Earthstorm (2022) s01e04 Episode Script

All eyes are on the Gulf Coast tonight
as people prepare for a life-threatening,
Category Four storm.
And the mayor of New Orleans
has been warning people to get out now.
Hurricane Ida developed
more rapidly than anyone was prepared for.
And Hurricane Ida
represents a dramatic threat
to the people of the city of New Orleans.
Time is not on our side.
This is a very dangerous
and a very real situation.
Something just blew up.
There's parts of buildings
flying everywhere in front of my face.
Oh, shit!
Hurricanes are
nature's most powerful storms.
And they're becoming stronger,
faster and pushing further inland.
In 2021,
a single storm revealed
the stark realities of climate change.
This is the story of Hurricane Ida.
Chasing hurricanes,
I love that. I feed off that energy.
As far back as I can remember,
I've had a fascination with the sky.
It's kind of a twofold thing
for me and my chase partner, Jeff.
Any time there's a storm around,
there's just something that pulls us in.
With a hurricane,
you're driving into a
200-to 300-mile-wide storm,
and you're in the storm for hours.
Jeff and I have been chasing since 2013.
My role as a storm chaser
is not to collect scientific data.
It's not to bring
weather instruments into these storms.
My purpose
is essentially storm journalism.
We care about people.
We hate to see what's happening to people,
and I think that's a large reason
why we document the damage.
When people are fleeing storms, we're
the ones that go into them and take video
and audio and bring other people
the sense that they're there with us.
But it's not just an adventure.
There's a real serious side to it.
Winds are at 90 miles an hour!
And that's the destruction
that these storms can cause.
On their own,
storms are not an evil thing.
When they intersect with humanity,
that's when it becomes tragic.
August 23rd, 2021.
An atmospheric
depression enters the Caribbean.
Three days later,
it becomes a tropical storm.
The birth of Ida.
Much of the Louisiana
and Mississippi Gulf Coast is bracing
for what could be
a major hurricane this weekend.
Tropical storm Ida
is moving toward the Gulf of Mexico
and is expected
to make landfall on Sunday.
At this point in the 2021 hurricane
season, we hadn't chased a storm yet.
We were holding tight,
we were being patient.
But this looked like the storm.
Yeah, I have a grab bag.
And then when
it's a green-lit chase, I grab that bag.
Four days worth of water and food,
gasoline, safety gear, and I head out.
Surprisingly, my oldest daughter
became very emotional
when I was saying goodbye to her.
This had never happened before.
It really, uh,
it shook me. It caught me off guard.
I made the hard call to walk out
the door and chase this hurricane but
that moment never left me
for the whole chase.
August 27th.
Ida passes over Cuba.
As it accelerates towards the US,
it becomes a Category One hurricane.
The categories
of a hurricane, are based on wind speed.
And structural damage.
Ranging from moderate
to complete destruction.
A hurricane,
in order for it to grow,
it's kind of like a recipe or something.
Everything has to be
kind of in the right balance.
They get most of their energy
from warm ocean water.
Once the ocean gets above 26 degrees,
that's when the storms can form.
Warm ocean air is moist.
Moist air weighs less than dry air.
That causes this upward motion
that creates a vacuum, essentially.
You take the air
that's there, you lift it up,
and all that air on
the sides comes rushing into the center.
That inward air starts rotating
around that low-pressure center.
That's what we know is the,
structure of the hurricane.
On average, 80 hurricanes
form across the world every year.
In the Indian Ocean,
they're known as cyclones.
In the Atlantic, hurricanes.
And in the Western Pacific, typhoons.
Over the last three decades,
the number of Category Four and Five
hurricanes has almost doubled.
The warm water increases
the intensity of the storm.
And the warmer and warmer it gets,
the more available energy
there is to power a storm.
In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan
slammed into the Philippines,
producing record winds, 195 miles an hour.
It's feared
that super typhoons like Haiyan
will become more common
as global temperatures rise.
Good evening. Hurricane Ida
is just hours from roaring ashore,
and right now it's a Category Two storm,
but it's expected to grow into a
life-threatening Category Four hurricane.
At this point, the hurricane is just
feeding off that warm eddy.
