Dr. Kim Wood

And so it's like, who's going to pay the bill?

And if everyone fights over who pays the bill, well, maybe it just doesn't get paid.

And so the infrastructure element is a component of it and us building in these places that could be impacted.

But the scope of the storm also matters.

So earlier we were talking about the Stafford Simpson hurricane wind scale, and that's how we categorize storms.

Katrina was devastating as a category three.

It did peak as a category five.

But it was weakening on approach to land.

And seeing the category numbers tick down does have a psychological impact to anyone who is associating those numbers with impacts.

Another thing is, structurally, weakening storms do different things.

So oftentimes you'll see increasing compactness of like the core of the hurricane as it's getting stronger.

Well, when it starts to weaken, that core can expand.

And sure, the peak wind speed is going down, but you're making the area over which there are winds bigger.

So when a storm is growing in size...

the part of the ocean that that wind is interacting with gets bigger.

And so you're driving more water toward a vulnerable coastline.

If you look at animations that follow Katrina's lifetime, the eye was compact and then it got big.

And yes, the maximum wind speed went down, but the storm grew.

And so it put more people in the path of strong winds.

Something that's hard to think about, but is important to think about is a tropical storm is pretty strong.