IEEE Spectrum March, 2007 - 7

IEEE Spectrum | March 2007 | NA

Management Agency (FEMA), which
has inherited the job of setting insurance rates in coastal areas, has always
based those rates on 100-year-flood
scenarios. But if Katrina itself was a
300-year or 400-year storm, as Resio
surmises, does it make sense now to
be preparing for only a 100-year storm?
Then, too, there will be questions about whether the corps' district office in New Orleans, given
a legacy of shoddy work and wide
public mistrust, can be counted on
to translate conclusions about waves
and surges into proper new elevations; set specs for better levees,
f loodwalls, and gates; and actually
get the work done. "It's not just the

levee system, it's the system that
gave us that system," comments Paul
Kemp, a faculty member at Louisiana
State University and a researcher at
the LSU Hurricane Center, in Baton
Rouge. The center has often been at
loggerheads with the corps.
Kemp claims that before Katrina,
the corps said more than once that it
already had given the city 300-yearstorm protection, only to be proven
catastrophically wrong.
-WilliAm SWeet

The draft final report of the IPET group
evaluating the operational risk and reliability of the New Orleans hurricane protection
system will be posted when complete at
https://ipet.wes.army.mil.

Ontario Quits Coal

in the province's energy plans, Kyoto looms large
Although most industrialized nations
have ratified the Kyoto Protocol-which
requires them, by 2012, to cut their
greenhouse gas emissions to levels
below what emissions were in 1990-
many key signatories have yet to curb

growth in energy consumption, making
it hard or impossible to cut their emissions. Canada, for one, is so far out of
compliance that it is even further from
controlling its emissions than is the
United States, which has been roundly
condemned in Europe for
refusing to accept the terms
BORING: This trench will take water from the
Niagara River to a new generating facility at the falls.
of the treaty. With just
six years remaining before
the Kyoto deadline, when
Canada's emissions are supposed to be 6 percent below
1990 levels, they are at present
nearly 27 percent higher.
The challenges facing
Canada are most acute in
Ontario, the province with
the greatest population
(12.6 million) and economic
power (US $444 billion
gross domestic product, or
roughly half that of New
York state). Ontario needs
to increase local electricitygenerating capacity in order
to stay ahead of demand
that is increasing at an average annual rate approaching
1 percent and to reverse a
growing (and costly) dependence on electricity imported
from neighbors such as
Quebec and New York.
Historically, Ontario residents have not given energy
use a second thought, because
electricity was dirt cheap and
there was never any concern

www.spectrum.ieee.org

NorM BEttS/BlooMBErG NEwS/lANdov

NEWS

just a single 100-year storm. Instead
it starts with a model of typical local
hurricanes and their characteristics;
estimates their probabilities and
likely consequences; and after a lot
of numerical manipulation, obtains a
range of wind speeds, wave heights, and
storm surges. Though the group has been
able to pare down the number of storm
possibilities by focusing on the storm
tracks typical of big hurricanes, it's still
an immense undertaking, "really first of
a kind," says Resio.
The IPET risk group, relying partly
on the storm probabilities developed
by Resio's team, is using a model of the
whole hurricane protection area along the
Gulf coast to assess risks. It will be up to
the corps' New Orleans district office to
determine how those risks translate into
specifications for the improved protection system. Foster anticipates that as the
district prepares plans, the risk group will
be asked to evaluate them, as a follow-up
to its IPET work-a further feedback loop,
or circularity.
When the conclusions of Resio's
team and the IPET risk group are
released, which will be soon, they are
bound to give rise to new questions.
Is the methodology used to calculate
100-year-storm scenarios sound? Does
it adequately factor in projected climate
changes? Is Congress's 100-year mandate
itself adequate?
Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric
scientist at MIT, comments that if
you separate out Gulf hurricanes the
way Resio has done, you'll end up with
too small a data set to detect a trend.
Only about a fifth of the hurricanes
originating in the Atlantic end up in
the Gulf, says Emanuel, whose work
asserting a sharp increase in Atlantic
hurricanes has aroused considerable
debate. "You have to get away from
history and bring in physics," he says.
Katrina certainly was a historychanging event. Though only a
Category 3 storm by landfall, it nonetheless kicked up the highest waves
ever recorded off North America,
generating surges "larger than any
previous storm to strike the area or
[indeed] the North American continent," as IPET put it. Katrina flooded
about 80 percent of New Orleans-
a sprawling city consisting largely of
low-lying ranch-style homes-killing
1600 to 2000 people in the region and
displacing at least two-thirds of the
city's population.
The Federal Emergency

https://ipet.wes.army.mil http://www.spectrum.ieee.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum March, 2007