9 American Disasters Where Someone Saw It Coming But NOBODY LISTENED (1889-2005)

In July 2004, in an emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, about three hundred officials sat down to drown New Orleans on paper. Their invented storm, Hurricane Pam, overtopped the levees, flooded the city ten to twenty feet deep and left a projected 61,290 dead. Thirteen months later Hurricane Katrina came ashore, and a senator would sum it up in one sentence: Katrina was not just predictable, it was predicted over and over again. But New Orleans was far from the first American city to be handed a precise picture of a coming disaster. This is a countdown of nine times America was warned exactly what was coming, from the oldest to the one everyone remembers: John Fulton's 1880 report on the South Fork dam above Johnstown, the Cuban forecast for Galveston in 1900, the dam keeper's muddy water at the St. Francis Dam in 1928, the evacuation train for the veterans of the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, Charles Pierce's map of the 1938 New England hurricane, the coal-waste dam at Buffalo Creek in 1972, the geologist's memo on the Teton Dam in 1976, the 1978 prediction for Mount St. Helens, and the long paper trail before Katrina. For each one, the record shows who saw it coming, how exact they were, and who set the warning aside. Tell us in the comments where you're watching from, and whether there's a dam, a levee or a stretch of coast near you that people quietly worry about. Was Buffalo Creek an act of God or an act of men? Would you have joined the convoy at Mount St. Helens? And if someone in your family lived through any disaster on this list, write the name of their town and what they told you. Subscribe for more disasters history keeps forgetting, told from the warning to the last minute. Not one of these nine warnings was wrong about the danger. What failed, every time, was the step between knowing and paying, and every fix came afterward, from Galveston's seawall to California's dam law to the fourteen and a half billion dollars of walls around New Orleans that held against Hurricane Ida in 2021. Galveston is still waiting for its coastal barrier, designed and redesigned at a price now past fifty billion dollars, with at least twenty years of work ahead. The warning has been written. It is on file. #HurricaneKatrina #DisasterWarnings #JohnstownFlood #MountStHelens #DisasterDocumentary