HURRICANE KATRINA: Unthinkable

St. Louis Post-Dispatch ^ | September 1, 2005 | Editorial

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

That was 1990??? Yikes, I'm getting old.

[Howlin]

It looks like no one mobilized until after the disaster,

You're ill-informed, too.

[GladesGuru]

"Math is your friend, put it to some use."

A well crafted line.

As for your NEA slam, having developed and taught teacher continuing education programs for the fourth largest public scruel system in America, all I can say is that you approach an English level of understatement.


GG

[lentulusgracchus]

The country needs rapid response for disasters like this. It looks like no one mobilized until after the disaster, in spite of the fact that everyone KNEW this hurricane was coming. From local to Federal, they all dropped the ball.

FEMA response to a Category III storm is not adequate to the devastation of a Category IV/V storm, and this one is a Cat IV that killed and wrecked like a Cat V. The storm surge was actually higher than that generated by Cat V Hurricane "Camille" in 1969 on the Mississippi coast. The top winds were less intense (145 mph vs 190 mph), but that's misleading because the storm did a "huff and puff" at the last minute -- dropping its top winds from 175 to 145, but spreading out the contact patch of 75-mph+ hurricane winds very considerably. "Camille" was intense and tightly wound-up; this storm's hurricane footprint was 200 miles wide. That's a really big storm, and I wouldn't be surprised if some physicist announced next month that "Katrina" was actually more powerful than "Camille" by a pretty significant margin.

That's the first point.

The second is that the storm was a Cat II/III storm until Saturday morning at 5 a.m., when the National Hurricane Center in Miami changed their forecast track and announced a serious increase in wind speed from Cat II to a strong Cat III storm.

So instead of mobilizing for a Cat II storm in Mississippi and Alabama, suddenly New Orleans was sitting on a bullseye, the storm was getting big and nasty very fast, and everyone had about 12 hours before the aviation authorities closed the New Orleans airport and 36 hours before the wind began to rise. And the entailed damages increased by orders of magnitude with every ratchet up in the windspeed levels.

Nobody could get ready for a moving target on damages and refugees that was running away from them even as they prepared and the forecast kept changing.

If "Katrina" had held to the Friday night forecast, it would have come ashore as a weak Category III somewhere around Biloxi with winds of about 115-120 mph and a hurricane-wind patch maybe 100 miles wide, from Mobile to Slidell, and New Orleans would hardly have got its hair mussed.

All that changed in about 18 hours, vultu Dei.