Perfect storms are becoming perfectly routine. Our lack of imagination is killing us.

I live in Houston and lost water and power during the winter storm last week. Fortunately my family didn’t have any damage to property or health. We’re some of the lucky ones.

As the recovery commenced, I was watching an interview with an energy researcher on CNBC. He said something that really struck me:

We do our best to plan for events, but this beyond anything I believe any reasonable person would have said would have happened at the same time. It is somewhat of a perfect storm.

A “perfect storm”…I’ve heard that before.

His words are similar to what I heard in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey, and what I heard in 2016 after the Memorial Day floods, and what I heard in 2015 after the tax day floods.

It sure feels like these one-in-a-lifetime perfect storms are becoming much more common.

I decided to do a little digging. I restricted myself to just weather events here in the United States in the last 10 years. Sure enough, we seem to be having a lot of perfect storms.

Texas wildfires – 2011

For the first one, we can stay right here in Texas. Back in 2011, wildfires erupted across the state. Texas accounted for nearly half of all acreage burned in the United States in 2011. The economic impact in East Texas was over $3 billion. Firefighters came from over 40 states; two of these brave heroes perished.

It was a perfect storm:

Faced with some of driest conditions Texas has seen in nearly a century, firefighters around the state are struggling to fight off what a forest service official on Sunday called the “perfect storm for wildfires.”

April Saginor, a spokeswoman with the Texas Forest Service, said crews were having difficulty getting hundreds of blazes under control due to a rare combination of strong winds, unseasonably warm temperatures and low humidity. Conditions this spring are the driest they’ve been in Texas since 1917, she claimed.

Tornado outbreak – 2012

In early March 2012, a series of tornados tore across the Southern United States. Forty-one people died: 22 in Kentucky, 13 in Indiana, 4 in Ohio, and 1 in Alabama.

Nine of the 70 storms had wind speeds between 135 and 165 miles per hour. Two of the 70 storms had wind speeds between 166 and 200 miles per hour. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates recovery costs exceeded $3 billion.

Again, a perfect storm had struck us:

The phrase “perfect storm” is overused, but in last Friday’s case, it might well be true.

“Nearly every factor meteorologists look for when forecasting severe thunderstorms and tornadoes was in place,” AccuWeather said in a report Monday.

Hurricane Sandy – 2012

Hurricane Sandy landed with devastating force near Brigantine, New Jersey, on October 29, 2012. That was after it had already annihilated parts of Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica.

The storm killed 223 people. Economic damage was nearly $70 billion. It’s hard to quickly name other storms that wrought the devastation we saw from Sandy.

Yes, this was another perfect storm:

[Queens College Earth and Environmental Sciences professor Stephen] Pekar adds that Sandy was considered an unusual event, what many call a "perfect storm." The collision of three elements contributed to Sandy's severity: a powerful hurricane with the energy and moisture from above-normal sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean; an unusually shaped dip in the jet stream that scientists believe may have been caused by warming in the Arctic, steering the storm from East to West; and lunar high tides that raised the sea level several feet along the East Coast.

Moore, Oklahoma tornado – 2013

The most powerful storm in the 2012 Southern US tornado outbreak was rated an EF4, with winds between 166 and 200 miles per hour. One year later, an even more powerful tornado touched down in Moore, Oklahoma. This tornado had winds in excess of 200 miles per hour, killing 24 people and causing around $2 billion in damage.

Again, only a year after the tornado outbreak of 2012, another perfect storm arrived in the form of a twister:

Tornado science is complex and several ingredients are needed to create a monster vortex like the one that spun through Moore; and even then, meteorologists say they can't identify exactly which storms will spawn tornadoes.

"The jet stream had a role, but of course, it is much more complex than that," Keith Brewster of the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms at the University of Oklahoma told LiveScience. "There are several ingredients involved in the creation of a tornado; these include a source of warm, moist air at the surface and colder, generally drier, air above."

Those ingredients were in place yesterday. Essentially, the perfect storm seemed to come together right over Moore.

"The atmosphere was just right in Moore, Oklahoma, for a violent tornado. If you'd gone 25 miles to the north, they had storms but no tornado," [said Kurt Van Speybroeck, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service based in Fort Worth, Texas,]. "Right in that location, we call that the local mescoscale, everything was just right in that storm for it to create that really violent vortex."

