By LEE BOWMAN
Scripps Howard News Service More than four years after Katrina left the deadliest toll for a tropical storm in the United States in nearly a century, most Americans remain convinced that hurricanes pose a greater threat to human life than in the past.
As the quietest hurricane season of the decade wound down this fall, Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University polled 1,001 adults and found that 56 percent believe that "hurricanes are becoming more dangerous to human life than they used to be."
That makes sense to disaster psychologist David Sattler, a professor at Western Washington University who has studied human reactions to tropical storms, earthquakes, tsunamis and other phenomena for decades.
"Katrina had a powerful effect on many people, whether they lived in the Gulf region or not," Sattler said. "There's a heightened sensitivity now to hurricanes and the risks they pose that our experience shows will endure at least a few more years."
Katrina killed more than 1,500 people with storm surge and flooding along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana and in New Orleans and its suburbs -- making it the third-deadliest hurricane ever to hit the United States -- behind only a 1928 storm that killed some 2,400 around Florida's Lake Okeechobee and the 1900 Galveston, Texas, hurricane that killed more than 8,000.
The poll results suggest that even though only two tropical storms made landfall this season (and two others skirted the coastline), Americans are more hurricane-conscious.
"I suspect people today are more aware of hurricanes after what happened in New Orleans and along the Mississippi coast during Katrina and on the low-lying Bolivar Peninsula near Galveston during Ike in 2008," said Abby Sallenger, head of the U.S. Geological Survey's Storm Impact research group. "Even so, rebuilding in hazardous coastal areas seems to be continuing and will likely fuel devastation during the next great storm.''
The Scripps-Ohio University survey also found that 36 percent of respondents had "experienced" a hurricane.
Experts said it's doubtful that more than a third of any national sample has actually been battered by hurricane winds. A 1992 study by Jerry Jarrell of the National Hurricane Center used Census data to show that 85 percent of the coastal population from Texas to Maine had never experienced a direct hit by a major hurricane.
