Hurricane Catarina: phenomenon marked a “key turning point” in disaster management in SC

When Hurricane Catarina passed, Santa Catarina did not have the necessary structure either to predict such a phenomenon, or to warn the population of what was to come. Winds that reached 180 kilometers per hour placed the phenomenon in category 2 on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

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Today, according to the State’s current Secretary of Civil Defense, Colonel Fabiano de Souza, the State has unique equipment and teams prepared to predict, alert and manage the occurrence of phenomena like this.

The colonel was a military firefighter at the time, and remembers the response, although quick, reactive. He says that Santa Catarina did not have equipment, nor teams, that could make this type of forecast.

— We did not have enough instrumentation in Santa Catarina to identify and categorize the phenomenon — he says.

It was Catarina, on March 27, 2004, and the Morro do Baú disaster, in 2008, that raised the alarm: the State needed to better prepare itself for climate events of this size.

Souza states that Santa Catarina is in a place, between the tropics, suitable for occurrences like these. Extratropical cyclones, which bring winds and rain to the State, are an example of this.

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It was one of these cyclones that evolved and became a hurricane, the only one in the South Atlantic so far. With no history of such intense weather events, there was even some doubt regarding the hurricane — would it really happen?

It happened. The hurricane passed and left a trail of destruction, 11 deaths, more than 30,000 damaged homes and around 30,000 people affected.

What has changed in disaster forecasting and management

After that, Civil Defense, which until 2008 was a department, was elevated to the first level of the Executive government and became a secretariat. Souza also states that there was a heavy investment in hiring professionals specialized in meteorological observation, and in equipment.

Today, Santa Catarina has its own equipment to receive and read satellite images and predict cyclones, for example, in advance. In this way, the State no longer depends on other institutes, as it was in 2004. At the time, says the secretary, hurricane warnings came from international entities.

Meteorological radars, despite not being the main equipment for this type of observation, help to measure volumes of rain, for example, which also did not exist at the time. According to the colonel, this also made it difficult to analyze Hurricane Catarina.

— Today, if a new Hurricane Catarina were to happen, we would have full conditions, and the existing structure in the State, to forecast this type of phenomenon.

Special reports remember Hurricane Catarina

In the week that marks 20 years since Hurricane Catarina passed through the State, a series of special reports recalls the unique event in the country that affected cities in the south of Santa Catarina in 2004, and brings the lessons learned from the hurricane, which changed the lives of thousands of people from Santa Catarina.

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