If you want a good running commentary on the situation in New Orleans, I strongly recommend the WWL-TV blog. Start at the bottom and go up
There’s a lot of the incredible details that just aren’t trickling up to the major media outlets, like the nursing home whose bus was stolen at gunpoint. Says the executive director: “We had excellent plans. We had enough food for 10 days…Now we’ll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot.”
Just remember, as bad as this is, it’s nowhere near what could have happened. One of the media’s worse failures during this incident is the lack of context. By Friday night, some weather-watchers were already concerned that Katrina was tracking dangerously close to New Orleans. Saturday the media began to report New Orleans as a possible target, but gave little warning of the unique dangers
By Saturday night, the NHC was giving dire warnings to New Orleans and begging them to evacuate. Residents of the city had finally started to leave. By Sunday, Katrina had become one of the largest and most powerful storms in history. A mandatory evacuation of the entire city was ordered, although they had only 12 hours left to get out. By Sunday night, the media had its eyes firmly fixed on New Orleans, and was telling the public of the massive destruction about to arrive
Then, sometime Sunday night, Katrina was hit with a large mass of dry midwestern air. This drastically weakened the storm and pushed it to the east. Those of us watching the satellite coverage actually saw this happen, although it was unclear what it was at the time – on the satellite it appeared as a total collapse of the western side of the hurricane for a brief time. This one event saved New Orleans(and probably doomed Biloxi and Gulfport)
Then the hurricane hit on Monday morning. New Orleans suffered serious damage, but for a period of about 12 hours it looked like it had actually averted disaster. Only long after Katrina had moved north did the storm surge on Lake Pontchartrain cause breaches of the levee system, resulting in the massive flooding and destruction we now see. If this hadn’t happened, all the people currently being rescued from the roofs of their home probably could have just stayed in them and waited for the power to turn back on
The flip side to this is, if that gust of dry air hadn’t hit Katrina, New Orleans would have been hit by the north-east quadrant of a Category 5 storm. There would be no homes. There would be no people to rescue. The Superdome, along with everything else in the city, would have been destroyed by the 30 foot storm surge and the 50 foot waves on top of that surge, all being pushed at the city by winds approaching 200MPH, twice what was actually experienced. You would be looking at a death toll of 50,000->100,000
The thin lines between salvation, catastrophe, and annihilation are the result of the storm’s strength as well as the city’s weakness. In hindsight it seems almost criminally negligent to leave one of our most valued cities so defenseless against such an inevitable disaster. We should remember how we were spared a far worse outcome; and if New Orleans is rebuilt, we must not count on luck to save the city again
