This is depressing:
As the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall approaches, New Orleans — and much of the Gulf Coast — is preparing to put into practice the lessons learned from that defining storm.
Tropical Storm Isaac is following a path eerily similar to Katrina’s in 2005.
There are some obvious differences — Isaac is much weaker than Katrina — but the storm nonetheless will require Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi to execute emergency management plans that were partly shaped by Katrina.
Thousands in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on Monday were leaving their Gulf Coast homes under mandatory evacuation.
Katrina, BP, and now this.
D0n Camillo
At least they have a competent president this time. I don’t who the head of FEMA is, but at least I know who it isn’t.
donnah
It sucks. One can only hope that the storm weakens before landfall and doesn’t cause a massive surge like Katrina did. My heart goes out to those people in the shadow of Isaac.
Cassidy
They will be fine. Valuejet was the safest airline on the planet after the Everglades crash. They will apply the lessons learned and the response will be largely well executed.
pragmatism
perhaps pat robertson could tell us why this is.
shoutingattherain
The free market will protect them….
Butch
There’s a video floating around of some idiot minister in Tampa claiming that she prayed to alter Isaac’s course. I guess it’s OK that you prayed to inflict it on someone else.
Xecky Gilchrist
New Orleans—and much of the Gulf Coast—is preparing to put into practice the lessons learned from that defining storm.
Well, the country applied one of those lessons in November of 2008.
cmorenc
A huge question with any hurricane landfall in the Mississippi/Atchafalaya River area is whether this will be the storm whose flooding rains finally cause the lower Mississippi River course to become “captured” by the Atchafalaya Basin, a river-course migration that would near-certainly have already occurred naturally one to five decades ago absent the extensive levee system maintaining the Mississippi’s current course through Baton Rouge and New Orleans. About thirty or so miles north of Baton Rouge, the respective river basins are closely parallel, separated by a very thin ribbon of land and artificial levees that would have already eroded through to change the river course, but for constant levee intervention. The problem is that the Atchafalaya course is a much shorter distance to the gulf and a relatively much steeper gradient (albeit still gradual) than the far longer, current lower Mississippi River course (150 river miles vs over 300 river river miles). If this capture happened, it would be an enormously expensive and difficult engineering project to reverse, and the current-river course shipping channel through Baton Rouge and New Orleans would become extremely difficult to maintain, direly threatening their continued feasibility as shipping ports.
It could happen.
jwb
And according to Twitter the GOP is talking canceling the convention because they doubt they will be able to compete on TV with Isaac.
sparrow
I just left Houston for greener pastures in the NE, but I still keep an eye on hurricanes (not least because my house hasn’t closed yet).
What is the most depressing is the number of comments in the Chronicle online where people say “this time we won’t let any refugees come here!” “Everyone grab a gun and head out on I-10 to turn them back!”, etc. These people have zero empathy for poor people with no where to go, and homes destroyed. The same people who pray to god and blame the government when the drought turns their farms into dry dust. Ugh.
lamh35
When it rains it pours.
I’m on the phone with my moms just a while ago and her and my sister and my nephews are gonna go to Baton Rouge and stay in an hotel with my grandmother. My grandmother is ole school, soon as she heard about the hurricane, she booked a couple of room at a local hotel.
As some of ya’ll may know, I am a Katrina survivor (I actually hate watching and seeing photos of what was going on ’cause I just dread seeing my own pic or a pic of my family). My fam and I before Katrina just road out the storms (I have distinct memories of riding out Andrew), but after Katrina, we take these more seriously.
The people I’m worried about how the people who don’t have any form of transportation who rely on public transportation will get out of the city.
General Stuck
Life on the Gulf coast. Once one of these nasty fuckers get into that giant hot tub, somebody is going to get hammered. One morning in 2005, I think, I woke up at two AM, turned on the tube. And there was Cat 5 Opal with a bead drawn what looked to be my own forehead living a few hundred yards off the beach. Sphincter tightens, as Mother Nature decides whose turn it is this time. Opal at the last minute turned east and weakened to a Cat 3 storm.
gbear
Is President Obama getting ready to do a fly-over in a week or so?
patroclus
@D0n Camillo: W. Craig Fugate is the FEMA administrator. Hopefully, New Orleans won’t get hit hard.
Punchy
This is an overreaction. The storm isn’t even a hurricane, and will be at worst a Cat. 1. Evacuations are a complete joke here. Talk about keeping the population in fear at all times.
HelpThe99ers
@patroclus: Time did a “2-minute bio” on Fugate back in 2009 – he sounds like one of the good guys.
max
The problem is, is that Isaac is a very *stately* hurricane. It’s passing over the loop current eddy and hopefully it won’t pick up too much excess water and slow down a lot. (A lot of the hurricanes since Katrina seem to be these wide disorganized things, instead high intensity reapers like Katrina. The thing is, is that they seem to be picking up even more rain than Katrina, even while being comparatively weak in terms of rotation.) Otherwise, it’s going to be loitering in the area of NOLA for a good 24 hours dumping rain everywhere. Katrina bottomed at 920 millibars at landfall, and Isaac is currently at 984 mb, but the rain from Katrina that broke the levies was ‘only’ 8-10 inches. Isaac could dump up to 15-18 inches.
