This is the bottom of the ocean
- an ocean of air as vast and volatile as any sea.
Above the earth's surface, currents ebb and flow.
Some spiral into whirlwinds.
The dust devil has more bluster than bite.
Other twisters are downright deadly.
Tornado on the ground on highway 44!
Damage everywhere.
We've got numerous people injured!
Get away from the windows!
Tree just blew over! Get away from the windows!
Get away! Get away!
Tornadoes pack the fastest winds on earth.
But in magnitude, this spinning giant goes unmatched.
Hurricane, typhoon, cyclone all equally fearsome.
By any name, the greatest storms on earth.
Severe tropical storms afflict every continent except Antarctica.
In this century, they have claimed over half a million lives.
Tornadoes have killed over 10,000 in the United States alone.
Today, electronic eyes pierce the atmosphere,
and map its shifting winds.
Scientists chart the anatomy of a storm.
Their sensors record speed and bearing.
Make yours the same level as the tripod.
But none can predict the birth of a killer.
That thing's a right mover!
We gotta get out of here, fast! Let's go!
Nothing in our power can stop the fury of Nature's whirling winds.
Early spring, 1991.
A southern sun heats the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Warm, moist air rises,
and travels northwest, over Texas, Louisiana,
and on toward the central United States.
More than a thousand miles away,
cool dry air rushes south from Canada.
Rising over the Rockies,
dry upper level air flows east, then spills onto the Great Plains.
These forces collide over Tornado Alley on Friday, April 26th, 1991.
Fast winds high above the ground, over slower winds below,
make the air roll horizontally, like a pencil on a table top.
The atmosphere is unstable.
Thunderstorms erupt across the plains.
Here and there, an updraft lifts the horizontal spinning of the air
into a vertical position.
Now the storm rotates as it feeds on warm, moist air near the ground.
The day gives rise to "supercells"
- the most complex and dangerous thunderstorms on earth.
Their underbellies bubble with instability.
Lightning and hail are the least of their threats.
Under the right conditions, they can also spawn monsters.
The National Weather Service has tracked the warning signs
for a week, predicting severe weather.
By April 26th, conditions are text-book perfect
for a major outbreak of tornadoes.
Throughout the afternoon and evening, across the central states,
fifty-six twisters are reported.
Honey, be careful.
Is it going away from us?
Honey.
Is it going away from us?
I sure hope you're right.
Then, at 5:57 a killer touches down in ansas.
In Wichita, residents are sitting down to dinner
when warnings send them running to basements and storm shelters.
Look at this stuff floating in the air, Ginger.
Take cover!
Around 6:20, the tornado takes on a pinkish hue
as it pulverizes a nursery full of geraniums.
By the time it hits McConnell Air Force Base,
the twister is nearly 300 feet wide.
The base hospital, school, rec center
and over a hundred housing units are leveled.
6:29. In Andover, the town siren fails,
but most residents heed warnings by police, and news reports.
The tornado's funnel has widened to almost 600 feet.
At 6:40, it tears through the Golden Spur Mobile Home Park.
The twister finally dissipates northeast of Andover.
Within minutes, its parent storm drops another funnel
along the ansas Turnpike.
Can you get in the left lane, Greg?
Yah!
I'll like you know this go away.
You're okay, you're okay.
Eep going', man. Eep going'.
Faster? No.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lots faster. Lots faster!
A local TV crew tries to outrun it.
Lots faster, Greg. It's catching us.
You gotta go buddy!
Even at 85 miles an hour, they can't get out of its way.
They stop at an overpass
where a father and his two daughters run for cover.
As the twister spins out its final moments,
a dread calm takes its place.
We need some place to sit down.
Along the turnpike,
people are pulled from trucks and cars tossed like children's toys.
Andover is hardest hit.
In what was the Golden Spur Mobile Home Park,
ten bodies are found.
Is anybody in there?
