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Storms Put Focus on Other Disasters in Waiting
By Dean E. Murphy
The New York Times
November 15, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/national/15disaster.html?pagewanted=all
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
Officials in California worry about the collapse of aging levees in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, which might allow surging seawater to contaminate much of the state's drinking water supply.
A major concern in Seattle is the seismic vulnerability of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a busy elevated highway in such peril that weight and lane restrictions were imposed on buses and trucks.
In Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, there is the recurring danger of a volcanic eruption at Yellowstone National Park, while in Florida, attention has turned anew to cleaning up Lake Okeechobee, which sends polluted water into nearby rivers during heavy rains and floods.
While the problems are mostly well known, the devastation from the Gulf Coast hurricanes is serving as a strong reminder that possible disasters could lay waste to cities and states across the country. People are calling government offices about emergency preparedness, long-forgotten plans are being dusted off and reassessed, and lawmakers are holding hearings about vulnerabilities and whether efforts to address them go far enough.
"Katrina woke us up again," said Susie Stonner, a spokeswoman for the State Emergency Management Agency in Missouri, where flooding along the Mississippi River in 1993 caused billions of dollars in damage but where building in flood plains has resumed. "Since 9/11 most of our efforts have been focused on terrorism, and it's time to start thinking we have natural disasters, too."
Robert S. Young, an associate professor of geosciences at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C., who conducts hurricane research for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said this year's hurricane season had people in government and out seriously considering an old idea: that the federal government cut off its investments in coastal areas repeatedly hit by hurricanes, including those in North Carolina.
Professor Young, who recently testified about the subject before a Congressional committee, said that there had long been resistance among environmentalists to construction along the coast, but that now lawmakers and taxpayers' groups were also questioning federal subsidies for things like flood insurance and rebuilding roads.
"There is no question that more people are interested and more willing to listen to the possibility of the federal government abandoning the coast," he said. "People are finally realizing how costly this is."
In some places like Utah, where a $200 million project is under way to mount the State Capitol on cylindrical bearings to reduce the shaking during an earthquake, officials said the hurricanes' destruction was a reminder that expensive disaster preparedness programs needed to stay on track.
Scientists at the University of Utah estimate there is a one in four chance that a major earthquake will rock the Wasatch fault in the state in the next 40 years, with the Capitol among the buildings most in jeopardy. Similarly, seismologists in Washington have said that the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which suffered severe cracking in an earthquake several years ago, will not survive a major quake, and efforts are under way to replace it with a tunnel.
"It has reinforced the importance of what we are doing and why," Derek Jensen of the Utah Department of Public Safety, said of the hurricane season.
Maj. Scott J. Smith of the Montana National Guard said officials there were looking anew at the problems that a major earthquake - and a possible resulting volcanic eruption at Yellowstone, where the caldera is classified as a "high threat" by the United States Geological Survey - would pose in assembling troops. The experience in Louisiana, Major Smith said, had illustrated that many of the people who would be called upon to deal with a disaster might also be among its victims.
"It certainly has been an eye opener for all of us," Major Smith said. "One specific area we are now looking at is where are we going to bring the resources, knowing we might not have all the soldiers we need."
National park administrators at Yellowstone and elsewhere have been instructed to review their emergency plans with the lessons of the hurricanes in mind. Kevin FitzGerald, chief ranger for visitor and resource protection for the eight-state intermountain region, said the reassessments had been "for the most part preaching to the choir," since periodic reviews were routine.
But with the severity of this year's hurricane season, Mr. FitzGerald said, taking extra stock is warranted. One task whose importance was reinforced by the problems in New Orleans, he said, was making sure park officials had emergency contact information for all of their employees so they could be accounted for after a disaster.
"You take that," Mr. FitzGerald said of the communication problems among law enforcement agencies after the hurricanes, "and you learn from it."
Though flooding is a recurring problem in much of the Midwest, the post-hurricane emphasis in Missouri has been on earthquakes, said Ms. Stonner of the state emergency management agency. The last big earthquake in the New Madrid seismic zone in the state was nearly 200 years ago, but seismologists have warned that the Central States, including Missouri, remain ripe for a significant temblor.
State and municipal officials in the region are determining whether generic disaster plans, written with flooding, tornadoes and other more common calamities in mind, are adequate for the particular problems posed by a catastrophic earthquake. As a start, a map has been posted on the Missouri agency's Web site showing 47 of the state's 114 counties that would sustain the brunt of a major earthquake, with splashes of yellow and orange signaling the most vulnerable areas.
