Sunday, September 07, 2008
News, In this Issue...

Georgia’s once and future apocalypse

Last time a major hurricane hit Georgia’s coast, it killed about 2,000 people. Next time could be worse

Contraflow traffic on I-10 outside New Orleans prior to Hurricane Gustav’s expected landfall on Aug. 31.
Matthew HINTON/AFP/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage

As The Sunday Paper goes to press, Hurricane Ike is a Category 4 storm, and its westward path is worrying Georgia’s state climatologist, David Stooksbury.

“People don’t realize that Georgia’s coastal waters are extremely shallow, and the coastal shelf goes out for a very long way,” he says. “You know, when you are standing in the surf here and you start walking into the water, you feel like you’re going to walk halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. That big, shallow shelf creates kind of a funnel. The Georgia coast is in fact the most storm-surge-prone place on the south Atlantic coast.”

It was the storm surge, the rapidly rising water pulled inland by Hurricane Katrina, that destroyed much of New Orleans in 2005. When Stooksbury applied a major hurricane model to the dimensions of Georgia’s coast, he found that the storm surge could reach 25 feet—almost the same surge recorded where Category 3 Katrina made landfall in southeastern Louisiana.

But that would require actually being hit by a major hurricane, and Georgia hasn’t been hit by one in 115 years. Year after year, as hurricane season hovers over the Atlantic from June 1 to November 30, we Georgians like to think that we’re safe, that somehow the hand of God curls around us protectively even as our neighbors in Florida and South Carolina and on Alabama’s Gulf Coast board up their windows and evacuate.

There is actually something extraordinary about Georgia’s coast. The Atlantic coast of Georgia looks like a bite mark in the Eastern Seaboard, curving in from Florida’s jutting peninsula and the Carolinas’ bulging shoreline. It is tucked in just enough so that the hurricanes that blow into Florida from the Caribbean and then swirl back out in a Nike-like swoosh toward the Atlantic almost always miss us.

“They’ll either move into the Gulf or, if they get caught in the westerlies [wind from the west], they will curve back out to the South Carolina and North Carolina coasts,” says Phillip Klotzbach, a scientist with Colorado State University’s Tropical Meteorology Project.

However, Stooksbury, who’s devoted himself to studying Georgia’s weather specifically, cautions that we can’t always count on the westerly wind.

“The ‘bite’ only protects us if the storm curves back out to the sea. If it doesn’t, the bite won’t protect us,” he says.

We’ve been very lucky. The worst we’ve gotten in more than a century are the soggy remains of hurricanes that have spent themselves on Florida, like Hurricane David in 1979—a Category 1 by the time it slogged into Savannah—and the spun-off storms of  hurricanes that have lashed the Carolinas’ coast, like Hugo in 1989. Once in a while, some storm in the Gulf will damage us, as Tropical Storm Alberto did in 1994, when half the state from Clayton County to Alabama’s southeastern boundary flooded, and hospitals in Macon had to have drinking and bathing water shipped in.

It could be exponentially worse. All it would take for a major hurricane to make landfall on our coast is the right trajectory, and for 115 years, no major hurricane has managed to find that fateful path. But it could happen, because it has happened before.

“In a space of 17 years in the late 1800s, Georgia got three hurricane landfalls, and the hurricane in 1893 was an apocalyptic event,” says Klotzbach.

More than 2,000 killed on Georgia’s coast

The Sea Islands Hurricane, as the 1893 storm was called, remains one of the worst disasters in American history. The Category 3 storm made landfall on Aug. 27, 1893, killing as many as 2,500 people along Georgia’s coast and on the neighboring Sea Islands. There are few accounts of the storm’s destruction, in part because the majority of its victims were black, and public records relating to their births and deaths were not kept by officials in many communities.

The other problem was that the Sea Islands Hurricane’s destruction was so complete that in some places it left no one alive to give an account of it. Some estimates put the number of dead closer to 1,500, but most historians say that would be a conservative estimate.

For the sake of a tragic comparison, Katrina killed at least 1,836. Of course, back in 1893, there was no Weather Channel, no system of civic sirens, no televisions emitting that hazardous weather warning beep. But there was a National Weather Bureau.