Ansas bears a bitter toll:
Over 1,700 homes destroyed or damaged, and 20 dead.
Survivors will never forget.
The car was hovering.
It was about three foot off the ground,
and just sort of floating in the air.
Then all of a sudden the car left, and went right out the roof.
What looked like typing paper floating around was really not,
it was like Garage doors.
Garage doors and window frames, parts of houses.
Ambushed on a country road,
Brook lbarra took shelter under the nearest tree.
In a flash, she was airborne... then dropped a thousand feet away.
The cows all of a sudden started running like a stampede.
I was picked up by the tornado and there was all sorts of debris.
One thing I remember was the cow that flew past me.
He was screaming.
And then, before I knew it, it was over.
I was just laying in the field next to a tractor engine.
Wounds are healed.
Neighborhoods rise from the rubble. The human spirit endures.
Such is life in Tornado Alley, USA.
Midwesterners once called them "cyclones".
Early photographs
and motion pictures held viewers spellbound.
Tornadoes begat their own myths.
Some claimed they fused coins in people's pockets,
and cooked potatoes in the ground.
In truth, they make airborne missiles of everyday objects.
Some have deposited heirlooms forty miles from home.
Do they pluck feathers from chickens?
No. Blame that on sheer fright.
They inspire no less terror in people.
April 3rd and 4th, 1974.
In the largest outbreak on record, 148 tornadoes race across 13 states.
March 18th, 1925.
The deadliest tornado in history leaves the longest path.
219 miles of continuous devastation. 689 dead.
Until the 1950's, accurate tornado wind speeds remain a mystery.
Then a frame-by-frame analysis of this footage clocks flying debris
at 170 miles an hour.
Tornado science takes a leap forward in 1953
when Dr. Ted Fujita leaves Japan for the American Midwest.
Main reason why we are here is to find out what tornado did.
And in case of future tornadoes what people should do.
That's the kind of thing we want to find out.
Four decades of research will earn him the title "Mr. Tornado."
I think it's a grain elevator up there.
At disaster sites, Fujita proves
there's much to be learned without braving a twister directly.
He likens tornadoes to criminals
who leave their fingerprints behind.
Ground markings are clues
to a twister's inner structure and dynamics.
To test his theories,
he builds a tornado machine at the University of Chicago.
He discovers that most strong tornadoes
are actually several small twisters
rotating around the center of a larger one.
These mini-tornadoes can lay waste to one house,
yet leave its neighbor unscathed.
Fujita's ideas have been amply confirmed in Nature,
and remain a cornerstone of tornado science.
Although they occur around the world,
three out of four tornadoes streak the skies over the United States.
They favor the springtime, and the warm hours between noon and sunset.
We say a tornado "touches down".
It actually sucks in air from near the ground
and carries it upward in a spiral.
Most range from 150 to 1200 feet in width,
and travel over land at about 30 miles an hour.
The funnel is often hollow,
a tube of condensed water vapor
that takes on the color of dust and debris.
In North America, most tornadoes rotate counterclockwise.
Perhaps one in a thousand spins in the opposite direction.
Twisters appear in many guises.
They can bring to mind the snapping of a bullwhip...
or the delicate dance of ghosts.
A single storm can spawn several distinct funnels
- a grouping referred to as a "family."
For all their fury, most tornadoes are short-lived.
Many last only minutes.
To the scientists who would study them, they are elusive prey.
How to penetrate the twister's secrets?
Aiming weather balloons and instrumented rockets into tornadoes
have yielded limited results.
All right. Three. Two. One.
Fire!
There! Perfe...
No.
In the 1980's, researchers at the National Severe Storms Lab
tested the "totable tornado observatory", nicknamed TOTO,
after Dorothy's dog in The Wizard of Oz.
This four-hundred pound package of sensors
was to record what no human can even approach
without risking life and limb.
But predicting the path of a tornado proved to be nearly impossible.
