how government saved lives in moore, oklahoma

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/how-the-government-saved-lives-in-moore-oklahoma.html



Moore, Oklahoma, is not unfamiliar with tornadoes: it gets hit by one about once every five years. But the one that touched down there on Monday seemed especially cruel. The storm laid waste to nearly everything in its seventeen-mile path, destroying thirteen thousand homes, causing approximately two billion dollars in property damage, injuring two hundred and thirty-seven people and killing twenty-four, including nine children, so far. Powerful as it was, this week’s tornado pales in comparison to the one that hit Moore fourteen years ago, which tore up thirty-eight miles of land and killed thirty-six people, and to the one that hit Joplin, Missouri, in 2011, which left behind three billion dollars in damage and a hundred and sixty fatalities. The rebuilding effort in Oklahoma is already under way, but everyone in the state knows that more devastating twisters are coming, perhaps soon.

Just as coastal towns and delta cities are beginning to adapt to the “new norm” of recurrent extreme weather, states and towns in the vast Tornado Alley (which stretches from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians) need to improve their preparedness for dangerous winds and thunderstorms. The tragic deaths of the seven children who drowned in the basement at the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore suggests that, at a minimum, all schools and public office buildings should have secure shelters. Today, about a hundred schools in Oklahoma have safe rooms that were built with federal funds, but the Wall Street Journal reports that the program’s budget zeroed out long before the vast majority of the state’s schools, including Plaza Towers Elementary, could install one.

The United States invests far more in disaster recovery than in preparing for disasters by designing and creating more resilient buildings and infrastructure. As a consequence, we are trapped in a cycle of repeatedly rebuilding shoddy systems in predictably dangerous places. The most recent Federal Emergency Management Agency budget dedicates about six billion dollars to disaster relief and three billion dollars to preparedness projects. But those numbers dramatically understate federal spending on extreme events. In April, the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank, reported that the federal government spent a hundred and thirty-six billion dollars in disaster relief between fiscal years 2011 and 2013, roughly four hundred dollars per household. If the U.S. continues simply to rebuild, rather than building in anticipation of the punishing weather that’s coming, communities everywhere will remain vulnerable, and the government will keep spending billions more than it has to.

This is not to say that the federal government has done nothing to prepare for natural disasters like tornadoes. This year, the U.S. finished upgrading its network of weather-forecasting technologies and its emergency-communications programs, meaning the National Weather Service (N.W.S.) can issue more accurate and timely emergency alerts. Many commentators have remarked that, given the physical devastation caused by the tornado, the death toll in Oklahoma seems remarkably low. “They’re right,” said Heidi Cullen, formerly of the Weather Channel and now the chief climatologist at Climate Central. “And I think one big reason for that is the government’s investment in Doppler radars with dual-polarization, which allow us to detect dangerous storm systems more quickly and precisely than before. We’re also much better at forecasting these events long in advance, up to about a week, because decades of investment in weather research and improved technological systems have given us better, higher resolution models.” In 1990, the average warning time for a tornado alert was about five minutes; the N.W.S. was able to issue an emergency alert about sixteen minutes before the storm touched down in Moore. “That’s obviously not sufficient, since we still had loss of life,” Cullen said, “but every second saves lives, and it’s an incredible advance. Now the challenge is to make sure that people get the message, and heed it.”