Hurricane Harvey – 2017

This one hits close to home. My wife, our two young boys and I rode this one out with my wife’s parents in Katy, Texas, just west of Houston.

Hurricane Harvey was a catastrophe of the highest order. It broke rainfall records throughout the Houston area and beyond. The storm killed over 100 people and caused $125 billion in damage. The economic impact was over 50% greater than we saw with Sandy.

And yes, the “perfect storm” designation very much applied here:

Houston’s large sprawl of urbanized areas covered with impervious surfaces such as concrete, along with its location on a flood plain, exacerbated the impacts of the rain, [Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia,] said.

“You had a very vulnerable city, the track of a storm that just stalled out and a huge amount of rainfall,” [Suzana Camargo, executive director of the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate at Columbia University,] said. “Each separately wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. When you put everything together - talk about a perfect storm.”

California wildfires – 2018

The Camp and Woolsey Fires in California ignited on the same day – Thursday, November 8, 2018. The Camp Fire ravaged Northern California, killing 85 people and causing over $16 billion in economic damage. The Woolsey Fire, in Southern California, killed 3 people and cost a further $6 billion.

Yes, each of these was considered a perfect storm. Here’s a bit on the Camp Fire:

This perfect firestorm didn’t behave like the wildfires most people picture in their minds.

This fire had something far more pervasive than a wall of flames, something fire scientists call “ember cast,” created by the high wind and the terrain.

“You can't start a fire any faster than that, starting at the base of a dry hill that's burning up the hill on a really high wind that's blowing it up the hill,” said Hugh Safford, a research professor at UC Davis and the US Forest Service ecologist for all of California. “And at the top of that hill, the wind is catching the embers off the trees and throwing them out miles ahead of the fire.”

And here’s a note about the tragic perfection of the Woolsey Fire:

Fueled by a perfect storm of factors, the Woolsey Fire that burned nearly 97,000 acres in two counties and destroyed more than 1,600 structures overwhelmed local fire agencies during its initial hours, even though they are among the "largest, most experienced agencies'' in the nation, according to a Los Angeles County report released Wednesday.

The "After Action Review'' of the Woolsey Fire, which erupted Nov. 8 in Ventura County and quickly burned into Los Angeles County, prompting mass evacuations that included the entire city of Malibu, detailed major success stories achieved by responding agencies, but said the fire quickly evolved into "an event never experienced in the Los Angeles region.''

West Coast wildfires – 2020

California got more than its fair share of wildfire devastation in 2018. Less than two years later, even more devastating wildfires struck the whole US West Coast. 37 people died. The economic impact was nearly $20 billion.

These wildfires took “perfect storm” to yet another level:

Climate and fire scientists have long anticipated that fires in the U.S. West would grow larger, more intense, and more dangerous. But even the most experienced among them have been at a loss for words in describing the scope and intensity of the fires burning in West Coast states in September 2020.

Lightning initially triggered many of the fires, but it was unusual and extreme meteorological conditions that turned some of them into the worst conflagrations in the region in decades. Record-breaking air temperatures, periods of unusually dry air, and blasts of fierce winds—on top of serious drought in some areas—led fires to ravage forests and loft vast plumes of smoke to rarely seen heights.

“We had a perfect storm of meteorological factors come together that encouraged extreme burning,” said Vincent Ambrosia, the associate program manager for wildfire research in NASA’s Earth Applied Sciences Program. “That was layered on top of shifting climate patterns—a long term drying and warming of both the air and vegetation—that is contributing to the growing trend we are seeing toward larger, higher-intensity fires in the U.S. West.”

Perfect storms feed on our lack of imagination

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a list of weather disasters with price tags exceeding $1 billion. Between 2011 and 2020, we’ve had 8 wildfires, 9 droughts, 19 tropical cyclones, 77 severe storms, 16 floods, 5 winter storms, and 1 freeze that each caused over $1 billion in inflation-adjusted damage.

I’m sure we could find “perfect storm” descriptions for 10 to 20% of these catastrophes.

Back to the winter storm that just wiped out power and water for millions of Texans. Here’s a bit from the summary of an ERCOT report from November 2020 about the grid’s readiness for the 2020-2021 winter. The emphasis is mine:

ERCOT anticipates there will be sufficient installed generating capacity available to serve system-wide forecasted peak demand this winter season, December 2020 ‒ February 2021.

