Hurricane Harvey- A messaging nightmare for the
weather enterprise (215)
Jeffry Evans, NWS
Houston/Galveston, Dickinson, Texas
Frank Billingsley, KPRC2-NBC
Tim Heller, KTRK-ABC13
Abstract:
How do we urge decision
makers and the public to listen, believe and then properly respond to weather
threats and impacts that they have never experienced? These were some of the
questions facing the weather enterprise as a whole as Hurricane Harvey, and its
remnants, battered southeast Texas in late August of 2017.
Hurricane Harvey was the
first category 4 storm to strike Texas in 56 years, and was the first
&lsquomajor' hurricane to make landfall in the CONUS since 2005.
Unfortunately, after landfall, Harvey only moved inland approximately 50-75
miles and stalled for two to three days before remerging over the Gulf and
making a second landfall near the Texas/Louisiana border six days later.
Throughout that stretch, Harvey's rainbands produced record amounts of rainfall
and historic flooding across the upper Texas coast from near Victoria eastward
across Port Arthur/Beaumont. In addition to catastrophic flooding, nearly all of
southeast Texas endured continual and overlapping threats from tornadoes,
tropical storm winds and storm surge for 4 to 6 consecutive days.
This presentation will
discuss the challenges in communicating the multiple, recurrent and overlapping
threats of a storm like Harvey which lasted continually for nearly a week. We
will also present some best practices and lessons learned from the weather
enterprise around Houston as they dealt with making these communication
decisions under continual stress and fatigue.