Long title at Nergene
There's a mind in the forest very much like our own.
Jockeying for status, developing unique cultures, and sometimes engaging in warfare.
Though our ancestors parted ways with the chimp some 6 million years ago, it's been
said that chimpanzees and humans share a primate soul.
Join us as we come face to face with our nearest relations in National Geographic's The New
Chimpanzees.
April 1912, the greatest maritime disaster in North Atlantic history.
RMS Titanic was the ship they called Unsinkable.
It was a luxurious floating palace, the largest ship of her time, doomed from the moment her
maiden voyage began.
Seventy-four years later, the Titanic's resting place is uncovered and explorer Dr. Robert
Ballard dives deep into the disaster that shook the world.
National Geographic journeys through tragic corridors beneath the sea to uncover the secrets
of the Titanic.
This is the bottom of the ocean, an ocean of air as vast and volatile as any sea.
Above the earth's surface, currents ebb and flow.
Some spiral into whirlwinds.
The dust devil has more bluster than bite.
Other twisters are downright deadly.
Riddos pack the fastest winds on earth.
But in magnitude, this spinning giant goes unmatched.
Hurricane, typhoon, cyclone, all equally fearsome.
By any name, the greatest storms on earth.
Severe tropical storms afflict every continent except Antarctica.
In this century, they have claimed over half a million lives.
Tornadoes have killed over 10,000 in the United States alone.
Today electronic eyes pierce the atmosphere and map its shifting winds.
Scientists chart the anatomy of a storm.
Their sensors record speed and bearing.
But none can predict the birth of a killer.
Nothing in our power can stop the fury of nature's whirling winds.
Early spring, 1991.
The southern sun heats the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Warm, moist air rises and travels northwest over Texas, Louisiana, and on toward the central
United States.
More than 1,000 miles away, cool, dry air rushes south from Canada.
Rising over the Rockies, dry upper-level air flows east, then spills onto the Great Plains.
These forces collide over Tornado Alley on Friday, April 26, 1991.
Fast winds high above the ground over slower winds below make the air roll horizontally
like a pencil on a tabletop.
The atmosphere is unstable.
Storms erupt across the plains.
Here and there, an updraft lifts the horizontal spinning of the air into a vertical position.
Now the storm rotates as it feeds on warm, moist air near the ground.
The day gives rise to supercells, the most complex and dangerous thunderstorms on Earth.
Their underbellies bubble with instability.
Lightning and hail are the least of their threats.
Under the right conditions, they can also spawn monsters.
The National Weather Service has tracked the warning signs for a week, predicting severe
weather.
By April 26, the conditions are textbook perfect for a major outbreak of tornadoes.
Throughout the afternoon and evening, across the central states, 56 twisters are reported.
Then, at 557, a killer touches down in Kansas.
In Wichita, residents are sitting down to dinner when warnings send them running to
basements and storm shelters.
On 620, the tornado takes on a pinkish hue as it pulverizes a nursery full of geraniums.
By the time it hits McConnell Air Force Base, the twister is nearly 300 feet wide.
The
base hospital, school, rec center, and over 100 housing units are leveled.
629.
In Andover, the town siren fails, but most residents heed warnings by police and news
reports.
The tornado's funnel has widened to almost 600 feet.
On 640, it tears through the Golden Spur Mobile Home Park.
The twister finally dissipates northeast of Andover.
Within minutes, its parent storm drops another funnel along the Kansas turnpike.
Can you get in the left flank, Greg?
Yeah.
Thought I didn't help us.
Go back.
You're okay.
You're okay.
Keep going, man.
Keep going.
Faster?
No.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Watch faster.
Watch faster.
A local TV crew tries to outrun it.
Watch faster.
Greg's catching us.
You gotta go, buddy.
Even at 85 miles an hour, they can't get out of its way.
Get up under here.
Under here.
They stop at an overpass where a father and his two daughters run for car.
You're okay.
Hang on.
You're okay.
You're okay.
As the twister spins out its final moments, a dread calm takes its place.
Along the turnpike, people are pulled from trucks and cars tossed like children's toys.
Andover is hardest hit.
In what was the Golden Spur mobile home park, ten bodies are found.
Is anybody in there?
Kansas bears a bitter toll.
Over 1,700 homes destroyed or damaged and 20 dead.
Survivors will never forget.
The car was hovering.
It was about three foot off the ground, just sort of floating in the air.
Then all of a sudden, the car left and went right out the roof.
What looked like typing paper floating around was really not.
