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On a spring day 22 years ago, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center was asked to run a computer program that demonstrated the chance of a major hurricane making landfall in Charleston. Any coastal area is vulnerable to the ravages of hurricane season, of course, so the news Mayfield delivered to Charleston that day was fairly positive:
A Category 4 storm wasn’t expected to come within 86 miles more than once in a century.
“That was at the beginning of the 1989 hurricane season,” recalls Mayfield, who retired three years ago as the director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami but retains an encyclopedic knowledge of storms that did, and didn’t, make landfall in the coastal United States. “A few months later, when Hugo hit as a Category 4 on the 22nd of September in 1989, it didn’t do those folks a bit of good to know that the mean return for a Category 4 in Charleston was 120 years."
More Monthly: Hilton Head / Bluffton hurricane emergency information and evacuation checklist
Mayfield went on to become one of the few national heroes of Hurricane Katrina by personally urging the mayor of New Orleans to take seriously the threat of that natural disaster. But he still remembers that “return period” analysis he ran for Charleston just months before Hurricane Hugo made landfall, and what it and events like it taught him about human nature: When it comes to protecting their lives and property, people will rely more on personal experience and anecdotal evidence than science.
They also want — perhaps even need — to believe that their homes and way of life will be protected. “A hurricane is a rare event anyway. On average, we only have six in the entire Atlantic basin, which includes the Atlantic, the Gulf and the Caribbean Sea,” says Mayfield, now a hurricane specialist
for WPLG-TV, an ABC a ffiliate in Miami. “The chance of a hurricane hitting one particular location is always going to be small. The chances of a major hurricane hitting is extremely small. But US history teaches that it happens, and it’s going to happen again.”
Hilton Head is among several coastal areas that sit precariously on the Atlantic or the gulf but have been spared the frantic hurricane seasons of other regions.
Locals here attribute their luck to the shape of the coastline; in other areas, the good fortune might be credited to a well-placed sandbar or other natural barrier. Mayfield says some residents in the Cape Canaveral area believe they are safe because NASA wouldn’t have parked such expensive facilities there if they weren’t.
Mayfield also recalls a college professor who told him the Bahamas protect Miami from hurricanes. The professor said that in 1972, 20 years before Hurricane Andrew. Hurricane experts — weary from years of hearing about special topographic protections a particular area is fortunate to have — have a message for those areas: Be prepared.
“It is true that the return periods and frequency of expected hurricane events can vary along the coast,” says Michael Lowry, a meteorologist in the storm surge unit of the Miami-based National Hurricane Center. “But if you live in the coastal US, you are vulnerable from the impacts of hurricanes.
There is not an area along the East Coast of the US that is not vulnerable to the impacts of a hurricane.” Take the “return period” data Mayfield put together for Charleston not long before Hugo, for instance. It tracks past known storms as a way to create a likelihood of future hurricane activity, and suggests that a Category 3 or greater hurricane would come within 86 miles of Hilton Head just once every 79 years — one of the lowest such rates on the Atlantic Coast.
What the hurricane models can’t tell a coastal resident is whether that once-in-a-lifetime storm will happen this year. And that, experts say, is where the human mind takes over, negating the seriousness of a threat to safety.
“People aren’t really good about understanding probabilities,” says Dr. Judith Becker Bryant, a psychologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa Bay. “We tend to then draw on personal anecdotal experience that overrides or allows us to discount the science. People will say, well, in that hurricane, they said the same thing, and nothing happened; therefore, nothing will happen this time. “It’s just normal human nature to draw on personal experience and not draw on numbers,” Bryant continues. “Numbers are pretty abstract.”
Personal experience, on the other hand, is concrete. Mayfield tells a story about an elderly South Carolina man who had lived on the coast for decades.
Mayfield says the man protested when his son tried to get him to evacuate for Hugo. “Supposedly, he took him outside and said, ‘Hurricane Dora only got this high, and Hurricane Hazel only got to the steps, and we’ve never gotten water in this house.’ When their house got washed away by the storm surge, this old man and his son spent the night up in a tree and thought they were going to die,” Mayfield says. “That’s a typical story. Just because you haven’t experienced something doesn’t mean you can’t experience it in the future.”
Indeed, prior experience is the best indication of how coastal residents will treat hurricane threats. When Hurricane Charley made landfall in Florida in 2004, it brought winds of up to 150 miles per hour, but the storm surge component of Charley was weak and estimated to have topped out at seven feet. Following the storm, the Federal Emergency Management District completed a behavioral analysis of residents impacted by Charley and found that while those people now understood the potential dangers of a hurricane, they feared only the winds.
“We asked: ‘Do you believe your home would be destroyed or damaged from a Category 4 storm with winds of 150 miles per hour?’ And, we asked: ‘Would your home be damaged or destroyed by a Category 4 storm surge?’” says Brandon Bolinski, regional hurricane program manager for FEMA. “Time and time again, they responded, ‘My home is vulnerable in Category 4 winds, but not storm surge.’ ”
In other words, people who had just endured a hurricane — even one that took lives — could process only how they would handle a storm just like it. “In the behavioral analysis, people said, ‘I went through Hurricane Charley. Next time, if I just put shutters up, I’ll be just fine’,” Bolinski says. “People truly could not understand their vulnerability to water.”
Bryant, the psychology professor at USF, says those who live close to water — which is, naturally, untethered — need to convince themselves that their lifestyle is safe. “People want to bring order and predictability to their lives,” Bryant says. “So, if you can say there’s this natural feature, this geological feature that protects us, that’s comforting.”
Bryant knows a little something about protective topography: She grew up in a town in Iowa where locals believed a nearby bend in the Iowa River protected them from tornadoes. “It can be mythology; it can be an urban myth. We want to be able to point to something that will say this isn’t going to happen to us,” Bryant says. “It may be irrational, but it’s comforting.”
A better way to bring order to the chaos? Be prepared with a well-maintained hurricane kit and an evacuation plan. “Know your vulnerability. Know your home,” says Bolinski, of FEMA. “Know where you need to evacuate.”