"Local officials saw what happened in Louisiana, and they are concerned," said Ms. Stonner, referring to the hard-hit roads and other damaged infrastructure in that state. "A lot of the time, you assume, say, that you would be able to get to the airport in St. Louis. But if you look at the earthquake map, that area is marked yellow in a bad-enough earthquake, which indicates the airport would probably be closed."
In San Francisco, a more arcane issue, the size of fire-hydrant valves, has set off a growing debate, as critics question the wisdom of exempting the city from a state law that requires all fire departments to have standardized valves and hoses. The law was imposed after fires swept through hills of Oakland in 1991, killing 25 people and causing more than $1.5 billion in damage.
Spurred by renewed fears of a natural calamity that might set off fires like those that destroyed much of San Francisco in 1906, the city's fire chief, Joanne Hayes-White, has recommended keeping a reserve of adapters on hand so neighboring departments could readily help in an emergency. Another proposal under consideration would require retrofitting about 8,000 hydrants in the city.
In Sacramento, nerves have also been newly rattled. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger requested $90 million in federal assistance in September to increase what he said was "woefully inadequate flood prevention" in the Sacramento area. Yesterday, the United States Senate approved legislation to allocate $39 million to improve flood control in Sacramento and about $2 million for other flood control projects in the area.
The problematic levee system there is part of the same network in the delta that protects millions of acres of farmland, drinking water for about 22 million people and, increasingly, housing developments on the distant fringe of the San Francisco Bay Area. Without major improvements to the system, scientists at the University of California, Davis, recently predicted, there is a two in three chance in the next 50 years that a major earthquake or storm will cause widespread failures of levees, which would allow salt water to back up into the delta and be drawn by pumps into the state aqueduct.
Some water officials are revisiting the idea of building a canal around the delta to help keep drinking water safe, a highly charged proposal that California voters rejected in 1982.
"Even New Orleans had a 250-year level of flood protection," Mr. Schwarzenegger wrote in a letter to members of Congress. " Sacramento only has about a 100-year level of protection."
Larry Larson, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said the hurricanes and the subsequent flooding in some Northeastern states, including New York and New Jersey, had grabbed the attention of emergency planners and elected officials like few other recent natural disasters.
Still, Mr. Larson predicted, the window of opportunity for translating the hardship into better preparedness is not very large. While many cities and states seem genuinely interested in tackling problems, he said, some of that interest will wane when the costs and other political obstacles loom larger.
"It's been a wake-up call," Mr. Larson said. "We need to figure out if we are ready to hear it."
U.S mayors retooling evacuation plans
Katrina illustrates potential problems
By Bruce Alpert, Washington bureau
The Times Picayune
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/washington/index.ssf?/base/new
s-1/1130219861302410.xml
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
WASHINGTON -- Stunned by the suffering they saw in New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina, some of the nation's mayors are retooling their evacuation plans and asking the federal government for rules to protect volunteers against lawsuits so they can more quickly respond to disasters.
U.S. Conference of Mayors President Beverly O'Neill scheduled a Nov. 3 summit in Denver on evacuations, which will examine among other issues how to help residents who don't have transportation or the financial means to leave a city during a major disaster, whether caused by terrorism or nature.
"It is being discussed already because mayors watch what's happening and are appalled by the things that they may have to face and are immediately looking into this," said O'Neill, the mayor of Long Beach, Calif.
Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley said he has ordered a review of his city's evacuation plans because New Orleans demonstrated, in ways that emergency drills don't, the difficulty in evacuating a major U.S. city.
"Just as you will have a hard time getting all first responders if there is a threat that is putting their own families in danger, you will also have a difficult time getting bus drivers to respond," Democrat O'Malley said.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said the problem getting bus drivers was one reason the city didn't order a major bus evacuation in advance of Hurricane Katrina.
The mayors, who met privately Monday with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, were reluctant to criticize Nagin, a fellow member of the Conference of Mayors. Nagin did not attend the meeting Monday.
"I think it's very hard to fault Mayor Nagin after that point in time where all his communications and cell towers and even the capacity for command were eliminated," O'Malley said. "That's what we have a federal government and National Guard troops to do. If CNN and ABC can get down to the Superdome, we should have been able to get our federal government to the Superdome, too."