It was like...
Garage doors.
Garage doors and window frames.
Window frames.
Parts of houses.
Ambushed on a country road, Brooke Ibarra took shelter under the nearest tree.
In a flash, she was airborne, then dropped 1,000 feet away.
The cows all of a sudden started running like a stampede.
I was picked up by the tornado and there was all sorts of debris.
One thing I remember was the cow that flew past me.
He was screaming.
And then before I knew it, it was over and I was just laying in the field next to a tractor
engine.
Wounds are healed.
Neighborhoods rise from the rubble.
The human spirit endures.
Such is life in Tornado Alley, USA.
Midwesterners once called them cyclones.
Early photographs and motion pictures held viewers spellbound.
Tornadoes begat their own myths.
Some claimed they fused coins in people's pockets and cooked potatoes in the ground.
In truth, they make airborne missiles of everyday objects.
Some have deposited heirlooms 40 miles from home.
Do they pluck feathers from chickens?
No.
Blame that on sheer fright.
They inspire no less terror in people.
April 3rd and 4th, 1974.
In the largest outbreak on record, 148 tornadoes race across 13 states.
March 18th, 1925.
The deadliest tornado in history leaves the longest path.
219 miles of continuous devastation.
689 dead.
Until the 1950s, accurate tornado wind speeds remain a mystery.
Then a frame-by-frame analysis of this footage clocks flying debris at 170 miles an hour.
Tornado science takes a leap forward in 1953, when Dr. Ted Fujita leaves Japan for the American
Midwest.
The main reason why we are here is to find out what tornado did, and in case of future
tornadoes, what people should do, that's the kind of thing we want to find out.
Four decades of research will earn him the title Mr. Tornado.
At disaster sites, Fujita proves there's much to be learned without braving a twister directly.
He likens tornadoes to criminals who leave their fingerprints behind.
Ground markings are clues to a twister's inner structure and dynamics.
To test his theories, he builds a tornado machine at the University of Chicago.
He discovers that most strong tornadoes are actually several small twisters rotating around
the center of a larger one.
These mini tornadoes can lay waste to one house, yet leave its neighbor unscathed.
Fujita's ideas have been amply confirmed in nature and remain a cornerstone of tornado
science.
Although they occur around the world, three out of four tornadoes streak the skies over
the United States.
They favor the springtime and the warm hours between noon and sunset.
We say a tornado touches down.
It actually sucks in air from near the ground and carries it upward in a spiral.
Tornadoes range from 150 to 1,200 feet in width and travel over land at about 30 miles
an hour.
The funnel is often hollow, a tube of condensed water vapor that takes on the color of dust
and debris.
In North America, most tornadoes rotate counterclockwise.
Perhaps one in a thousand spins in the opposite direction.
Twisters appear in many guises.
They can bring to mind the snapping of a bullwhip or the delicate dance of ghosts.
A single storm can spawn several distinct funnels, a grouping referred to as a family.
For all their fury, most tornadoes are short-lived.
Many last only minutes.
To the scientists who would study them, they are elusive prey.
How to penetrate the twister's secrets.
Aiming weather balloons and instrumented rockets into tornadoes have yielded limited results.
See whether we can.
All right.
Three, two, one.
Fire.
There.
Nope.
In the 1980s, researchers at the National Severe Storms Lab tested the Totable Tornado
Observatory, nicknamed TOTO, after Dorothy's dog in The Wizard of Oz.
This 400-pound package of sensors was to record what no human can even approach without risking
life and limb.
But predicting the path of a tornado proved to be nearly impossible.
Tornado had one close call, no direct hits.
For now, the safest way to see inside tornadoes is to probe them from afar with Doppler radar.
Like an X-ray of a storm, the system displays wind speed and direction.
In 1981, scientists first detected the spiraling signature of a tornado on Doppler radar.
Today the system is used to issue warnings to the public.
Still, we're not exactly sure why twisters form at all.
For Howard Bluestein, professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, there's only
one way to find out.
Satellite pictures are nice, radar pictures are nice, but you need to look out the window
and see the clouds on a very, very fine scale to get a feeling for what's happening.
I don't understand how one can study a phenomenon without actually experiencing it, seeing it
or feeling it or tasting it.
To me, that sets everything in motion.
That makes me want to understand why it's there, what causes it, what's going to happen
to it.
Every spring, Bluestein exercises two considerable talents, chasing tornadoes and measuring them
with the latest technology.
Portable Doppler radar is like a meteorological magnifying glass.