That warm, uh, warm water over the Gulf,
and will do so for
the next day and a half.
And if you're not sure really
what that means for a hurricane,
it's like a, uh
it's like a hungry kid being at a buffet.
When I was driving in
on Interstate Ten,
every road that was going away from
Louisiana was basically a parking lot.
Everyone was trying to get away from
the coast and towns like New Orleans.
Ida is bearing down on The
Big Easy and could make landfall 16 years
to the day after Hurricane
Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast.
Hurricane Katrina was one
of the most impactful and strongest storms
that hit the United States of America,
and it hit us 16 years ago.
It was a Category Five hurricane.
Wind forces over 170 miles per hour.
An entire ward
of the city, the Ninth Ward,
appears to be up to its rooftops in water.
Two and a half million people
are without power tonight.
Over 43,000 people in Red Cross shelters.
Our city sat in flood waters
for over a three week plus period.
80% of the city was underwater.
People stranded
on rooftops without water and food.
911, what's your emergency?
I'm stuck in the attic with me
and my little sister and my mom
and we got water in the whole house.
And we lost over 1800 lives.
The levee failure was
the most significant impact of Katrina.
Seeing Hurricane Ida,
one of the strongest storms
that come our way since Katrina,
clearly we were
bracing ourselves for whether or not
they were going to fail or not.
If that happens again,
it will devastate this community.
As Ida approaches
the Louisiana coastline,
wind speeds increase dramatically.
It's about, a little after
04:30 in the morning, and um,
yeah a very concerning situation.
We are in Houma, Louisiana,
which is predicted to be ground zero.
Uh, Jeff is, behind me here,
still asleep in his vehicle.
Good morning.
Morning.
What are we looking at?
Well.
Hurricane Ida, according
to the hurricane hunters,
went straight from a CAT2 to a CAT4,
- within one and a half hours.
- My gosh.
Insane.
That's called rapid intensification.
That's a dangerous storm, man.
When a tropical system
intensifies at least
35 miles-per-hour of wind speed
over the course of 24 hours, that's
classified as rapid intensification.
This is something that's
been happening more and more.
And in 2021, the entire Gulf
of Mexico was just, it was boiling.
Not literally, but it was basically
boiling water for this hurricane.
We call it nightmare fuel.
And the warmest waters
is right on the coastline.
So as it approached the coast, we were
expecting it to intensify even further.
This is the time to stay inside.
Do not venture out.
No sight seeing. This is very serious.
My worst fears for the city
was not wanting to lose life.
Shelter in place.
Hunker down. It is vitally important.
I wanted to make sure that our people
was as prepared as possible
and that was going
to be a sheltering-in-place model,
which was not
the model during Hurricane Katrina.
We need you to stay
in from this point forward.
All morning. All afternoon. All evening.
The protection
of your people is the top priority.
Not having your people staged
on an interstate in harm's way,
especially when the storm is moving fast.
Mandatory evacuation was not an option.
It takes 72 hours
to evacuate a city safely.
Hurricane Ida has intensified so rapidly,
there's no time
to enact the evacuation plan.
People in Louisiana have
to stay put and hope for the best.
Something like half the
world's population lives at the coast.
And we know that people
continue to move to the coast.
This is going to be
problematic in the long term.
50, a 100 years from now. Will it even be
possible to evacuate the way we do today?
In a laboratory,
it's possible to assess
the potential damage to housing
caught in the crosshairs of the storm.
With the onset of strong wind,
we begin to see somewhat
cosmetic damage to the structure.
So we'll see water
ingress through the building.
But as the wind speeds pick up,
they might cause a breach
in the building envelope.
Say a window breaking
or a door blowing in.
And ultimately it sets
the structure up for a cascading failure.
The simplest way
to think about wind loads on a structure,
is, imagine that time
when you've had your hand
stuck out the car
and you're driving down the road,
say it's 70 miles per hour. Well,
suddenly that car accelerated to 140.
The loads that act
on your hand, they wouldn't double.
They would actually quadruple.
Because wind forces increase
with the square of the wind speed.
So even a small change in wind speed,
can lead to a large change in
the performance of that structure.