TOTO had one close call, no direct hits.
For now, the safest way to see inside tornadoes
is to probe them from afar with Doppler radar.
Like an x-ray of a storm,
the system displays wind speed and direction.
In 1981, scientists first detected
the spiralling signature of a tornado on Doppler radar.
Today, the system is used to issue warnings to the public.
Still, we're not exactly sure why twisters form at all.
For Howard Bluestein,
Professor of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma,
there's only one way to find out.
Satellite pictures are nice. Radar pictures are nice.
But you need to look out the window
and see the clouds at a very very fine scale
to get a feeling for what's happening.
I don't understand
how one can study a phenomenon without actually experiencing it.
Seeing it or feeling it or tasting it.
To me, that sets everything in motion.
That makes me want to understan why it's there,
what causes it, what's gonna happen to it.
They just issued a tornado warning for right where we are.
Every spring, Bluestein exercises two considerable talents:
Chasing tornadoes, and measuring them with the latest technology.
Portable Doppler radar is like a meteorological magnifying glass.
It allows Bluestein to measure wind speed in very fine detail,
in specific regions of a tornado.
Okay, we better get going quickly.
That thing is starting to form a nice funnel.
Actually, hold it. Hold it. Hold it!
Can you turn it on?
It is starting to form a funnel and it's not that far away.
I'm on the left side of that tight circulation.
Bluestein's success rate is better than most storm chasers'
The funnel cloud is just to our north, northwest.
We're packing up the radar...
He estimates one in nine expeditions ends
with an encounter.
O, tornado is crossing the path of the radar.
Debris in the air.
Strong tornadoes almost always form under the southwest edge of a storm.
Bluestein plots his course accordingly,
and tries to place his team roughly two miles from touchdown.
Center it right on the funnel!
Oh, what a classic! Should I go to FM?
Only if you have a good CW signal.
We're detectives.
We're looking for lots of bits of evidence.
And the more pieces of evidence we have,
the more likely it will be
that we'll be able to solve the puzzle of why tornadoes form
and what's their structure.
April 26th, 1991.
Bluestein and his team track the outbreak
that will ravage Andover, ansas.
A spectacular funnel stops them in Red Rock, Oklahoma.
Their Doppler radar will capture the fastest windspeed on record:
Nearly 280 miles an hour.
In the heat of the chase, even Bluestein can miss a beat.
Let's get out of here fast, let's go!
For less frenzied fieldwork,
Bluestein turns to these hunting grounds: The Florida eys.
August, 1993.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
and the National Geographic Society
reunite Bluestein with Dr. Joseph Golden,
expedition chief scientist.
As a graduate student,
Bluestein once joined Golden to explore the skies over ey West.
This expedition marshals state-of-the-art scientific
and photographic technology.
The quarry?
A phantom twister that haunts these tranquil waters.
In 1967, on a vacation trip,
Golden took a sightseeing flight over the Florida eys,
and had a chance encounter with
one of our atmosphere's most startling apparitions.
Since that time,
he has become the world's leading expert on waterspouts.
Our knowledge of these ethereal ribbons was once based largely
on mariners' accounts.
Golden first emphasized their similarities to tornadoes.
Though usually smaller than a twister over land.
They form in gentler weather than most violent tornadoes,
allowing close inspection.
Smoke flares will help visualize airflow near the sea surface.
For Bluestein, this is an unparalleled ringside seat.
When we're out in the great plains looking at tornadoes,
we cannot see what's happening right at the ground very clearly,
nor can we see what's happening at cloud base extremely clearly.
The perspective that we get from the helicopter
in that we can look down at the sea surface...
and see the effect of rotation at the ground level
and also be at cloud base
and practically kiss...
the condensation funnel that's right outside the window
is really spectacular.
Ultimately, the ghostly waterspout may reveal the hidden forces
that trigger tornadoes.
Joe, I guess climatology works.
That was incredible!