It allows Bluestein to measure wind speed in very fine detail in specific regions of
a tornado.
Okay, we've got to get going quickly.
That thing is starting to form a nice funnel.
Actually, hold it, hold it, hold it.
Can you turn it on?
Oops.
Up power.
It's starting to form a funnel.
It's not that far away.
I'm on the left side of that tight circulation.
Bluestein's success rate is better than most storm chasers.
The funnel cloud is just to our north, northwest.
We're packing up the radar.
He estimates one in nine expeditions ends with an encounter.
Okay, you got it?
Yeah.
I'll tell you to take pictures.
Recorder's starting.
Which mode are you in?
I'm in CWN.
Okay, tornado is crossing the path of the radar.
Debris in the air.
Strong tornadoes almost always form under the southwest edge of a storm.
Bluestein plots his course accordingly and tries to place his team roughly two miles
from touchdown.
Just send it the whole way.
Okay, I'm tuned in all the way.
Now you can send it.
Oh, what a great start.
Should I go to FM?
Only if you have a good CW, you say no.
We're detectives and we're looking for lots of bits of evidence.
And the more pieces of evidence we have, the more likely it will be that we'll be able
to solve the puzzle of why tornadoes form and what's their structure.
April 26, 1991.
Bluestein and his team track the outbreak that will ravage Andover, Kansas.
Stopping tornado.
Let's go.
Let's go.
A spectacular funnel stops them in Red Rock, Oklahoma.
Their Doppler radar will capture the fastest wind speed on record, nearly 280 miles an
hour.
In the heat of the chase, even Bluestein can miss a beat.
For less frenzied field work, Bluestein turns to these hunting grounds, the Florida Keys.
August 1993.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Geographic Society reunite
Bluestein with Dr. Joseph Golden, Expedition Chief Scientist.
As a graduate student, Bluestein once joined Golden to explore the skies over Key West.
This expedition marshals state-of-the-art scientific and photographic technology.
The quarry, a phantom twister that haunts these tranquil waters.
In 1967, on a vacation trip, Golden took a sightseeing flight over the Florida Keys and
had a chance encounter with one of our atmosphere's most startling apparitions.
Since that time, he has become the world's leading expert on waterspouts.
Our knowledge of these ethereal ribbons was once based largely on mariners' accounts.
Golden first emphasized their similarities to tornadoes.
Though usually smaller than a twister over land, they form in gentler weather than most
violent tornadoes, allowing close inspection.
Smoke flares will help visualize airflow near the sea surface.
For Bluestein, this is an unparalleled ringside seat.
When we're out in the Great Plains looking at tornadoes, we cannot see what's happening
right at the ground very clearly, nor can we see what's happening at cloud base extremely
clearly.
The perspective that we get from the helicopter in that we can look down at the sea surface
and see the effects of rotation at the ground level and also be at cloud base and practically
kiss the condensation funnel that's right outside the window is really spectacular.
Ultimately, the ghostly waterspout may reveal the hidden forces that trigger tornadoes.
Other whirling winds demand a more lofty vantage point.
Take a seat on the space shuttle for the perfect view of these monsters, over 500 miles wide
and some 10 miles high.
Creatures of the sea, they breed in the warm oceans of the tropics.
Depending on their birthplace, we call them cyclones, typhoons, or hurricanes.
These giants can stir up more than a million cubic miles of the Earth's atmosphere every
second and travel across an ocean at up to 30 miles an hour.
Yet they have humble beginnings.
In the summer and fall, the sun heats vast stretches of tropical ocean to over 82 degrees
Fahrenheit.
Warm, moist air rises over these hot spots, forming bands of thunderstorms.
Upper level winds push storm systems westward as surface winds spiral into the low pressure
beneath the clouds.
Occasionally, one such spinning wheel of thunderstorms gathers strength, feeding on moisture and
heat.
When winds reach 74 miles an hour, a hurricane is born.
The storm's architecture is highly organized.
Wind bands up to 300 miles long converge in the most violent sector, the eye wall.
Here winds of up to 200 miles an hour spiral upward.
Within the eye, downdrafts of dry air create an eerie calm.
Such severe tropical storms spin out their lives uneventfully in the open sea.
When one threatens to come ashore, the world's eyes are trained upon it, including those
of Jim Leonard.
A professional storm chaser, Jim checks forecasts religiously.
He prowls the globe for weather that most people would simply flee.
Among chasers, Jim has few peers.
Some say he has videotaped more severe storms than anyone on earth.
