Hurricane Katrina- 10 years later (1 Viewer)

[Doug B]

I personally think the current "ranking" system for Hurricanes needs to be updated to include a combination of Storm Surge and Wind Speed.

I know the Category numbers aren't going away, but there's been a strong move since 2012 to fully incorporate storm surge models into pre-landfall hurricane new coverage. Accordingly, state/parish emergency managers are evaluating storm surge predictions when calling for evacuations.

Folks in the northeastern US will remember Hurricane Sandy very well. Sandy came ashore in New Jersey as a rapidly weakening Cat 1 -- with a 1,100-mile wide wind field. Huge wind field = huge storm surge.

 

[rabidfireweasel]

I am having an art exhibit about this time

http://www.uma.edu/news/new-exhibit-my-katrina-chronicles-chapters-iii-and-iv-in-the-danforth-gallery/

 

[renesauz]

I remember Mayor Nagin complaining about the lack of Federal assistance after he failed to have the city properly evacuated. As far as I know, he is still in jail for corruption.

Governor Landrieu was an ineffective bump on a log.

Bush was slammed big time. The picture of him looking out the window of Air Force One while he flew over New Orleans was a massive gaffe.

The entire crisis was a complete cluster####.

Imagine the chaos that will ensue after the "Big One" hits the West coast.

Too bad they didn't have like a week to 10 day notice that a storm was heading their way. That may have helped.

The city pretty much survived the hurricane itself as people woke up to clear streets- and even the levees were never topped with the storm surge. It was the collapse of the levees/ under pilings that caused the majority of the problems(and I recall seeing video of a gate opening that failed somewhere near 9th ward). Turns out the failure was in how they were built - hard to blame the residents in the final analysis.

Turns out? Problems with the levees were known for decades.

No they were not. The levees were underdesigned and underbuilt, that fact came out after the storm. There are federal ACOE engineers who should be in jail.

This is simply not true. I remember hearing for years before Katrina that NO couldn't withstand a direct hit from a major storm without catastophic consequences. I remember telling my then wife that NO was FUBAR'd the day before the storm hit.

IT WAS KNOWN.

 

[renesauz]

One thing I've often wondered about, and want to run it by people who don't live in the New Orleans area or on the Gulf Coast:

The local media -- most assiduously our local newspapers -- takes great care to never, ever print that Katrina was a natural disaster. It's always referred to as something like "the breach of the federal levees" or "the failure of the federal flood protection system" ... sometimes even "the Federal Floods" for short. The conventional wisdom locally is that Katrina was straight-up a man-made disaster, with culpable human actors as the ultimate (if not readily determinable) root cause.

Does this play outside of the New Orleans area? How do folks in other hurricane-vulnerable areas regard the "man-made disaster" argument? How about people that live well away from hurricane risk?

I've always believed this, because they had talked for years about the inadequacy of those levees.

 

[rabidfireweasel]

Most folks I talk to have no sense of the devastation to Mississippi coast. Katrina , for many, = New Orleans, Goverment ineptitude and race based poverty.

 

[Righetti]

I'm not even going to check the map. If you cut a swath into the river levee or both sides of the 17th street canal, it would flood 80% of the city, mid-city, much of Carrollton, Lakeview, Gentilly, into Metairie, Central City, Ninth Ward, 7th Ward, Tulane-Gravier, etc. It's happened before, 1848 when the river levee busted, 1915, 1871 or so, 1946 (when the other side of the 17th street canal levee busted, which flooded Metairie). Hell there used to be a small lake in Broadmoor. I don't think it even matters what the +/- of the sea level is, it's all about topography. There are some ridges but really nearly everything should naturally be swamp or marsh and once was.

eta - see here.

Read this article today and thought of you 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/15/world/europe/climate-change-rotterdam.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

 

[Righetti]

Let's face it, it was a confederacy of dunces. Brown was a political spoils job. Our mayor would go to jail, the parish presidents of 2 neighboring parishes would go to jail, and the sheriff in another neighboring parish would go to jail. We had corruption and incompetence, and at least two if the above flat out lost their mind. Blanco was a blank. Even now after the reforms with BP we found out the MMB was run by a connected appointee and Jindal actually tried, maybe successfully, to interfere in the Sela levee board, meanwhile the West Bank got their own levee board fiefdom early on. This stuff angers me, truly.

Have you ever thought about running, seriously

 

[flapgreen]

The Katrina anniversary coincides with Big Daddy Kane meeting that chubby chick in the CVS parking lot. So I always remember it.

That was an iconic moment in ffa history 

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

Read this article today and thought of you 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/15/world/europe/climate-change-rotterdam.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

Thanks a lot for this and for noticing my old post.

The Maeslantkering is a consequence of repeated historic calamities. In 1916, the North Sea overwhelmed the Dutch coastline, inaugurating a spate of protective construction that failed to hold back the water in 1953 when an overnight storm killed more than 1,800 people. The Dutch still call it the Disaster.

Hello. That's us.

- You can see here in this pic from the NYT that the Dutch barrier...

...was a model for what we ended up doing at the base of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO).

I appreciate the article, I'm going to read it.

Amsterdam was oft discussed post-2005 as a model for NO & the NL for LA, however there are some distinctions or flaws we have in following their path:

- Political. We have very serious political dysfunction. It partly led to our infrastructure failures before the Storm and while we did have some reforms they continue to plague us. Not least of which is the complete lack of political will to overcome the oil/gas companies which have ravaged our coast and our system with corruption. I don't say that as some raging lefty, it's a real thing. I'm a fairly conservative person with full appreciation of the bounty that oil and natural gas has brought us, I'm respectful and I don't view corporations or these in particular as evil. However it is a fact that they wield tremendous power in our state right down to the governors and there is and can be and has never been reform in coastal restoration because they quite frankly can stop it.

- Local attitudes towards global warming.

Mr. Molenaar, Rotterdam’s climate chief, summed up the Dutch view: “We have been able to put climate change adaptation high on the public agenda without suffering a disaster in many years because we have shown the benefits of improving public space — the added economic value of investing in resilience.

- The rate of recycling is low here. We don't recycle glass or compost. We're heavily invested in landfills and the landfill owners have tremendous political influence in South Louisiana and NO, including in the courts (we elect our judges). IMO we simply ran up against ourselves after Katrina, I would like to think, I know, that reform in coastal protection and in natural preservation are essential to our survival here and those things require severe political reform. We have had several positive developments in our economy and in our city's infrastructure and planning, but holistically not enough has changed on this front. It's mind-numbingly frustrating and foolish, but then our ambivalence and decadent attitude towards life is why many people love us and think us special, including ourselves.

Just as a side note on reality, this is happening in Grand Isle, probably our greatest barrier island and the closest thing you will ever see to a beach in Louisiana.