First Charley struck Port Charlotte Aug. 13, 2004, with 150-mph winds. Then Frances pounded Martin and Palm Beach counties, collapsing part of Interstate 95 near Lake Worth and sending gusts into Broward that left a quarter-million people without electricity. Ivan came ashore near Pensacola with 120-mile-per-hour winds and a storm surge that swamped coastal towns. Jeanne struck the same area as Frances, turning out the lights in most of Palm Beach County, ripping off roofs and flooding houses.
It came to be known as the Year of the Four Hurricanes.
Following that beating, and another one the next year with Hurricanes Wilma and Katrina, there have been dramatic improvements to Florida’s electric grid, shelters, forecasting abilities and ability to communicate. And while another season like 2004 still would be disastrous, residents would have more warning and stand a better chance of returning faster to normal life.
What’s Better
Communications: When the 2004 storms struck, Twitter did not exist. Neither did the iPhone. A new website called TheFacebook had just been created in a Harvard dorm room. When it came to hurricanes, the latest news arrived via television, the Web and radio. Today, when a storm gets close, text alerts will go out to anyone within range of South Florida cellphone antennas, even if their phone has a Cleveland or New York City area code.
A Twitter room has been set up at the Palm Beach County Emergency Operations Center, where full-time staff will send out notices and monitor social media sites for word of any emergencies, said Vince Bonvento, assistant county administrator. Residents can submit photos of damage via an app called PBC DART, or Palm Beach County Disaster Assessment and Resource Tool, available for both iPhone and Android systems. This also will provide information on evacuations and shelters before the storm.
Evacuations: These actually may be less frequent, thanks to new storm-surge models that more precisely establish which areas could be in danger.
Electricity: Florida Power & Light Co., which had faced severe criticism after the massive outages in Hurricane Wilma in 2005, has spent more than $1.4 billion to harden its system. The company cleared vegetation from more than 100,000 miles of line, replaced or upgraded more than 95,000 utility poles, added flood monitors and storm-resistant doors to more than 200 substations and installed 4.6 million smart meters and other devices that give the company immediate notification of outages.
“We’ve learned a lot from the ’04 and ’05 storms,” said Manny Miranda, FPL’s vice president of power delivery. “But hurricanes are powerful forces of nature, and we expect outages to occur.”
Food and gas: After the 2004 storms, power outages kept many grocery stores and gas stations closed for days, even though they had no damage. This is unlikely to happen again.
Gas stations with eight pumps or more are now required to install generators, and many with fewer pumps did so too. Winn-Dixie installed generators at 31 of its 88 stores from the Florida Keys through Palm Beach County. Of the 264 Publix stores from the Keys through Indian River County, all but 14 have generators, said Publix spokeswoman Nicole Maristany Krauss. “We felt it was important to make the significant investment into outfitting as many stores as possible with generators to ensure our communities can have access to food, water and supplies as soon as possible,” she said.
Forecasting: Predictions are more precise thanks largely to improvements in models, computer power and satellite technology. When a storm is three days out, forecasters can predict its path within 100 miles, down from 170 miles 10 years ago, said James Franklin, National Hurricane Center hurricane specialist unit branch chief. When Hurricane Arthur swept past the Florida coast last month, forecasters felt confident enough to issue hurricane watches for North Carolina and not for Florida.
The hurricane center’s warnings to the public also have improved. Some changes enhanced readability, with notices written in mixed-case letters rather than in SCREAMING CAPITALS. New maps show the risk of hurricane-force winds over broad areas to counteract the focus on the skinny black line at the center. And this year, maps show the risk of storm surge, which accounts for more deaths than wind.
The center now issues hurricane warnings 36 hours in advance, up from 24 hours a few years ago. Hurricane watches, which indicate hurricane-force winds are possible, are issued 48 hours in advance, up from 36 hours.
What’s Not Better
Intensity forecasts: This is still a problem for forecasters and it is important. A category 1 storm approaching Fort Lauderdale likely would call for evacuations of only the extreme coast, while a category 3 would require a much bigger, more disruptive evacuation.
Hurricane Charley surprised forecasters with a plunge in pressure and increase in intensity over only a few hours, with maximum sustained winds suddenly speeding up from 110 miles per hour to 150 miles per hour. Today, such a rapid intensification still might catch forecasters by surprise. Studying the mechanisms by which hurricanes intensify is extremely challenging, requiring extensive data at low altitudes from the center of the storm.
“Those cases are still very difficult to predict,” Franklin said. “While the physics of hurricane tracks are well understood, the physics of hurricane intensification are not.”
More people: South Florida’s spectacular growth since World War I barely paused for the vicious hurricanes that raked the region in 1926 and 1928, for Hurricane Donna in 1960 or Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The same goes for the hurricanes of 2004.
Census estimates shows the population of Palm Beach County, which took a beating from Frances and Jeanne, grew from 1,252,223 in 2004 to 1,278,380 in 2005. Broward County rose from 1,725,461 in 2004 to 1,746,896 in 2005, although it dipped slightly the following year. Charlotte County, where Charley made landfall, saw its population drop by 2,493 people from its 2004 level of 157,755 but quickly made it back and more by 2007.
“When we look at the impact of hurricanes, there often was a dip in the population after, but it didn’t have any long-term impact,” said University of Florida research demographer Stefan Rayer. “Even a pretty bad hurricane like Andrew had only short-term impact.”
Since 2004, South Florida’s population has grown by nearly half a million, to 5.82 million.
“My biggest concern is it’s been 10 years, and there’s a lot of complacency,’’ said Bonvento, of Palm Beach County. “You have a lot of people who have never been through a hurricane.”
Added Ascarrunz, of Broward County. “As we saw in ’92 with Hurricane Andrew, it only takes one big one, and it’s not a matter of if, but when.”
©2014 Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.). Distributed by MCT Information Services.