He has no formal training, no college degree in meteorology, just a lifelong passion.
15F, you're all set.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
When I was 10 years old, I had my first real hurricane experience, Hurricane Donna.
We got probably winds of 80, 90 miles an hour.
It was quite an exhilarating experience at that point.
People think I'm crazy, but that's their own opinion.
It's not going to change.
I've always been crazy about storms, and I always will be.
The best of them all probably was Hurricane Hugo.
Went down to Puerto Rico and got a direct hit.
As it got stronger and stronger, debris was starting to be lifted off the parking lot.
It looked like it was going to get blown back toward us.
We decided at that point to start going down the stairway.
As we're going down the stairwell, the rain is being driven into the walls, through the
stairs, coming down the stairway, and the wind you see here squealing.
At this point, it's probably in excess of 150 miles an hour.
That was quite an experience.
It was like one of the chasers call it the hallway from hell.
I have no reason to be in a storm if it's going to scare me.
I'll get to the point to play the safe route as far as I can.
But if I want to get that ultimate shot, of course you're going to take some chances.
1992, Typhoon Omar in Guam.
Jim and a fellow tracker have a close call as Omar's eye wall comes ashore.
Now the storm's placid eye engulfs them.
It seems over.
It really does, but it's not.
We're going to get blitzed again.
I know.
I can't believe that we're going to get blitzed again.
It just seems impossible.
That was flabbergasting.
The unsettling lull does not last.
Here, the trailing edge of the eye wall rushes in, with winds blowing in the opposite direction.
It looked like it was going to wait a few minutes.
Yeah, I know.
It wasn't coming on.
Yeah, if I knew it was this, I would have hurried more.
In 1991, Jim achieves a personal best.
Typhoon Yuri, when it came to approach the southern part of Guam, I did a little bit
of carelessness there, but I got the storm surge shots that I always wanted to get.
The water came up a little faster than I thought it would.
Winds and low pressure allow the sea surface to rise near the storm's eye.
When it hits land, this mound of water rushes ashore.
That's what you call storm surge.
Great.
We're in it.
Oh, great.
When the surge is waist deep, Jim retreats.
He more than most knows that a hurricane's most deadly weapon is not wind, but water.
Nine out of 10 hurricane victims are drowned by storm surges.
They can raise tides more than 20 feet above normal and flood 100 miles of coastline under
10 feet of water.
Fifteen percent of the world's population live at risk from severe tropical storms.
Atlantic hurricanes assault the U.S., Mexico, and the Caribbean.
Typhoons born over the western Pacific Ocean batter Japan, China, and the Philippines.
Most deadly are the cyclones that strike Bangladesh.
Here millions farm a river delta in places only inches above sea level.
Escape routes are few.
House of life has been appalling, in a single 1970 storm over 300,000 dead.
Of all the atmosphere's threats, these giants should hardly catch us off guard.
Weather satellites track them from birth, but no technology can predict exactly where
one will go.
To penetrate the hurricane secrets, researchers ride a flying laboratory into the eye of the
storm.
David?
Yes, sir?
We're going to go in at 10,000 feet.
At 10,000, no?
Yeah, we're as a planet safe.
Looks impressive anyway.
We have about 15 miles to the beginning of the wall here.
External sensors measure temperature, air pressure, humidity, and wind speed as the
plane braves the turbulence of the eye wall.
I got a 100 knot to wind now.
Yeah, I thought it might drop off when it hits.
Not yet.
Up ahead, it looks like it probably won't.
We may see some 200 knot guns there, 25 knot up there.
Okay, we're just coming into the edge now.
An oasis of calm over nine miles tall, the eye is virtually clear from sea to sky.
You guys see a center down below there?
I think we're just about directly over it.
Looks good.
I think we got the center here.
Okay, I'll mark it.
The eye's exact location and vital statistics are sent to forecasters on shore.
Meteorology also flows to this meteorological think tank, the Hurricane Research Division
in Miami, Florida.
What global ingredients determine how many hurricanes are born each year and what paths
they follow?
Stanley Goldenberg, research meteorologist, says clues range from the El Nino phenomenon
to rainfall in Africa.
He crafts computer models based on the premise that an organized piece of weather like a
hurricane can be defined in mathematical terms.
The atmosphere is an orderly universe.
There's physical rules, physical laws that govern these things.
It's just a matter of having the right data, looking at it with the right tools and the
right analyses.
I mean, the real art is pulling the information out of the data.
