What has Galveston done to prepare itself for another hurricane?
After the storm, it built a seawall, but meteorologists fear the wall may have made Galveston complacent. Most of the city’s new housing is rising on land beyond the wall’s protection, adjacent to little signs marking an evacuation route. I was fascinated to learn that despite satellites and hurricane-hunting aircraft and computer models, no hurricane expert thinks the days of monstrously deadly hurricanes have passed forever. Like seismologists, they believe a Big One is long overdue, and they rank Galveston as one of the most likely targets. They envision a great storm that does something unexpected — accelerates suddenly, veers, or undergoes the kind of explosive deepening that marked the hurricane of 1900 — and catches the city’s 60,000 residents before they have a chance to evacuate or, perhaps worse, in midevacuation. Technology has produced the illusion that it has so defanged hurricanes that they’ll never surprise us again. But no one who has spent any time studying hurricane
