MIT professors quoted on Hurricane KatrinaIn the wake of Hurricane Katrina, news reporters consulted MIT experts about the science of hurricanes and the protection and rebuilding of cities. Some excerpts from the resulting articles are below. Please note that links may expire and/or require registration. Joshua AngristJoshua Angrist is an economics professor at MIT with research interests in education, labor, immigration and econometric methods for program and policy evaluation. "It is possible that we are not spending enough on levees, and it is also possible that the people moving in behind those levees are not being charged enough--for flood insurance, for example. If they were required to pay for flood insurance, they might not build there." -- Joshua Angrist Rafael BrasRafael Bras, Edward A. Abdun-Nur Professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, also consults on a project to install floodgates to protect Venice. "What you have in New Orleans is a delta and if you do not supply the sediment to the delta, then, in essence, you have increased erosion and that erosion will endanger your situation further." -- Rafael Bras "The long-run solution, in my opinion, is not only dealing with the engineering of barriers, but also with the nourishment of the natural system by bringing sediment down. You've got to let the river do its job." -- Rafael Bras "You'll never be able to control nature. The best way is to understand how nature works and make it work in our favor." -- Rafael Bras Kerry EmanuelKerry Emanuel is a professor of meteorology in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, and author of the just-published "Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes." Earlier in the summer, Emanuel reported that hurricanes have grown more powerful and destructive over the last three decades due in part to global warming, and this work was cited often in the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina. "My mother has an elderly friend in New Orleans, and I did something I never do. I sent her a message: 'You ought to get out, now!'" -- Kerry Emanuel "It is all down to chance. We were seeing the laws of chance operating there. Katrina was near maximum intensity when it hit landfall and it hit a very vulnerable place." -- Kerry Emanuel "It is tempting to ascribe Katrina, Rita and now Wilma to global warming effects, but I am not sure that would pass statistical muster." -- Kerry Emanuel "A rational scale would have equal increments of either the wind speed squared or the wind speed cubed." - Kerry Emanuel "A hurricane is an engine and how fast that engine can run is very sensitive to the temperature of sea water, so when it goes up, the engine can spin faster. We see a very strong correlation between measures of a hurricane's energy and ocean temperatures." - Kerry Emanuel "I think it's a safe bet that the next hundred years are going to have more Cat 4 and 5 hurricane strikes in the US than the last hundred years. But we're not used to thinking on those time scales, and that's part of the problem." -- Kerry Emanuel "The temperature of the tropic oceans is warmer than it's been in 150 years." -- Kerry Emanuel "If you consider hurricanes over their entire life, and not just when they make landfall, you really do see an upward trend in the power of hurricanes--not in their frequency--but in the magnitude of the wind speed and also in their duration." -- Kerry Emanuel "'Divine Wind' amazing read after Katrina" "What has everybody in my profession so concerned--and we've been concerned for decades--is the confluence of a huge upsurge in the coastal population with a natural upswing in the number of storms in the Atlantic." -- Kerry Emanuel "Hurricanes have killed more people worldwide in the last 50 years than any other natural cataclysm." -- Kerry Emanuel, in the preface to his new book on hurricanes. "We're in for a rough ride over the next 10 years." -- Kerry Emanuel, emphasizing that the current increase in hurricanes in the Atlantic is part of a natural cycle. Thomas A. KochanThomas A. Kochan is a professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-director of the MIT Workplace Center. "The key principle should be to give all adults able and willing to work access to training and a guaranteed job in the clean-up and rebuilding process. By doing so we will give them a stake in their future and the skills and opportunities they need to rebuild their lives for the long run." -- Thomas A. Kochan Robert LangerInstitute Professor Robert Langer conducts research at the interface of biotechnology and materials science. "The biggest problem we've had is getting funding. The government will spend $50 billion on recovery, and we could have helped them for a great deal less." -- Robert Langer Henry PollakowskiHenry Pollakowski is the director of the Housing Affordability Initiative at MIT's Center for Real Estate. "You just can't help but thinking and worrying about people getting excessively afraid and selling at excessively low prices." -- Henry Pollakowski, referring to New Orleans property owners Yossi SheffiYossi Sheffi is the director of the MIT Center for Transporation and Logistics and author of the forthcoming book "The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage." ''It takes time to do all this, and economic activity shifts. Companies may decide to build those facilities in the Port of