[Paleo Conservative]

People are safer to shelter in-place rather than drive into horrible traffic. Evacuation is simply an invitation to the looters to ransack your house

Not if a Cat 5 hurricane (which Katrina was before landfall) hits New Orleans directly or slightly to the west. The Red Cross refuses to set up shelters in New Orleans for any hurricane above Cat 2. The storm surge of Katrina was measured at about 30 feet while it was over the Gulf of Mexico. Considering parts of New Orleans are 12 feet below sea level, they could easily have been 40 under water regardless if the levees stayed intact. The people left behind in New Orleans were lucky Katrina followed a path a little bit to the east of its predicted path.

[sefarkas]

The estimated elevation of the storm surge in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico has little to do with the surge that New Orleans has to deal with, i.e., the sloshing of water in Lake Ponchatrain which is around 15 feet deep. Water, as with any fluid, will seek its own level and move in the path of least resistance. The poor defenseless folks on the Mississippi Coast directly facing the ocean have cause to be concerned about a storm surge.

The damage from a Cat 5 would be from the power of the wind. The location of New Orleans combined with the levees protects it from realistic storm surges, not the ones invented by the MSM to sell TV time and newspaper ads.

The friction with the ground as hurricanes approach the coast nearly guarantee that no Cat 5 will ever put its eye over land. Note this and the other well organized storms that take a jog to the east each time they approach the coast as they pinwheel north. It is no accident that Katrina was Cat 4 at landfall at the mouth of the river nearly 50 miles from New Orleans proper.

[sefarkas]

Here is an interesting map for you. Katrina storm surge summary