Hurricane Floyd - Essay Example

Introduction

This article will be highlighting the preparedness and the impact caused by Hurricane Floyd. This will be compared to preparedness and the response during Hurricane Rita. Hurricane Floyd occurrence was in the year 1999 while Hurricane Rita occurred in the year 2005. Hurricane Floyd is said to have been a Cape Verde hurricane type that was considered very powerful. The hurricane hit the United States on its east coast. Hurricane Floyd was to be the fourth hurricane, sixth storm and it was the third greatest hurricane in the Atlantic hurricane season of 1999. Hurricane Floyd activated the third biggest evacuation in the United States record where 2.6 million seaside residents were moved from their homes as the hurricane approached (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola, 2011).

Hurricane Rita, among the Atlantic Hurricanes, came to be the fourth–most extreme to ever be registered. It was the most extreme tropical cyclone, in the Gulf of Mexico, ever seen. The coast of West Africa was its origin and moved westward through the Straits of Florida.

Hurricane Floyd preparedness and response compared to Hurricane Rita

Both Hurricane Floyd and Hurricane Rita were so devastating causing a lot of damage to property and death. Hurricane Floyd caused rainfall in North Carolina. This is a place that had just recently been hit by Hurricane Dennis. This rain led to massive flooding in the area and the rivers were registered to have exceeded the 500-year flood levels. Hurricane Floyd caused the death of 57 people and the damage recorded was estimated at $4.5 billion which is an equivalent cost of $6.31 billion in 2013 (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola, 2011).

Hurricane Rita overwhelmed low-lying areas near the shore in Louisiana causing the effects of Hurricane Katrina that had just happened a month ago to worsen. Lake Charles was hit by massive flooding. In Texas, the massive damage was due to the hurricane winds. The hurricane led to nine counties in Texas being declared as disaster areas. There were interrupted electric services in the states of Louisiana and Texas for weeks after the hurricane. The damage caused by Hurricane Rita along its path was calculated and given to be about $12 billion dollars which is $15.2 billion dollars in 2013. In the four states of the United States directly affected by Rita, there was a fatality of 120 people (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola, 2011).

When Hurricane Floyd was predicted, the United States started to enact some measures in preparation for the Hurricane. In the official forecasts of the storm though, there was no prediction of the movement of the hurricane northwards and that it would weaken before landfall. There was high hurricane alert on the East coast from Florida to Massachusetts although it turned out that only a part of this region experienced the hurricane winds. In planning for a possibly disastrous landfall, there was the evacuation of one million and above residents of Florida. Two hundred and seventy-two of those evacuated were from Miami-Dade County. There was a declaration of emergency by the president of the United States, Clinton, in both Georgia and Florida in expectation of the Hurricane. There was more evacuation when the storm started heading north. Not all areas evacuated were hit by the storm, but this showed a lot of preparedness in the United States during Floyd (Haddow, Bullock, & Coppola, 2011).

Several things were done way better in preparing for Hurricane Floyd than in Hurricane Rita. The first problem arose because the prediction of hurricane Rita was not done early enough like that of Hurricane Floyd. This was to prove to be a huge error because it provided a very short time for a large number of people to be evacuated. Hurricane Rita is known to have sparked the largest evacuation in the history of the United States estimated at 2.5 – 3.7 million people. Hence the time that was needed to evacuate this large number of people was not good enough because there was a late prediction of the storm (Romero, 2005).

Another factor that was well done in the evacuation during Floyd is that there was communication of the happening of the storm and hence there were ordered and requested evacuations depending on the area. But in Rita, there was no effective communication of the happening of the Rita. Some people were not aware that the hurricane was going to take place and hence did not evacuate in time. Others opted to remain and guard their property considering that massive looting of property had taken place during Hurricane Katrina (Romero, 2005). In such cases, there should have been better communication of the happening of the hurricane, and ordered evictions should have taken place.

The evacuation process was well handled during Hurricane Floyd leading to fewer deaths before the storm hit. It was in a manner that there were no traffic snarls as experienced during Rita. The large number of people being evacuated within a small timeframe during Rita led to bottlenecks in the traffic. The freeway system of Houston was at a standstill by the time of mandatory evacuation. The evacuation process during Rita was so ineffective that slightly more than 90 people died due to a heat wave before the storm hit.