Houston. Some of this traffic may never come back." -- Yossi Sheffi "Instead of taking decisive actions, city, state and federal officials argued with one another; communications broke down, and too many civil servants, from New Orleans police officers to Louisiana state officials to FEMA directors, did not have the urgency or the passion required." -- Yossi Sheffi "The issues there entirely have nothing to do with technology. They entirely have to do with reporting lines, organization lines, agreeing to work together. The technology is there." -- Yossif Sheffi, on communication among leaders during catastrophic events. Lawrence ValeLawrence Vale is a professor and the department head of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He co-edited "The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster." "For at least the last 200 years or so, however, large cities have almost always been rebuilt. Regardless of whether they have been flooded, burned, bombed, starved, shaken, or poisoned, we have long bypassed the age of 'lost cities.' " -- Lawrence Vale "New Orleans will be rebuilt, not just because of its history and culture, but because of where it is. America's greatest river system needs to feed through a great port, and a port simply cannot exist without a city to support it." -- Lawrence Vale "The nation and the world have seen who really lives in a proud but troubled American city just now, and the question is, how are we going to respond to that?" -- Lawrence Vale "There's a deeply rooted necessity to turn disaster into opportunity." -- Lawrence Vale "The question is, what do we mean by recovery? Is it getting the hotel occupancy numbers back up in the French Quarter? Or is it fixing low-income schools or working on the worst housing problems?" -- Lawrence Vale "In many ways, it's a lot easier to cope with the engineering challenges of rebuilding a city than it is with the social ones." -- Lawrence Vale "We have ignored the ecosystem of the Mississippi Delta at our peril for more than 100 years." -- Lawrence Vale "The cultural provenance of New Orleans stands out in a way that isn't true of other parts of the South." -- Lawrence Vale "I think there will be a disproportionate amount of attention to restoring the tourism image of New Orleans, but the problem is that a lot of the people who serve the tourist industry don't live in the French Quarter." -- Lawrence Vale. "All the experience of the last 200 years has been that no matter how devastated a city is, no matter how vulnerable a location, the almost ubiquitous experience has been to rebuild on that same site." -- Lawrence Vale "What inevitably happens is that the post-disaster environment is a window onto the inequalities of the power structures of the place before the disaster hit." -- Lawrence Vale |
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RELATEDExperts available to discuss hurricanes and their aftermath - MIT faculty with expertise on hurricanes and their aftermath are available for comment to members of the media. 9/1/2005 Speakers explore resilience of cities post-disaster - Throughout history, hundreds of cities have been permanently lost to natural disaster and war, but in the last 200 years, the trend has been to rebuild, said Professor Lawrence Vale, head of MIT's urban studies and planning department, at an Oct. 5 talk at MIT. 10/18/2005 Hurricane symposium zeroes in on response - MIT professors at a Sept. 30 symposium found that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina "varied markedly," with good work by the Coast Guard and National Weather Service, and deficiencies on the part of FEMA. 10/5/2005 Post-hurricanes, MIT gets to work - In response to the hurricanes in the Gulf Coast region, members of the MIT community have created a number of educational initiatives, including a series of symposia that starts Sept. 30 with "How Can We Improve Disaster Response?" 9/28/2005 Jobs are key to rebuilding, professor says - "It's all about jobs" must be the tireless mantra of efforts to rebuild the families, communities and economy of the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina, according to a professor in the Sloan School of Management. 9/28/2005 Blown here by Katrina, students start anew - MIT is hosting 10 undergraduates from areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, and has accepted 15 graduate students. Two of the undergraduates come from the University of New Orleans, one from Xavier University, one from Loyola and six are from Tulane. 9/21/2005 Professor offers lesson from storm response - Resilient corporations -- those that have survived and flourished despite disruption and disaster -- have much to teach government agencies about how to prepare for crises like Hurricane Katrina, according to Yossi Sheffi. 9/21/2005 Faculty pool ideas for Katrina assistance - The MIT faculty has responded to the crises left in Hurricane Katrina's terrible wake with many ideas for the immediate relief and long-term recovery of the Gulf Coast. 9/21/2005 MIT meets hurricane crisis with care, can-do spirit - Fifteen undergraduate students from the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast arrived on campus this week as MIT continued its efforts to help out in the wake of the devastating storm. 9/8/2005 MIT response to Hurricane Katrina - An MIT web site listing resources and ways to help More: Civil engineering |