Goldenberg helped refine one of the models the National Hurricane Center uses to issue
forecasts, but he had never experienced a hurricane on the ground until 1992.
On August 17th, tropical storm Andrew takes shape, about halfway between Africa and the
Caribbean.
During the following days, the storm slowly intensifies.
Then high-level winds begin to tear Andrew apart, slowing its momentum.
To Goldenberg and most other meteorologists, Andrew has only the slimmest chance of ever
becoming a hurricane.
Friday, August 21st.
As high-level winds die down, Andrew begins to reorganize and quickly gathers strength.
Computer models show Andrew might head toward southern Florida, but Goldenberg and his colleagues
dismiss any immediate threat.
Stan leaves work early to prepare for an important weekend.
His wife Barbara is due to deliver their fourth child on Sunday.
750 miles from Miami, Andrew's winds exceed 74 miles an hour on Saturday, August 22nd.
The first hurricane of the Atlantic season is born.
By noon on Sunday, massive evacuations are ordered along the Florida coast.
Sunday afternoon.
Right on schedule, Barbara has been in labor since around 6 a.m.
Here we have from the hurricane to the other action in this room, which is Barbara going
through early stages of labor, over 4 centimeters contracted, going through labor pains.
In the birthing suite, Stan videotapes the proceedings with all the fervor of an expectant
father.
Still, the meteorologist in him can't help but be distracted.
And we still have, waiting for the hurricane, beautiful skies.
Come, you never know what's going to happen here in the next 12 to 14 hours or so.
Late in the day, Andrew's winds accelerate to 150 miles an hour.
Traveling nearly due west, it descends upon the Bahamas.
Around 6 p.m., it strikes the Lutheran Island, packing a storm surge 23 feet high, taking
four lives.
Having a boy makes you feel like a father, and having a girl makes you feel like a daddy.
Stan steals a few hours with the new arrival, Pearl, then leaves the hospital.
He'll ride out the storm at home.
In Miami, violent skies herald Andrew's approach.
Inland, residents take routine safety measures.
Seven miles from shore, Stan and his boys are joined by his sister-in-law and family.
Sunday, 23rd of August, we have the family here, Jonathan and Daniel, Roger, Benjamin,
Joseph, Aaron, Ruben, we have Ann, and we're going to weather it out through the storm.
Hi, Daniel, say hi.
Hi.
At night, Andrew suddenly intensifies as it approaches the tip of Florida.
August 24th, around 4.30 a.m., Andrew comes ashore.
Looks like our TVs are out.
Maybe the power is out now for the duration of this.
You can hear that outside.
You can start to hear the roar outside.
In the hallway of the Goldenberg House, winds outside, I think, are at least 100, 110 miles
an hour or more.
Aaron, are you okay?
And there's the cat, and here's everybody here just waiting out in the hall because
we lost the plywood on the front window, but we are praying God will cover that.
And we are just sitting back here resting in the Lord in the hallway.
We can feel our ears constantly pop from the pressure drops.
Yes, Jonathan?
We're here, we're here.
I do not hear anyone.
Lord, we just thank you.
We ask your protection.
It's here.
This is Stan at 8.30 in the morning.
We have been through a night.
This is our street, trees down everywhere.
The big tree, this was a huge tree in front of me, just one window broken on that car.
Trees down everywhere.
These are our sweet, precious neighbors.
These shutters survived the storm.
Every window covered with this type of shutter survived.
But our house had wood shutters, the roof lifted off, and as you can see, we have no
house.
This wall fell on us, containing the refrigerator, the stove.
This is the wall, fell on top of us, stove down there, cabinets, all fell on top of us
in that small space you're looking at.
The mattress and everything, that's where we were pinned and protected during the worst
part of the storm.
Benjamin and Joseph.
Incredibly, three adults, six children, and a kitten emerge unharmed from the wreckage
that was Stan's home.
The scope of the disaster has not yet dawned on Miami.
At the hospital, Barbara rests assured that her family is safe.
Perhaps get the first look at what's going on up in the air from Skyfall.
The hospital had an emergency generator, so we still had power, and we saw all of the
first footage of this destruction and storm, and we were in shock.
The first areas they went through, they were kind of relieved, saying, oh, and just making
interesting comments about how this car is thrown here and there, but they became much
more sober as they went farther south.
This is incredible.
It has just flattened this area.
It did not look possible that anybody could be alive, and that was just a mile or two
from my house, and at that point, I really felt a sprain.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and there must have been about, let's say,
counting and trying to estimate at least three to four hundred mobile homes here.