Other whirling winds demand a more lofty vantage point.
Book a seat on the Space Shuttle for the perfect view of these monsters
- over 500 miles wide, and some ten miles high.
Creatures of the sea,
they breed in the warm oceans of the tropics.
Depending on their birthplace,
we call then 'cyclones', 'typhoons', or 'hurricanes'.
These giants can stir up
more than a million cubic miles of the earth's atmosphere every second,
and travel across an ocean at up to 30 miles an hour.
Yet they have humble beginnings.
In the summer and fall,
the sun heats vast stretches of tropical ocean
to over 82 degrees Fahrenheit.
Warm, moist air rises over these hot spots,
forming bands of thunderstorms.
Upper level winds push storm systems westward,
as surface winds spiral into the low pressure beneath the clouds.
Occasionally,
one such spinning wheel of thunderstorms gathers strength,
feeding on moisture and heat.
When winds reach 74 miles an hour, a hurricane is born.
The storm's architecture is highly organized.
Rain bands up to 300 miles long converge in the most violent sector:
The "eye wall".
Here, winds of up to 200 miles an hour spiral upward.
Within the "eye", down drafts of dry air create an eerie calm.
Most severe tropical storms spin out their lives,
uneventfully, in the open sea.
When one threatens to come ashore,
the world's eyes are trained upon it - including those of Jim Leonard.
A professional storm chaser, Jim checks forecasts religiously.
He prowls the globe for weather that most people would simply flee.
Among chasers, Jim has few peers.
Some say he has videotaped more severe storms than anyone on earth.
He has no formal training, no college degree in meteorology.
Just a life-long passion.
When I was ten years old
I had my first real hurrican experience with Hurricane Donna.
We got probably winds of 80, 90 mile an hour.
It was quite an exhilarating experience at that point.
People think I'm crazy but, that's, you know, that's their own opinion.
It's not gonna change.
I've always been crazy about storms, I always will be.
The best of them all, probably, was Hurricane Hugo,
went down to Puerto Rico and got a direct hit.
And as it got stronger and stronger,
debris was starting to be lifted off the parking lot,
and it looked like it was gonna get blown back toward us.
So we decided at that point to start going down the stairway.
As we're going down the stairwell,
the rain is being driven into the walls through the stairs,
coming down the stairway.
And the wind you see up here squealing.
At this point it's probably in excess of 150 miles an hour.
And that was quite an experience.
It was like, one of the chasers called it the Hallway from Hell.
I have no reason to be in a storm if it's gonna scare me.
I'll, y'know, get to the point,
y'know, y'know, play the safe route as far as I can.
But if I want to get that ultimate shot, y'know,
of course you're gonna take some chances.
1992. Typhoon Omar, in Guam.
Now is this a piece of wind or is it a piece of wind?
Really! I wouldn't miss a great eye wall like this for anything.
Jim and a fellow tracker have a close call
as Omar's eye wall comes ashore.
Now the storm's placid eye engulfs them.
It seems over, it really does, but it's not.
We're gonna get blitzed again. It's so eerie. I know.
I can't believe that we're going to get blitzed again.
It seems impossible. That was flabbergasting.
The unsettling lull does not last.
Here, the trailing edge of the eye wall rushes in,
with winds blowing in the opposite direction.
God, I didn't... no way!
It looked like it was gonna wait a few minutes!
It wasn't comin' on as fast.
Yeah! If I knew it was this, I would've hurried more.
In 1991, Jim achieves a personal best.
Typhoon Yuri, when it came,
approached the southern part of Guam,
I did a little bit of carelessness there
but I got the storm surge shots that I always wanted to get.
The water came up a little faster than I thought it would.
Winds and low pressure allow the sea surface to rise
near the storm's eye.
When it hits land, this mound of water rushes ashore.
That's what you call storm surge!
Great.
Oh, great!
When the surge is waist-deep, Jim retreats.
