When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in late August 2005 and the levees around the city broke, flooding the city and killing hundreds, Ed Link was as surprised as everyone else.
He shouldn't have been. As one of the nation's foremost hurricane experts, Link, a professor at the University of Maryland, had access to the government's most sophisticated mathematical models for predicting damage from big Gulf Coast storms. But those models weren't accurate because the data they were based on were incomplete, out of date or just plain wrong.
As the floodwaters receded and the Army Corps of Engineers rushed to repair the levees, the government asked Link to lead a team of engineers and scientists from the government and private sector -- 300 in all -- to recode those old models. The goal of the vaguely named Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force was twofold, Link told Wired.com: first, "to get that knowledge built back into the levee repairs so the same vulnerability wasn't built into the system again. The second was to come up with a 'risk assessment' looking forward."
In other words, to have a much better idea, grounded in solid science, of who might be killed or have their property destroyed in future Gulf Coast hurricanes.
The levees have long since been fixed and upgraded, but the risk assessment -- based on a mind-boggling 2 million equations -- is just now nearing completion. As the math came together beginning in 2007, the task force began publishing color-coded, interactive maps in an effort to show Gulf Coast residents what kind of danger they likely faced from hurricanes. The Google Earth-based maps can be found on the Army Corps website.
The ultimate "risk" map, the culmination of the task force's work representing tens of thousands of square miles from Florida to Texas, is slated for release this week.
Gathering the data for the levee upgrade and the risk maps took three years of back-breaking, mind-numbing effort by hundreds of team members using a surprising mix of high technology, old-fashioned detective work, trick psychology and, when all else failed, intuition. The results have revolutionized authorities' understanding of Gulf Coast hurricanes.
But whether the public will pay heed is another matter.