So when you see
a Category One or Category Two,
you see, you know,
a fair amount of damage.
But when you get to
that Category Three, Four and Five,
that's when we begin to see extreme damage
because these loads are so intense.
The scene here in the next hour
or two is going to deteriorate rapidly.
Um, tropical storm force winds here.
Already seeing small branches
and little pieces of debris blow by.
As a storm chaser,
there's a lot of mixed emotions there.
Because you're going to experience
something that Mother Nature throws out
that most people don't get to experience.
But then, there's a reality
that people's lives
and businesses
are going to be changed forever.
August 29th. 11:55 a.m.
Ida tears into the Louisiana coastline.
A Category Four storm with
winds gusting 150 miles an hour.
Whoa. Whoa!
It's so strong
it temporarily reverses the flow of
the Mississippi River.
There was a point where
we were back at the parking garage
and Jeff knew he needs
to go out and shoot some stuff
and decided to head out
in a separate vehicle.
And this allows us as a team
to get multiple stories
going on at the same time.
And so I drove up
to the top level of the parking garage
to experience the strength of this
storm before it gets too dangerous.
Gabe Cox from
the outer eye wall of Hurricane Ida.
I'm about to step outside so you guys
can get a sense for how strong it is.
Uh, here we go.
I'm leaning at a 45 degree angle.
My feet were beginning
to slide back behind me.
At that point, the tree behind me snaps.
Holy cow!
I decided to duck behind the car.
Oh, shit.
This wind was screaming by me.
We probably had wind gusts in excess
of 100 miles an hour at that point.
Here we go.
Phew!
That was more than I bargained for.
I texted Jeff to see where he was,
and he told me,
"I'm getting some amazing footage.
I'm going to hold tight
for just a little bit longer."
The next text that I get from Jeff is that
he was actually trapped at his location.
And he has no way to get back.
And his phone's dying and it won't charge.
Hi, you've reached Jeff,
you know what to do.
I'm imagining
a worst case scenario.
I was completely convinced
that I was going to have plenty of time
to go document some minor winds,
and then be able
to get back to our home base.
Uh, but things
started turning pretty quickly.
Holy cow.
I thought, "Hey, I'm going to go
and get to the south side of this building
and hide behind it.
I'm going to document this roof
because I think this roof is going
to come toppling over pretty soon."
Oh, my gosh.
Huge pieces of wood and tin are
literally scraping the front of my car.
All it takes is a part
of a roof coming through your windshield.
You can feel the vibrations from your car
being moved to the left and
to the right and forward and backwards.
You can smell lumber
that's being taken up and thrown around.
It's an absolutely terrifying situation.
I'm just kind of
hunkered down into my car, just praying.
"God, please give me five minutes.
Give me five minutes where I can breathe,
I can look, and maybe
I can drive somewhere more safely."
I can't hang here forever
because this building is coming apart.
Oh, my gosh.
Oh, shoot!
There was a, I would call it
a random break in the wind speed.
I knew that was my one chance.
My phone is dead at this point.
And I couldn't remember how to get back.
Street signs are gone.
The landscape of the town
looks drastically different.
So I'm going up and down streets
that don't look recognizable.
Certain landmarks,
they're not there anymore.
I found myself trying
to avoid power lines, flood waters.
Pieces of roofs all over the place.
And so I don't want to get a flat tire.
There's just so much anxiety.
I finally figured out where I was
when I got to the center
of the town and remembered, "Okay, uh,
if I take two more turns, I will
finally be back to where I need to be."
I pulled in, and to me,
it was complete silence.
I had spent five and a half
to six hours with my ears popping.
It was like being at a rock concert
and you are so used to the loud noise,
you don't hear the same.
That's exactly what it felt like.
And lo and behold,
right in front of me, there's Gabe.
I just saw him wide-eyed, pulling into the
parking garage like, he had seen a ghost.
And you could tell
that he had been through
just a crazy ordeal,
just by the look on his face.
He just turns around at me,
goes, "What in the world?"
I was like, "I don't know."
And I was so exhausted. I could have
slept for about 24 hours at that point.
It was utter relief,
to see my friend again.
Things were right in the world again.
The storm
leaves a trail of destruction.