He, more than most, knows that
a hurricane's most deadly weapon is not wind, but water.
Nine out of ten hurricane victims are drowned by storm surges.
They can raise tides more than twenty feet above normal,
and flood a hundred miles of coastline under ten feet of water.
Fifteen percent of the world's population live at risk
from severe tropical storms.
Atlantic hurricanes assault the U.S., Mexico and the Caribbean.
Typhoons born over the western Pacific Ocean
batter Japan, China, and the Philippines.
Mostly deadly are the cyclones that strike Bangladesh.
Here, millions farm a river delta in places only inches above sea level.
Escape routes are few.
Loss of life has been appauling.
In a single 1970's storm, over 300,000 dead.
Of all the atmosphere's threats,
these giants should hardly catch us off guard.
Weather satellites track them from birth.
But no technology can predict exactly where one will go.
To penetrate the hurricane's secrets,
researchers ride a flying laboratory into the eye of the storm.
David? Yes, sir.
We're gonna go in at 10,000 feet.
At ten, No?
Yeah. We're playin' it safe.
Looks impressive, anyway.
We have about 15 miles to the beginning of the wall here.
External sensors measure temperature,
air pressure, humidity, and wind speed
as the plane braves the turbulence of the eye wall.
We've got a hundred knots of wind, now.
I thought it might drop off but it hasn't.
Not yet.
If it hasn't by now it probably won't.
We may see some 200 knot gusts here. 25 knot updraft.
Okay, we're just coming into the edge now.
An oasis of calm over nine miles tall,
the eye is virtually clear from sea to sky.
You guys see the center down below there?
I think we're just about directly over it.
Looks good, looks good. I think we got the center.
O, I'll mark it.
The eye's exact location and vital statistics
are sent to forecasters on shore.
Data also flows to this meteorological think- tank,
the Hurricane Research Division, in Miami, Florida.
What global ingredients determine
how many hurricanes are born each year,
and what paths they follow?
Stanley Goldenberg, research meteorologist,
says clues range from the El Nino phenomenon to rainfall in Africa.
He crafts computer models based on the premise
that an organized piece of weather like a hurricane
can be defined in mathematical terms.
The atmosphere is an orderly universe.
There's physical rules, physical laws that govern these things.
It's just a matter of having the right data,
looking at it with the right tools and the right analyses.
I mean, the real art is pulling the information out of the data.
Goldenberg helped refine one of the models
the National Hurricane Center uses to issue forecasts.
But he had never experienced a hurricane on the ground until 1992.
On August 17 th, Tropical Storm Andrew takes shape,
about halfway between Africa and the Caribbean.
During the following days, the storm slowly intensifies.
Then, high level winds begin to tear Andrew apart,
slowing its momentum.
It's slower. It's the slowest one.
Three days puts it here. So by four days...
To Goldenberg, and most other meteorologists,
Andrew has only the slimmest chance of ever becoming a hurricane.
Friday, August 21 st.
As high level winds die down,
Andrew begins to reorganize, and quickly gathers strength.
Computer models show Andrew might head toward southern Florida,
but Goldenberg and his colleagues dismiss any immediate threat.
Stan leaves work early, to prepare for an important weekend.
His wife Barbara is due to deliver their fourth child on Sunday.
750 miles from Miami,
Andrew's winds exceed 74 miles an hour on Saturday, August 22nd.
Hurricane warnings in effect for Dade and Brown Counties.
Hurricane watch in effect...
The first hurricane of the Atlantic season is born.
By noon on Sunday, massive evacuations are ordered
along the Florida coast.
Sunday afternoon.
Right on schedule, Barbara has been in labor since around 6 am.
Here we have from the hurricane to the other action in this room.
Which is Barbara going through early stages of labor.
Four centimeters contracted, going through labor pains,
In the birthing suite, Stan videotapes the proceedings
with all the fervor of an expectant father.