“The August hurricane was not unexpected,” recalled a writer for the February 1894 edition of Scribner’s magazine. “In fact it had been heralded, and for at least three days before it made its appearance, warnings had been given. The  Weather Bureau, sensitive to such disturbances, had found it in West Indian waters, and so the announcement went forth that a storm was forming in the neighborhood of St. Thomas. Next day the bulletins stated that the disturbance near St. Thomas had moved slowly westward. The day after came the announcement that the West Indian storm, after moving to the west and then to the south, had turned and was heading directly for the South Atlantic coast.”

From their tropical offices, the bureau’s weather watchers telegraphed its headquarters in Washington D.C., where staffers then telegraphed Charleston, S.C. Public notices were posted on the walls of courthouses and newspaper offices. That was great, if you could read. Out on the Sea Islands, however, many residents couldn’t have read the bulletins even if the telegraph wires could have reached them. 

Scribner’s published its story about the hurricane in tandem with one on a hurricane that hit near New Orleans at about the same time. In that one, recovery had been faster because New Orleanians, the magazine claimed, were notoriously generous and had chipped in to help out those who had suffered losses. In Georgia, however, the agony of the hurricane’s aftermath persisted for 10 months. The Red Cross didn’t even show up until Oct. 1. It rationed out “a peck of grits and a pound of pork” to each family, a meager amount the Scribner’s writer lauded for compelling the victims to try to provide for themselves rather than “eating the bread of idleness.” The same writer mentioned a woman who stood staring out to sea and who, it turned out, had lost all five of her children to the storm surge.

For months afterward, bodies washed ashore as far south as Florida and as far north as Port Royal, S.C. In one day on the island of St. Helena, S.C., 80 bodies floated in on the surf.
   
Just five years later, in early October 1898, a Category 4 hurricane came ashore at Brunswick, Ga. sinking ships on its way (coincidentally, one called The City of Atlanta was pulled to safety by an English ship, The British Empire). It claimed far fewer lives than its predecessor, according to Walter J. Fraser’s book “Lowcountry Hurricanes: Three Centuries of Storms at Sea and Ashore.” Most estimates place the death toll at fewer than 200, although the yellow fever that spread as a result of severe flooding may have claimed many more lives.
   
Fortunately, not many people lived on Georgia’s coast back then. Today, it’s home to almost 1 million people.

80 percent of I-95 underwater

“The fact that it hasn’t happened in over a hundred years means nothing,” says Buzz Weiss, spokesman for the Georgia Emergency Management Authority (GEMA). “If anything, that just means we’re due.”
   
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “During the 20th Century, Georgia did not have even a single major hurricane make landfall along its coast. However, it was a different story in the 19th Century. In contrast, Georgia experienced three major hurricanes in the latter half of the 19th Century—a Category 3 in 1854 near Savannah, the Category 3 Sea Islands Hurricane in 1893 … near Savannah and a Category 4 in 1898 near Brunswick. Knowledge that such strong hurricanes have impacted this portion of the coast (and will undoubtedly hit again) is important for residents of Georgia to plan for the future.”

With that in mind, GEMA, along with the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA), started taking concrete steps in 1999 to do exactly that when Hurricane Floyd triggered the second-largest evacuation in American history. (Hurricane Rita is said to have triggered the largest.) Nearly 3 million people evacuated the coasts of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina. Floyd weakened to a Category 2 and made landfall on the North Carolina coast. Fifty-seven fatalities were attributed to the storm.
 
It was the Hurricane Floyd evacuation that inspired the state to put its contraflow traffic plan into place. Now, gates are installed at entrance and exit ramps on Interstate 16 from Macon to Savannah, to keep cars off the freeway in the event that all the north and southbound lanes have to accommodate people fleeing the coast.
       
If they use I-16, that should work well. But what if they use the always-busy I-95?
   
“If a major hurricane hits the Georgia coast, 80 percent of the part of I-95 that’s in Georgia would be underwater,” says Stooksbury. “That’s what we know about our storm surge. If it happened around Miami or Hatteras, they do not have the storm surge we have. It would be worse for us.” SP

Special thanks to the Georgia Historical Society. For more information about Georgia’s stormy past, visit www.georgiahistory.com.