O'Neill said Chertoff promised to work for improvements in the much-criticized Federal Emergency Management Agency. O'Neill said the mayors also asked him to funnel more money directly to the cities so they can develop communications systems that will continue to work during emergencies.
The mayors also said that they sought help from Chertoff to break down the bureaucracy so that city governments and other volunteers can respond more quickly to help when disasters strike other cities. O'Malley said rescue teams from Baltimore moved as quickly as they could, given the bureaucratic obstacles, but they arrived in St. Bernard Parish two days after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Meridian , Miss., Mayor John Robert Smith said that on the evening after Katrina hit, he received an e-mail from officials in Davenport, Iowa, offering to send four 10-person rescue teams to help in some of the hardest hit communities.
But he said their arrival was delayed for seven days by difficulties in getting legal immunity so volunteers would be free from the threat of litigation.
Smith said he also was unable to get federal and state officials to move two 500-bed emergency medical units set up in Meridian to locations with more pressing needs.
"My wife and two doctors and four nurses and six volunteers couldn't stand watching the suffering on TV anymore and headed south and found Long Beach, Miss., (and) Pass Christian, totally wiped out," Smith said. "They opened a clinic in an Episcopal school gymnasium, or what was left of it. And they were seeing 300 patients a day."
But the two-500 bed MASH units, which came with a reported price tag of $5 million, treated only 49 patients over 10 days, he said.
Natural Gas: Big Worry This Winter
By Simon Romero
November 15, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/business/15natgas.html?
adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1132093813-YzqF4WN9n0fNKKLbAdTP6g
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
HOUSTON, Nov. 14 - Unexpectedly warm weather has bathed much of the United States in recent weeks, but fears persist that a classic energy shock may be unfolding as the nation heads into winter.
This time, though, the coming squeeze is in natural gas rather than oil.
Executives at companies that consume large amounts of natural gas are warning - almost screaming - about the costs they expect to face over the coming months.
"Our monthly natural gas bill has doubled since August, from $700,000 to $1.4 million," said Fletcher Steele, president of Pine Hall Brick in Winston-Salem, N.C. Mr. Steele said he planned to shut half of his production in January, when natural gas prices are expected to resume climbing again because of cold weather.
It is a problem that has been building for several years.
Thanks to a huge buildup of natural-gas-fired electricity plants in the 1990's even as exploration has slowed, demand has outstripped supply; the nation now depends on natural gas for 24 percent of its energy requirements, compared with 23 percent for coal and 40 percent for oil.
The threat of higher prices and potential shortages has led to a showdown over the most ambitious push to expand domestic drilling since the 1970's. The energy industry and major consumers of natural gas have been aggressively pushing Congress to open areas for exploration.
While they have been rebuffed so far - Republican leaders in the House were forced to pull back on a budget bill that would have opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and coastal waters off several other states to drilling - energy suppliers are expected to keep pounding at the door.
The dispute over expanding drilling is related to the fierce opposition from environmentalists, real estate investors and residents of areas where the industry would like to put operations intended to increase imports of natural gas.
In the meantime, higher prices for the fuel are rippling through the economy. And with more than half of the nation's homes heated by natural gas, millions of Americans are already bracing for big price increases this winter. The Energy Information Administration recently predicted that the cost of heating a typical home with natural gas could rise by more than 40 percent in coming months, or an average of $306 a household.
At the same time, officials are warning businesses that they face possible disruptions in the natural gas supply in some states this winter. Under long-established rules, utilities will give the highest priority to supplying natural gas to homes, possibly cutting off some companies and forcing some manufacturers to turn to other energy sources.
Beyond the fear of supply disruptions, higher natural gas prices have stoked concern of price increases cascading through the economy, with the most recent monthly inflation gauge at 1.2 percent in September, the largest increase in a quarter-century. The United States now has the highest natural gas prices of any industrial country, surpassing those in Germany, the Netherlands and China.
The prices have been pulling back from a post-hurricane spike in October that sent them above $14 per thousand cubic feet, but they remain at unusually high levels, with the futures contract for December closing at $11.61 on Monday. Only three years ago, during a glut, natural gas was selling for as little as $2 per thousand cubic feet.
High prices are inflicting pain across the country, hitting hard at utilities in the mountain states, grain elevators in the Midwest and chemical manufacturers along the Gulf Coast. Announcements of job losses in energy-intensive industries are mounting.
For instance, Lyondell Chemical of Houston said last month that it was shutting a foam chemicals plant in Lake Charles, La., cutting about 280 jobs. The reason was higher energy costs, the company said, though Lyondell also cited damage from Hurricane Rita.