In Louisiana,
a million people are without power,
six hundred thousand without water,
and thousands are left homeless.
Um, this is Larose, Louisiana.
This is my apartment. I've been
here for like, going on two years.
It's been a year
and like six months I've been here.
And it's, this is just devastating.
I just had a baby.
My baby is eight months old.
It's just devastating.
And this is our home.
I ain't never been
through nothing like this.
If you come upstairs, be careful.
I don't want nothing to come falling.
Oh! It's dry rotting and dropping.
This is my room right here.
Um, you can't even
get in there, as you can see.
And if you come
this way, this is my baby's room.
This was my baby's room.
If I can even get right there.
Try to take what I can take.
Brand new clothes.
I ain't trying to fall.
At least I saved something.
Hold on.
We haven't talked to no one.
We don't know who gonna help.
But I'm not trying to sit around and wait.
If I gotta go move and find me a job
elsewhere, that's what I'm gonna do.
In the US,
hurricanes cause almost 50 billion
dollars worth of damage every year.
But it's not the wind
that's the biggest problem.
It's the storm surge
and the flooding that follows.
As the storm came in,
the water got almost to the power line.
I'd say right up here. I'm 5'9" so
About,
ten feet above my hand.
It blew windows out. It blew steps away.
All this stuff
that you see now is replaced.
Water is very powerful,
especially when it comes in, like,
through a storm,
with winds on top of 100 miles an hour.
Came in from the southeast.
It used to be that you can
buy something and build, like this shed,
and expect, uh, your grandkids to live in.
Now, you don't
know if it's going to make a year.
You don't know if it's going
to make hurricane season.
We got to put our heads
together and think, and think quick.
Not a 100 years from now,
because we just don't have time.
The interaction of wind and
water can be studied in a giant wave tank,
simulating the effects of a storm surge.
We're sitting on
the top of this sustained tank
and that is a 75-feet-long facility
where we can create the conditions
like what you see at the ocean surface
in a really intense
Category Five hurricane.
In the Northern Hemisphere,
hurricanes spin
in a counterclockwise direction.
So we talk about
the dirty side of the storm
that's being on the right side,
where all the onshore winds are coming.
Those can drive tremendous surges inshore.
Elevations of water level
as much as, say 20 feet.
You think about a Category Five storm
on a 155 mile an hour wind,
it's pushing in tremendously
large waves into your coastal properties,
into upper decks of elevated houses even.
Like a bus hitting a building repeatedly.
The best defense
against a storm surge
is to build houses taller,
on stilts, above the flood level.
Elevation will give you a lot.
That'll help out a lot.
But if a storm surge brings those waves up
high enough
that you can reach to the elevated levels,
then you can get catastrophic
damage even to elevated structures.
It's a real problem.
The US Coast Guard are first
to see the full extent of the damage.
By flying over the path of Hurricane Ida.
Regardless of the number
of hurricanes you fly through
as a Coast Guard Aviator,
every hurricane
still affects you emotionally,
just by seeing
the destruction of the storms.
This whole town is flooded.
It took some damage.
It's unfortunate.
Yeah.
It became clear
that New Orleans may have been spared,
but some of the outlying
parishes may not have been so lucky.
The storm surge definitely
makes it very hard to differentiate
what used to be and what is now.
What we're used
to seeing as like swamplands
and fields and marsh is now just water.
It looked like the Gulf of Mexico.
The roofs
are missing on the right side.
Somebody's got their work cut out
for them fixing all those power lines.
Grand Isle
had been severely damaged.
Homes were either
leveled or uninhabitable.
This is a total loss.
Grand Isle's pretty much a total loss.
My name is David Camardelle.
I'm the mayor of Grand Isle.
Born and raised here.
Wouldn't live nowhere else.
Grand Isle is just unique.
It's the only human inhabited
island right here in Louisiana.
It's paradise.
So what happened is, the water
came in from the back of the island.
And then you're gonna start seeing sand
just levelled from one end to the other,
and just trash going in the back.
You see the trash going to the levee.
And just, all this sand just
You couldn't even find the road.
And all the power lines
were just crossways
in different parts of the road.
