Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Tracy by a few. Unintentionally, a
victim-helper rela-
tionship
became established to the point that little
encouragement was given to victims to play an active
role in their own recovery. Disaster victims in Australia
are resourceful. To treat them otherwise impedes the
social recovery from disaster.
The long-term response to Cyclone Tracy was also
negative. The decision to rebuild and the method of
allowing rebuilding did not take into consideration
the long-term effects on human mental and physical
health. Large sums of money were poured into
rebuilding lavish government offices and facilities. The
rebuilding effort was taken over by outsiders, and
the growth of Darwin beyond 1974 population levels
was encouraged. The rebuilding became a 'sacred
cow', with the visible commitment to the rebuilding by
the federal government leading to unlimited growth.
Locals who still lived in Darwin objected to redevelop-
ment plans, stating that they had no say in the range of
plans put forward. Residents evacuated to the south
had no say in the redevelopment at all. Only men
were allowed to return to the city to rebuild. The men,
isolated from their families for up to one year, grouped
together socially. When their families finally returned
home, many of these men could not break back
into family groupings, most of which had completely
changed (for example, children had physically and
mentally grown in the absence of a male role figure).
Even though within the first year, returnees suffered
less physically and emotionally than non-returnees,
returnees in the long term suffered the same conse-
quences as non-returnees. By 1985, over 50 per cent of
the families who experienced Tracy had broken up.
The personal problems resulting from Cyclone Tracy
are now being imparted to the second generation, the
children, to be passed on in future years to another
generation unless rectified. Today, Darwin is a trans-
formed city. It is estimated that 80 per cent of the
people now living there, never lived through Cyclone
Tracy.
total evacuation of the population, either horizontally
or vertically. Horizontal evacuation involves moving
large numbers of people inland from flood-prone
coastal areas. In August 1985, millions of people were
evacuated, some more than once, as Hurricane Danny
wandered unpredictably around the Florida coast and
then headed into the Gulf States. This type of evacu-
ation can be especially difficult where traffic tends
to jam on escape routes. The alternative is vertical
evacuation into high-rise, reinforced buildings. This
approach is taken in Miami Beach, where limited
causeways to the mainland restrict the number of
people who can flee, where the population is elderly
and hence physically immovable, and where safe
structures can easily accommodate the majority of the
population. There is a concerted effort to build coastal
protection works and even try to modify the intensity
of hurricanes through cloud seeding. A high priority is
also put on research activities that model, predict, or
quantify hurricanes and related hazards. Some east
coast states, such as North Carolina and Maine, have
development plans that exclude development from
low-lying coastal zones subject to storm surge and wave
erosion due to hurricanes. These setback lines are
equivalent to 30-100 years of average erosion.
The above measures have effectively reduced the
loss of life due to tropical cyclones in the United States.
However, there are serious flaws with the evacuation
procedures. Most evacuations actually take up to
30 hours to carry out, whereas the general populace
believes that it would require less than one day to flee
inland to safety. The evacuation system also relies
heavily upon warnings of hurricane movement put out
by the National Hurricane Center, which attempts to
give 12 hours' warning of hurricane movements. In
fact, hurricanes move unpredictably and can shift
dramatically within six hours. At one point in time,
Hurricane Hazel moved at speeds of 50 km hr
-1
. In the
United States, the time required for evacuation
currently falls well short of the monitoring and forecast
lead times for hurricanes. There is also the problem
that 80 per cent of the 50 million people living today in
hurricane-affected areas have never experienced an
evacuation. These same people, together with develop-
ers, have become complacent about the hurricane
threat because the frequency and magnitude of
hurricanes has decreased in recent decades. The
1970s, in fact, experienced the lowest frequency of
hurricanes ever recorded. At present along the whole
United States
(American Meteorological Society, 1986; Carter, 1987)
The United States government believes that early
warning and monitoring is the best method to
reduce loss of life due to tropical cyclones. Weather
satellites were originally deployed to predict and track
cyclones, thus giving enough warning to permit the
