Given that the media exists in order to hype, it was only late last night that I started to believe just how bad this disaster is. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the level of destruction suggests Katrina is going to be the worst storm since the turn of the last century, worse than even Hurricane Hugo or Andrew for example.
Last year, before a visit to the Big Easy, I recall reading this shudder-inducing scenerio of a hurricane slamming New Orleans. And while it's a relief it doesn't seem as bad as this article portended (it predicted thousands of lives lost) [Update: or maybe not], it seems to have missed the possibility of a levee breaking and water flooding via Lake Pontchatrain. Who would've thought that the worse problem would not be the hurricane itself but the levee breaking? (Though obviously the former was the cause of the latter.)
As for Biloxi, it's hard to imagine them getting hit any worse. It was a Cat 4 and not Cat 5 storm but it feels academic at this point. Looking out at the extremely wet weather here in Central Ohio makes the storm is easy to personify; she has traveled eight hundred miles. It makes tangible our physical interconnectedness.
Here's an excerpt from National Geographic's doomsday scenerio from a year ago:
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste...When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.UPDATE: I can not get my head around this. I can't get my head around a city being closed for a month (or longer). I can no more get my head around this than I could around the destruction wreaked by the terrorists after 9/11. It's too big. They say as you get older you lose some of your capacity for surprise since you have seen so much more, but I am just so surprised at seeing 80% New Orleans under water and hearing the words "New Orleans is closed".
"The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast... "I don't think people realize how precarious we are," Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse."
No comments:
Post a Comment