Other companies unable to pass all their higher natural gas costs to customers are starting to announce big losses. For example, CMS Energy, Michigan's largest natural gas utility, reported a $263 million loss this month.
The hurricanes made a bad situation worse. The American Chemistry Council estimates that 100,000 jobs at companies that rely largely on natural gas have been lost since prices for the fuel began climbing in 2000. Chemical companies have been particularly outspoken in calls for the Bush administration and Congress to focus on curbing consumption and repairing energy infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico.
"We need to declare a national crisis," Andrew N. Liveris, the chief executive of the Dow Chemical Company, said in recent testimony before the Senate. Dow, the nation's largest chemical maker, has shut 23 plants in the United States in the last three years in places like Somerset, N.J.; South Charleston, W.Va.; and Elizabethtown, Ky., as it shifted production to Kuwait, Argentina, Malaysia and Germany, where natural gas is cheaper.
"Call it demand destruction," Mr. Liveris said. "Dozens of plants around the country have closed their doors and gone away, and are never coming back."
The Bush administration has begun to urge conservation, in moves that draw comparisons to President Jimmy Carter's calls in the late 1970's to don a sweater and turn down the thermostat. But as officials contemplate further action, the energy industry is stepping ahead with plans of its own.
Long-contemplated projects have come back to life, including a $20 billion pipeline to bring gas from Alaska to the lower 48 states and a $3 billion pipeline to transport Rocky Mountain gas to big cities. Beyond the lobbying to overturn drilling bans off coastlines, the industry is redoubling its efforts to overcome objections to importing large amounts of natural gas from countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Some of these projects might eventually materialize, but none quickly enough to bring natural gas prices down substantially before this winter. Still, the proposals are part of a major push by the energy industry to raise imports and overturn decades of environmental limits on domestic exploration.
If greater offshore drilling were allowed, "we could move up by 50 percent to 100 percent of current production, a lot in natural gas," claimed John F. Hofmeister, president of the Shell Oil Company in the United States.
The current supply shortage results mainly from production disruptions in the Gulf of Mexico, where nearly 40 percent of output remains shut. But it has also revealed two disturbing trends: disappointing production elsewhere in the United States and an inadequate imports via pipeline from Canada.
Wildcatters are frenetically trying to drill as much as possible in parts of the Rocky Mountain West, but these efforts have produced severe bottlenecks as companies have flooded the Bureau of Land Management with a 30 percent increase in drilling applications over last year. The result has been a backlog of two months or more for approval of hundreds of projects.
Some companies that rely on natural gas to generate electricity are, meanwhile, scrambling to find substitutes, creating greater demand for coal, fuel oil and even wind energy. Prices for coal from the Powder River basin of Wyoming have almost doubled since September, to about $19.50 a ton from $10 a ton, and railroads there are under strain to take more coal from the area.
And in Colorado, the wind-energy customers of one Denver utility, Xcel Energy, will be paying about $10 less on average per month than customers who buy electricity made from natural gas.
The surge in prices is repositioning the debate over whether greater imports of natural gas are needed. Some officials, most notably Alan Greenspan, the departing chairman of the Federal Reserve, have warned repeatedly over the last two years about the risks of a supply shock because of too much reliance on domestic production.
"Our limited capacity to import liquefied natural gas effectively restricts our access to the world's abundant supplies of natural gas," Mr. Greenspan said in June 2003. "If North American natural gas markets are to function with the flexibility exhibited by oil, unlimited access to the vast world reserves of gas is required."
The United States currently has five terminals for importing natural gas. Regulators have approved the construction of eight more; all but one are planned in coastal areas of Louisiana and Texas that are prone to hurricanes.
Rooted in fears over accidents or terrorist-induced explosions, opposition to terminal projects in other parts of the country raises the possibility that the United States might lose access to natural gas sources to other nations where governments can easily override local objections.
In China, for instance, officials in Beijing recently determined that the country would build 10 L.N.G. terminals, paving the way for China to compete for natural gas reserves in Asia and Russia.
The scramble for those resources, of course, is less immediate than fears of a prolonged cold snap in the months ahead. William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said recently that natural gas prices were the biggest short-term risk to the economy.
"If we have a cold winter," Mr. Poole said with the typical reserve of central bankers, "we may find ourselves with an unpleasant crunch."
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Storms Put Focus on Other Disasters in Waiting