The rest are just completely gone.
In the morning, my wife finally got through to somebody there just to find out I was okay.
Somehow we both had a peace that each of us was okay, but I still remember the first time
I got through to her.
I just wept, I mean, it wasn't just the excitement of getting through her, it was me pouring
out the emotions of what I had been through.
I mean, we had been through an incredible experience.
Andrew's storm surge wreaked havoc along the Florida coast, but its winds devastated an
area larger than the city of Chicago, some 135,000 dwellings damaged or destroyed.
The homeless numbered 160,000.
It seemed miraculous only 44 died.
Not one official wind gauge survived Andrew's peak winds.
No one knew how fast they had gusted.
Intrigued, Dr. Ted Fujita, Mr. Tornado, flew to Miami to study the aftermath.
Roofs ripped from homes, trees snapped in half, concrete beams carried hundreds of feet,
plywood embedded in a tree trunk.
Fujita finds evidence of winds up to 200 miles an hour.
But his most startling findings come from aerial surveys with local meteorologists.
They point out narrow streaks of total devastation near areas with lesser damage.
To Fujita, the patterns are eerily familiar.
He develops a theory that the worst damage in Andrew was caused by mini swirls, tornado-like
rotations, brief but violent, embedded in the eye wall.
The theory has personal meaning for Stan Goldenberg.
We never expected the kind of damage that we experienced.
Not only were we in the area of some of the maximum winds of the storm, we had an addition,
we believe, an area of more intense winds probably caused by the mini swirls that Ted
Fujita talks about.
There was a strip right through my house of homes that were devastated, and I was right
in that strip.
Stan would relocate his family to a new house.
Parts of Florida remain scarred to this day.
Andrew also ravaged the Louisiana coast, taking 17 lives.
Finally, the storm would vanish over the mid-Atlantic states some two weeks after its birth.
Andrew was America's costliest disaster, but it had a silver lining.
It spared New Orleans, a city defined by water.
Repeatedly flooded and drained over the past three centuries, the metropolis was built
on swampland surrounded by the Mississippi River.
Just like a bowl, the city's terrain rises near its edges and dips in its midsection
to below sea level.
Lake Pontchartrain crowns its northern shore.
Over a hundred miles of levees and flood walls up to 20 feet above sea level keep river and
lake at bay.
Massive floodgates fill the gaps.
New Orleans has one of the best drainage systems in the world, powered by 21 colossal pumps.
The city has known hurricanes in this century, but not a direct hit from a storm like Andrew,
and not with up to a million people to evacuate over narrow bridges and causeways.
Former meteorologist in charge of the New Orleans National Weather Service Office, Bill
Crouch, fears the levee system provides a false sense of security.
It's a two-edged sword because it protects the people's homes most of the time, but if
water ever comes over the levees, it's going to get as deep as the levees are tall and
the lake would be 19 or 20 feet deep.
This means that in parts of New Orleans that are below sea level, the water could be 30
feet deep.
That is, you would not be safe even in a three-story house.
So those are the scenarios we look at, which would force people to go upward into the buildings
downtown and even using that refuge, it's my belief there would still be a great loss
of life.
One day, five, perhaps 50 years from now, a hurricane like Andrew might descend on New
Orleans.
The city might be jammed with tens of thousands of tourists oblivious to the dangers of hurricanes.
Evacuation would be ordered and many would heed the call, but advance weather could move
in quickly and flood the causeway, knocking out bridges.
A hurricane approaching from the southeast could fill Lake Pontchartrain with its storm
surge.
Weather would rush over hurricane protection levees.
This grim scenario may be imaginary, but the threat is not.
A hundred thousand might be stranded in the heart of the city.
The city of New Orleans has enlisted federal, state, and local emergency management agencies
to prepare for just such a nightmare.
There are many other potential disasters along the U.S. coastline.
It is only a matter of time before another great storm exacts its toll.
Nature has given us fair warning.
The gossamer veil of atmosphere is all that protects us from the sterile reaches of space.
What we call weather is simply the Earth's attempt to balance heat and moisture around
the globe.
Swirling winds may spawn tornadoes and hurricanes, but they can also breed whimsy.
A hay devil on a summer afternoon.
Our home is a planet perpetually in the making, forever new.
The same awesome powers that sustain life can also wreak destruction.
It is up to us to be prepared.
There lies the challenge and the delight of living on this dynamic Earth.
be able to live on this planet.
We hope you have enjoyed this presentation from the National Geographic Video Library.