A Few Comments about the new book “Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy” The second anniversary of Hurricane Sandy has brought us “Superstorm” by accomplished author and former professor of environmental writing, Kathryn Miles. It’s a great story, though aspiring meteorologists beware. When the science gets run through the keep-it-simple machine, at times the wind blows the wrong way. Still, Miles got the essence of the event right, in a way that few books about hurricanes do. Most often the wind and the water, the damage, and the heartbreak are the story. And this book has plenty of that, but there’s another layer here. The fabric of this story is the myriad of critical, heart-pounding, and life-altering decisions that people made – in and out of government – with less-than-perfect tools or information. In every storm, thousands or millions of people are faced with go or no-go choices. I don’t remember a book that so well captures the real-life challenges that people face, and the wing-and-a-prayer way that most decisions get made. There is little or no time for reflection. There is most often no previously devised plan to consult. People mostly just go with their gut for reasons that, in hindsight, often seem irrational. But, that’s the way it really is. “Superstorm” hits just the right note. But, the story goes a bit off key in few spots, and the National Weather Service isn’t happy about it. Miles apparently had extra-ordinary access to personnel at the National Hurricane Center and at local forecast offices in New Jersey and New York, and the story that is woven from those interviews is a reasonably accurate representation of the mechanics of their work during the storm, as I imagine it occurred. Who did what when, and what they were thinking, etc. ring true. To somebody who knows many of those people like I do, it was easy to tell when the narrative went a bit off kilter because the comments were slightly out of context or twisted a bit for effect. But, all in all, it was about right. Where the story feels wrong is the narrative that the storm somehow baffled the forecasters so much that they threw up their hands in amazement, paralyzed by the unknown. The apparent meteorological befuddlement was dramatic over-reach. In fact, the meteorology of the storm was extremely well understood and forecast. We knew well in advance that it was going to be a huge, hybrid storm with far-reaching consequences. The challenge was how to communicate the threat because the storm didn’t fit nicely into the existing National Hurricane Center watch/warning structure. With so many people, governments, and institutions with different problems, interests, and biases invested in a system that doesn’t lend itself to being modified on the fly, there was no easy path out. Still, even with that, I think the National Weather Service is reading it wrong. The big picture is that the agency comes off as an underfunded and understaffed organization of extraordinarily dedicated professionals. There is certainly ineptness and dysfunction chronicled in the story, but it’s Congress that comes off inept. That rings true, of course, since the same nonfeasance applies to the maintenance of our roads and bridges, the FAA, and countless other government responsibilities abdicated by our elected representatives. A hero of the storm and the story is Gary Szatkowski, the meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service office in Mt. Holly, NJ. He took extraordinary measures to convey the threat to Governor Christie and people in his area of responsibility, when it seemed that the message was not getting out. A question that Miles does not ask or answer is why those measures are not baked into the system for communicating extreme threats to eliminate the angst and limb-walking that Szatkowski and others endured in order to do the right thing. But, that’s for another book. I play a small role in the book. Miles reprints a good part of the blog I wrote that frustrating Saturday night after Mayor Bloomberg announced he was not ordering evacuations for a set of odd, convoluted, unfounded reasons (see the realities of crisis decision-making above) and the National Hurricane Center announced they were not putting up a hurricane watch for the northeast coast. I thought the world had gone mad, but looking at it now, the blog was unnecessarily snarky. I’m sorry about that because the folks at the NHC felt like I didn’t have their back at a difficult time. When, in fact, the whole situation was simply incomprehensible. Normally extremely capable people were doing things that didn’t seem to fit reality, and providing only the thinnest of rationales. There were far more questions than answers at a time when answerless questions were the enemy, and people like me had to conjure up explanations when all of our energy should have been concentrated on communicating the treat from the storm, not the mechanics of the alerting process. In the end, the snarky blogs might have helped nudge the people in New York, but it was Dr. Rick Knabb and Jaime Rhome at the National Hurricane Center who forced the issue and convinced the Bloomberg people to change their tune and order an evacuation the following day. The damage was done at that point, of course. You can’t tell the general public that the storm is a big threat today after it wasn’t yesterday when the storm still looks the same, and then expect good decisions. So I recommend the book, the flaws notwithstanding. Ironically, the real story with better science and without the hyperbole and forced drama would have been just as good… maybe even better.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:00:55 +0000
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