Still, the meteorologist in him can't help but be distracted.
And we still have, waiting for the hurricane.
Beautiful skies. Calm.
You'd never know what was going to happen here
in the next 12 to 14 hours or so.
Late in the day,
Andrew's winds accelerate to a hundred fifty miles an hour.
Traveling nearly due west, it descends upon the Bahamas.
Around 6 PM, it strikes Eleuthera Island,
packing a storm surge 23 feet high, taking four lives.
Having a boy makes you feel like a father
and having a little girl makes you feel like a daddy.
Stan steals a few hours with new arrival Pearl,
then leaves the hospital.
He'll ride out the storm at home.
In Miami, violent skies herald Andrew's approach.
Inland, residents take routine safety measures.
Seven miles from shore,
Stan and his boys are joined by his sister-in-law and family.
Sunday, 23rd of August.
We have the family here:
Jonathan, Daniel, Roger, Benjamin, Joseph,
Aaron, Ruben. We have Ann.
And we're gonna weather it out through the storm.
Say hi, Daniel. Hi
In the dead of night,
Andrew suddenly intensifies as it approaches the tip of Florida.
August 24th, around 4:30 AM. Andrew comes ashore.
Our TV's out, maybe the power's out for the duration of this.
You can hear that outside...
You'll start hear the rule outside.
In the hallway of the Goldenberg house.
Winds outside,
I think, are at least a hundred, hundred and ten miles an hour
or more...
Arie, are you o. K?... It's okay, it's o. K.
And there is the cat...
And there is... every body here?
Just waiting it out in the hall
because we lost the plywood on the front window
The rear plant gate would probibly layrers.
And we are sitting backhere resting in the Lord,
In the hall way.
We can feel our ears possibibly cut?
Pressure drops.
Yes, Johnson.
Lord we thank you and ask for your protection.
This is Stan, at 8:30 in the morning.
We have been through a night.
This is our street, trees down everywhere.
The back street is a history in front of me...
just one window broken on that car.
Trees down everywhere.
These are our sweet precious neighbors
These shadows survive the storm every window cover
with these type shadows survived.
But our house, which had wood shutters, the roof lifted off.
And as you can see, we have no house.
This wall fell on us, containing the refrigerator, the stove.
This is the wall, fell on top of us,
the stove down there,
the cabinets, all fell on top of us,
and that small space you're looking at,
the mattress and everything,
that's where we were pinned during the worst part of the storm.
Incredibly, three adults, six children and a kitten emerge,
unharmed, from the wreckage that was Stan's home.
The scope of the disaster has not yet dawned on Miami.
At the hospital, Barbara rests assured that her family is safe.
We will perhaps get the first look at what's going on, up in the air.
The hospital had an emergency generator,
so we still had power.
And we saw all of the first footage of this destruction and storm,
and we were in shock.
The first areas they went through they were kind of relieved,
saying, "Oh..." and just making interesting comments
about how this car is thrown here and there.
But they became much more sober as they went farther south.
It did not look possible that anybody could be alive.
And that was just a mile or two from my house.
And at that point, I really felt despair.
One two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
And there must have been about, oh, let's say,
counting and trying to estimate
at least three to four hundred mobile homes here.
The rest are just completely gone.
In the morning, my wife finally got through to somebody there
just to find out that I was okay,
somehow we both had a peace, that each of us was okay.
But I still remember the first time,
I got through to her on the phone, I just wept.
I mean it wasn't just the excitement of me getting through to her,
as me pouring out the emotions of what I'd been through.
I mean, we'd been through an incredible experience.
Andrew's storm surge wreaked havoc along the Florida coast.
But its winds devastated an area larger than the city of Chicago:
Some 135,000 dwellings damaged or destroyed.
The homeless numbered 160,000.
It seemed miraculous only 44 died.
Not one official wind gauge survived Andrew's peak winds.
No one knew how fast they had gusted.
