This past hurricane season was quieter than expected. The forecasts were all wrong. And that bodes ill for the future.

Hurricane experts know from experience that when they predict a storm will hit a city and it misses, it’s harder to get residents to evacuate the next time. Now they’ve missed the entire season’s forecast! Let’s hope the memory of Katrina is stronger than the memory of the missed forecast when the next Big One heads for the coast.

And speaking of the Big One, outgoing National Hurricane Center chief Max Mayfield expressed his dismay today over the ongoing practice of building more and more at the shore. He knows, as do all the researchers who have studied hurricane history, that Katrina was not the worst that Nature will dish out, sooner or later.

“We’re eventually going to get a strong enough storm in a densely populated area to have a major disaster,” Mayfield said. “I know people don’t want to hear this, and I’m generally a very positive person, but we’re setting ourselves up for this major disaster.”

At the least, Mayfield argues in an L.A. Times article, stronger building codes need to be in place to avoid utter devastation. My bet, given Mayfield’s predecessors have made the same warnings since the early 1990s: Those codes will go in place after a major city suffers a disaster that makes New Orleans look lucky.