Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Katrina I have to admit that even though I read the paper and follow the news. The disaster befalling New Orleans and the Gulf coast took me a little by surprise. For the past few years the number of hurricanes per season has been above average and the coverage of them tends to run together. I rely on alarmist press or weather diagrams that show that a given hurricane is headed towards the chesapeake before I give any genuine focus to it. I remember them saying it was just a tropical storm when it was poised last weekend to rollover florida. I remember them saying it might regain hurricane strength when it got back out over the warm (90°) water of the gulf. The next I recall was hours before it gained landfall - still heading for New orleans - they were talking about  90 - 140 mph winds.  That's not just a catagory three hurricane, I thought that's catagory four. At the end of the segment the weathercaster says it is a cat. five hurricane. I couldn't believe a storm could ramp up in force so quickly.   Was it that quickly, maybe I wasn't giving nature the attention and respect it deserves and will occaisionally demand. Since it took me by surprise and the realization occured in a single moment, I can say that the hairs on the back or your neck really do stand up at such times. A catagory five storm will rip apart anything in its path. Far too many people may have had an attitude like mine and didn't evacuate and at this point is is great fear and a hundred or more people may have drowned. At first it seemed like New Orleans had dodged a bullet when the final track took Katrina east of the city, but with the levee breached the city looks like it may have to be abandoned for the near future. A major American City abandoned? These are not good times. The blog Googlemapsmania (featured in the Washington Post last Sunday) has some creative ways of tracking this - NWS mashups. There are flickr Hurricane Katrina and technorati tags Katrina for this as well. 11:33:12 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2005 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 9/2/05; 1:48:21 AM.