Intrigued, Dr. Ted Fujita "Mr. Tornado"
flew to Miami to study the aftermath.
Roofs ripped from homes.
Trees snapped in half.
Concrete beams carried hundreds of feet.
Plywood embedded in a tree trunk.
Fujita finds evidence of winds up to 200 miles an hour.
But his most startling finding comes from aerial surveys
with local meteorologists.
They point out narrow streaks of total devastation
near areas with lesser damage.
To Fujita the patterns are eerily familiar.
He develops a theory:
That the worst damage in Andrew was caused by "mini-swirls":
Tornado-like rotations, brief but violent, embedded in the eye wall.
The theory has personal meaning for Stan Goldenberg.
We never expected the kind of damage we experienced.
Not only were we in the areas of
some of the maximum areas of the storm,
we had in addition, we believe,
an area of more intense winds probably caused by the mini-swirls
that Ted Fujita talks about.
There was a strip, right through my house,
of homes that were devastated, and I was right in that strip.
Stan would relocate his family to a new house.
Parts of Florida remains scarred to this day.
Andrew also ravaged the Louisiana coast, taking 17 lives.
Finally, the storm would vanish over the mid-Atlantic states,
some two weeks after its birth.
Andrew was America's costliest disaster.
But it had a silver lining.
It spared New Orleans, a city defined by water.
Repeatedly flooded and drained over the past three centuries,
the metropolis was built on swampland
surrounded by the Mississippi River.
Shaped like a bowl, the city's terrain rises near its edges,
and dips in its mid-section to below sea-level.
Lake Pontchartrain crowns its northern shore.
Over a hundred miles of levees
and flood walls up to 20 feet above sea level
keep river and lake at bay.
Massive floodgates fill the gaps.
New Orleans has one of the best drainage systems in the world,
powered by 21 colossal pumps.
The city has known hurricanes in this century,
but not a direct hit from a storm like Andrew
- and not with up to a million people to evacuate
over narrow bridges and causeways.
Former Meteorologist-ln-Charge
of the New Orleans National Weather Service office,
Bill Crouch fears the levee system provides a false sense of security.
It's a two-edged sword,
because it protects the people's homes most of the time.
But if water ever comes over the levees,
it's going to get as deep as the levees are tall.
And the lake would be 19 or 20 feet deep.
This means that in parts of New Orleans that are below sea level,
the water could be 30 feet deep.
That is you would not be safe even in a three-story house.
So, those are the scenarios we look at,
which would force people to go upward in the buildings down town,
and even using that refuge,
it's my belief there would still be a great loss of life.
One day, five, perhaps fifty years from now,
a hurricane like Andrew might descend on New Orleans.
The city might be jammed with tens of thousands of tourists
- oblivious to the dangers of hurricanes.
Evacuation would be ordered, and many would heed the call.
But advance weather could move in quickly
and flood the causeway, knocking out bridges.
A hurricane approaching from the southeast
could fill Lake Pontchartrain with its storm surge.
Water would rush over hurricane protection levees.
Pumping stations would be overwhelmed.
This grim scenario may be imaginary, but the threat is not.
A hundred thousand might be stranded in the heart of the city.
The city of New Orleans has enlisted federal, state
and local emergency management agencies
to prepare for just such a nightmare.
There are many other potential disasters along the U.S. Coastline.
It is only a matter of time before another great storm exacts its toll.
Nature has given us fair warning.
A gossamer veil of atmosphere is all that protects us
from the sterile reaches of space.
What we call 'weather' is simply the Earth's attempt
to balance heat and moisture around the globe.
Swirling winds may spawn tornadoes and hurricanes,
but they can also breed whimsy.
A hay devil on a summer afternoon...
Our home is a planet perpetually in the making, forever new.
The same awesome powers that sustain life can also wreak destruction.
It is up to us to be prepared.
There lies the challenge, and the delight,
of living on this dynamic Earth.