Waiting For Hurricane X

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Anyone trying to recover in the wake of last week's visit by Hurricane Bonnie probably isn't feeling especially lucky at the moment. Good fortune isn't the first thing you think of when your living room is full of mud, your roof is missing, your power has been out for days on end. But considering the destruction that often accompanies storms of this magnitude, residents of North and South Carolina and Virginia got off remarkably lightly. Only three people died. Property damage was far lower than it might have been. Beaches remained largely intact.

If anything, the storm reinforced the popular belief that hurricanes are so thoroughly tracked, probed and forecast these days that they cannot possibly cause great loss of life. Scientists don't share that optimism, however. Many believe we're entering a cycle in which violent storms are going to be more frequent, and in which the likelihood of a disastrous strike will be greater than ever. The scientists' pet nightmare is of the Big One--a catastrophic storm that could do $100 billion dollars' worth of damage and kill thousands of people. No one knows when or where the Big One will hit, but the certainty is growing that it will.

Even a Little One like Bonnie, of course, can do plenty of harm. Some half a million people were forced to flee inland last week, as the 400-mile-wide storm--mammoth in size even by hurricane standards--swirled toward Cape Fear, N.C. And though Bonnie's 115-m.p.h. winds slowed rapidly as she lumbered inland, her forward progress slowed too, with the result that the storm hovered over the state and pummeled it for more than a day. Downed power lines robbed over 240,000 people of electricity. Even worse than the winds were the rains--more than 12 in. in some places--which caused flooding in North and South Carolina. When the crisis seemed to be over, Bonnie regained some of her fury to pound Virginia before heading out to sea.

But the Big One will come eventually. Many researchers think we are entering a period of increased hurricane intensity, more like the period from 1940 through 1969 when monster storms swept ashore with greater frequency. Anyone who lived through Hurricane Andrew in 1992 might disagree, but the experts say that for the past quarter-century America has got off easy. The last Category 5, or "catastrophic," hurricane was Camille, which struck the Gulf Coast in 1969 with winds over 200 m.p.h. and a storm surge 24 ft. high. Since then, hurricane activity has been mild.

Such cycles occur every several decades. Researchers emphasize that both phases, active and quiet, are normal, but that's not very reassuring. Even if the next high-intensity phase of hurricane activity is simply a replay of the last such period, it will wreak far more destruction. Reason: a frenzy of coastal construction has brought huge populations to live at America's beaches and barrier islands--people with no conception of what it's like to sustain a direct hit from a truly powerful hurricane.