Showing results by author "Robert Pudlock" in All Categories

Twenty-five centuries ago, a Chinese military strategist named Sun Tzu wrote that the general who wins first makes many calculations before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes only a few. Sun Tzu was writing about war. He was also, without knowing it, writing about every catastrophic storm that has ever made landfall on an inhabited coast.Art of Storm is a narrative history podcast that examines the decisions, systems, and failures that determine who survives a disaster and who does not — and why the same patterns appear, storm after storm, generation after generation, across ...

Every hurricane that has ever struck the American coast left behind two stories. The first is the one you already know — the wind speed, the category, the damage estimate, the aerial footage of flattened neighborhoods. That story gets told within hours of landfall and forgotten within weeks.The second story is the one that explains why the damage was that severe, why the warnings arrived too late, why the people who died were living where they were living, and why the institutions responsible for protecting them made the decisions they made. That story takes longer to tell. It requires ...