“In the winter, we’re dealing with morning and evening peaks and sometimes extreme volatility in the weather,” said Manager of Resource Adequacy Pete Warnken. “We studied a range of potential risks under both normal and extreme conditions, and believe there is sufficient generation to adequately serve our customers.”

Did you catch that? “We studied a range of potential risks under both normal and extreme conditions…”. And yet “we” didn’t imagine the extreme conditions that we all just saw unfold with our own eyes.

Sure, it’s possible that this particular winter storm is the only one we missed. All other events that we previously considered inconceivable may turn out to never materialize. That sure seems like a silly bet to make, though.

In this article alone, I already identified 7 devastating storms in the past decade for which I quickly found “perfect storm” descriptions. These catastrophes are becoming routine. And our inability to imagine storms in these categories is literally killing us.

Of course I’m not the first one to lament our overuse of the “perfect storm” moniker. In late 2012, Stanford published an article about the research of Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, a professor of management science and engineering. Professor Paté-Cornell was all over the “perfect storm” fallacy:

[Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Stanford professor of management science and engineering,] argues that the risk of a "perfect storm," where multiple forces join to create a disaster greater than the sum of its parts, can be assessed in a systematic way before the event because even though their conjunctions are rare, the events that compose them – and all the myriad events that are dependent on them – have been observed in the past.

"Risk analysis is not about predicting anything before it happens, it's just giving the probability of various scenarios," she said. She argues that systematically exploring those scenarios can help companies and regulators make smarter decisions before an event in the face of uncertainty.

With too little imagination, we don’t perform the right analyses, and people die

Let’s say we want to protect the Texas power grid from nearly every conceivable risk.

We can imagine events like nuclear weapons attacks on our largest power plants. Or an asteroid landing in the Gulf of Mexico, causing a massive tidal waves that floods wide swaths of the state for days or weeks. Or maybe it’s the summer equivalent of the winter storm that just passed – an extended heatwave that arrives with heavy haze and next to no wind, and covers all 254 counties for the month of August.

What might we do?

We could bury all critical power generation and transmission capacity underground. We could then build massive channels to porous formations even further below, so that we could steer heavy rainfalls or tidal wave runoff beneath our now subterranean power infrastructure. We could build enough redundancy in coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants that we could make do without wind or solar. We’d basically build a massive, state-wide fallout shelter for all our power equipment. And we could conceivably do the same for our water and wastewater infrastructure.

Will we do it?

Of course not. The economics are wildly impractical. The vast majority of Texans couldn’t come anywhere near affording their current standards of living if the costs of power and water exploded, which is what would happen if we buried everything to protect it.

There’s a middle ground though.

I bet when we tally the costs from last week’s storm – from deaths, to illnesses, to property and equipment damage, to lost productivity – the actual costs will exceed what proper winterization would have cost by at least two orders of magnitude.

Now, Texas should still have this debate. Of the range of calamities we can imagine, which are we willing to prepare for? Thinking through different mitigation strategies, as our power and water become more expensive, what are the burdens imposed on Texans in different parts of the state? Where might a tipping point exist?

Because if we choose not to winterize, it’s not like we just avoid those costs. We paid those costs last week in spades. People paid with their lives. They suffocated in cars, trying to stay warm. They burned in houses, relying on unsafe fires. They paid hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousand of dollars to repair damaged homes, schools, and businesses. Those costs are real, whether we decide to pay them in advance or after the fact. And depending on the scenarios, paying in advance or after the fact can be much, much more expensive than the alternative.

The problem is, we don’t even give ourselves the chance to have those debates when they matter most, because of our lack of imagination. Rather than performing this economic analysis in advance, and having a calm and rational debate, we will scramble to put this together after the fact, when tens of Texans will have paid with their lives for our lack of preparation.

It’s strange for it to be as banal as this, but it is. The more imaginative we are, the better analyses we perform. We have all the tools we need. As Professor Paté-Cornell says, many of these extreme events are composed of elements that we have observed in the past. These are not true black swans. They’re foreseeable. They just have a strange composition, combining elements we’ve already seen in more extreme ways than we’re used to.

But we’ve seen these elements, and we can model them. Then we can rationally discuss and debate them. What we need is the imagination to set the stage for these discussions and debates to begin with. Shame on us for needlessly falling for this “perfect storm” nonsense. We’re paying the price with our lives.