckle,
the second beam directly
above his head holds
supporting just enough the ceiling
to allow Tony to escape without injury.
Now, all thoughts go to
Lorraine and the children
still huddled in the bathroom.
- I was very fearful for
my family at that point.
I knew that this whole
house was not gonna make it.
- [Narrator] To his relief, they're shaken,
but very much alive.
- We would hunker down
for about an hour and a half
before the wind died.
(laughs)
I felt a great sense
of relief at that point
that none of us were hurt.
After we felt brave enough to go outside,
we looked at what was left of the house,
I mean, the walls had all caved in,
the roof was definitely gone.
- Everything was leveled to ground zero,
and it blew those walls that had come down,
it blew those into three
or four neighborhoods.
There was debris from miles,
miles away that we picked up.
- [Narrator] But what had stayed intact
was that little bathroom.
- I know we had that one safe haven,
which was the smaller bathroom that we had.
That was the safest part of the house.
It's very miraculous that we survived
this category four hurricane,
because we had everything going against us.
We didn't have enough plywood,
we weren't prepared with
enough tape on the windows,
we're living in an older home.
Yeah, I mean, we're
lucky to be here, very lucky.
- [Narrator] When the
winds finally died down,
Iniki's path of destruction
proved devastating.
14,000 homes were destroyed,
30,000 people were homeless,
and six lives were lost.
It takes the Wichman
family seven years to recover,
but at least they have their lives.
- I'm definitely a lucky guy.
I have a guardian angel, no doubt about it.
- I definitely don't
wish this upon anybody,
and I don't want another
one to hit Kauai, not ever.
- [Narrator] But as
climate change increases,
storm threats are expected
to intensify, not diminish
on both coasts of the United States.
And the Pacific ocean can
be just as active as the Atlantic,
unstable and angry as the Atlantic
when it comes to the production
of high powered tropical cyclones.
In fact, what's known as
the Northwest Pacific Basin
is the most active place on the planet
when it comes to these storms
called typhoons in this part of the world.
Asian nations like the
Philippines, Japan, and China,
receive the brunt of these k*ller cyclones.
Many of them bigger and
stronger than hurricanes
due to the warmer waters of the Pacific.
Hurricanes are the most
fearsome weather on earth.
Monster storms batter coastlines
with wicked winds and storm
surges that bury entire towns.
Countless fortunes are
lost when hurricane strike
and more importantly, lives are stolen
when warnings aren't heeded.
The great irony of these disasters,
without tropical cyclones and hurricanes,
the world, as we know it would end.
They act as nature's thermostat,
transferring heat and
regulating the climate.
Hurricanes bust droughts
and enhance ecological life
and the creation of new
coral reefs and sandbars
to aid in bird migration.
Welcome to our World! Where we serve you cookies to ensure you get the best viewing experience on our site.
Did you know that you can remove censorship board-wide, use our advanced search functions, be notified when new content is posted, join our memberships, set episodes to show in any order you want & more if you are logged into your account?
Register or sign in here: ucp.php?mode=register
Did you know that you can remove censorship board-wide, use our advanced search functions, be notified when new content is posted, join our memberships, set episodes to show in any order you want & more if you are logged into your account?
Register or sign in here: ucp.php?mode=register
01x04 - Hurricanes: Storms of Destruction
Watch/Buy Amazon
Earth, air, water and fire are essential elements in life. But what happens when these natural elements turn on humanity?
Earth, air, water and fire are essential elements in life. But what happens when these natural elements turn on humanity?