And then when you get
that type of wind,
what it did,
it just brought a wall of water
and it just gushed on this side
and it just pushed
it all the way across the island.
And all them bays in the back,
all them canals with them camps,
it just wiped out everything.
Bullseye.
Out of 2800 hundred homes,
we had about 700 destroyed.
It was nothing but devastation.
One comment, one of the papers
said, "Is it worth saving Grand Isle?"
Let me tell you something.
As long as there's one grain of sand
to plant the American flag,
we ain't going nowheres.
What you see in the field
stays with you.
It motivates everything
that you do back in the laboratory.
This is not acceptable.
Anybody who lives on
a hurricane prone coast
should be very concerned
about what happened here in Grand Isle.
Because this
will not be an isolated event.
Here we see a home that survived
perfectly intact following Hurricane Ida.
And its performance gives us hope that
we can engineer buildings to withstand
Category Four or Category Five hurricanes.
You can see the massive timber
pilings supporting the entire house.
You could see
a significant elevation difference
between the ground and the bottom
of the living residence.
22 feet, I'm told.
We also have this lateral bracing,
which provides
significant resistance to the wind
and wave loads
that would act on the structure.
It has impact resistant windows
and storm shutters.
And a metal roof that will be just as
good 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road.
Such solutions are expensive
and the bill will only keep growing
as hurricanes become more powerful.
The only other option
is to let nature take its course
and abandon places like Grand Isle.
From Louisiana,
Ida pushes northeast.
Traveling across eight other states.
It is now an extratropical storm.
But it is still
dangerously saturated with moisture.
What's important to understand
in a climate-changed environment,
we expect more intense hurricanes,
but we also have more water vapor
available to the atmosphere to tap into,
that ultimately
reaches the ground as rainfall.
And in fact,
what we see is significant floods
in places we don't normally see them.
Many of these regions
don't have the infrastructure or policies
that prepare them for hurricanes.
And so we have a problem.
Four days later,
Ida hits New York,
A thousand miles
from where it first made landfall.
And still it's dumping
huge amounts of rain.
It's a weird feeling
to know that you've escaped with your life
from a storm in Louisiana,
three, four, five days later you see the
storm still churning. It hadn't stopped.
The day that Ida hit,
I was sitting at home with my wife when,
at about a quarter to ten,
I started to get calls
from our MTA subway management team.
The numbers are extraordinary.
Three point five inches
of rain fell between nine and ten p.m.
The largest one hour rainfall
in New York City recorded history.
When it hit, we had about a dozen
trains that ended up being stranded.
Basically, if the MTA's not operating,
the city's not operating, full stop.
Our bus drivers were heroic.
They kept operating right
through the storm and in many cases,
they were picking up people who were stuck
and didn't have any other way to get home.
We became almost a door to door service
for a lot of people through
the use of our incredible bus system.
What we're experiencing now is that
the climate is so different than it was,
you know, in that 100-year-ago time
when the subway system was built.
And we're having to adjust
to the new reality of climate change.
By early September,
Ida has moved over
the cooler waters of the North Atlantic.
Starved of energy, it weakens and dies.
The storm has caused
75 billion dollars worth of damage
and taken 95 lives.
Think about this.
We were talking several days prior
about an innocent looking tropical
wave off the coast of Venezuela.
And now we transition
to a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico
with dire implications.
Followed by the remnants
of that storm, impacting people
literally hundreds to thousands
of miles away from where it was birthed.
This was one storm.
Imagine a year with 20 storms like this.
Hurricane season just ended.
But it's not a break to sit back and wait.
It's a break to work.
To do more in preparation
for the next hurricane season
that could be unprecedented,
like I've experienced
the last two to three.
Climate change is happening.
It's not something in the future. It's not
just about polar bears or the year 2080.
We are living
climate change right now and hurricanes
are manifesting
themselves within that environment.
I think the average person
on the street sees that,
and understands
that something's different.
Hurricane Ida
is a wake-up call.
Billions of dollars are needed to shore up
defenses before the next hurricane,
cyclone or typhoon.
As the speed of climate change
accelerates, so do the challenges.
For all of us.
Subtitle translation by: Antoinette Smit