This will definitely going to be a test of the rebuilt levies.
max
[‘The silver lining is that the drought in the Mississippi Valley will be over soon. Via the magic of flash flooding.’]
Tractarian
Have you seen the location of this city? IMO, it has “caught a break” every year that it doesn’t suffer a cataclysmic hurricane.
Violet
@jwb: Seriously? But people are already there. I don’t see them canceling it.
@sparrow: But at the time, right after Katrina, Houston was incredibly welcoming and did their best to take care of a very large number of people showing up without much warning. There is a wide gulf between a small number of idiots who post stuff like that online and what people actually do when needed. I think Houston would step up again.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Tractarian: Yep.. it’s damn unfortunate it’s right smack in the path from the tropics to Oklahoma, a state God is surely trying to smite.
Elizabelle
@Violet:
Very good point.
If all of America was populated with the cruel trolls you find on newspaper internet chats, Mexico would be putting up a fence to keep us out.
Astonishing about an anniversary hurricane.
Hope this storm demonstrates government and people of good will can do a lot to sustain and protect communities.
Percysowner
I don’t believe God responds to personal requests and I wish no ill on anyone, for the most part, but if Issac’s winds died down so they weren’t destructive and the entire rainfall only fell on the Republican Convention site and the convention hotels (except for John Cole’s) I would smile a little. And I can wish this because it will never happen.
Good luck to the good and courageous people of New Orleans. You all have more guts than I do, because I would have never come back. I truly do admire everyone who stayed or rebuilt.
Heliopause
I’d say New Orleans has caught most of the breaks over the centuries. It’s below sea level in a hurricane prone area and requires massive infrastructure investment to even exist.
Elizabelle
OT: Charlie Crist to speak at the Democratic convention.
Take that, Zell Miller.
JoesShabadoo
@Tractarian: Yep.
Sometimes I think how much better off we would be if we smartened up and just moved away from these disaster areas instead of just rebuilding bigger on the faultline/in the path of hurricanes.
ET
@Cassidy: Yeah but Bobby Jindal is in charge of LA now. Sadly with Katrina very, very fresh in the minds of people – it is likely that more people won’t want to stay and will get out (if they can) than would would be the case in 15+ years when the memories fade. Hopefully all the hipsters that moved to Bywater have cars.
Thankfully my family has now evacuated. Unlike Katrina when a few stayed behind.
jacy
Track of the storm takes it directly over our house. Wheeeee. The small kids are excited that school has been canceled, but they’re too young to really remember Katrina. Hope everyone in my neck of the woods stays safe and doesn’t incur much damage.
Haydnseek
@pragmatism: Pat Robertson will tell us that it’s a category 2 instead of a 5 because the prostitutes, gays, and liberals have largely self-deported.
danimal
If there are any Dems interviewed on a split screen between GOP convention coverage and Isaac coverage, and they don’t mention that GOP budget cuts would eviscerate NOAA, I want them fired.
Unsympathetic
GOP budget cuts would eliminate the single thing that gives us the ability to evacuate people from hurricane targets.
In short: The GOP wants to kill poor people so rich people can get a bigger tax cut.
WereBear
I did not realize it until I read books like Bloodlands, but Stalin didn’t starve all those Kulaks to “enforce ideological purity” as I was taught in school.
He sold their food for money and didn’t care if they starved.
Which is worse.
quannlace
On the Weather Channel they showed some of the levee’s that had been built up higher, since Katrina. And a huge system of pipes, that can pump water out. Are those new?
Comrade Luke
Yes, that’s where the internets flow.
SiubhanDuinne
@jwb:
Oh pleeze pleeze pleeze pleeze pleeze pleeze.
SiubhanDuinne
@lamh35:
I don’t know where I saw it, but just recently I read that FEMA will provide buses for everyone who needs transportation to evacuate. Quite a difference from 2005.
SiubhanDuinne
@gbear:
Guess it depends on whether a Dem Senator is having a birthday in the meantime.
SiubhanDuinne
@Elizabelle:
This makes me so happy. I’ve probably mentioned it before, but several years ago when my job involved my attending the annual Southern Governors’ Association meetings, I met Charlie Crist at one of the SGA get-togethers, and actually shared a dinner table with him and his then-fiancée (I know, okay?) Point is, he was one helluva nice, bright,interesting and engaged guy, and I remember distinctly thinking (though I didn’t have the nerve to say), “Why aren’t you a Democrat?” I’m really glad he’s come around. Better late than never.
Elizabelle
@SiubhanDuinne:
Good to hear. I wish Mr. Crist happiness and respect.
sparrow
@Violet: True, I need to remind myself that often it’s the dregs that spend all day commenting on rags like the Chronicle (not sure what that says about me… heh). I’d like to think “we’d” step up again.
Kiril
OK, here we go:
@D0n Camillo: In my deployments since Obama was elected, it’s always been interesting to me to observe people who hate him being surprised that the government will help them anyway. Projection 101, I guess.
@donnah: It’s the rain. It will dump on NOLA, but then apparently move directly north, dumping more water in the rivers and streams that feed into the area, so watch for flooding days later.
@sparrow: Yep, that is depressing. But as far as the criminal element of New Orleans goes–because we are all terrible pseudo-American heathens–Baton Rouge and Lafayette, LA received more evacuees/refugees from Katrina and dealt with it fine. Why? Because when the population of those cities went up, they increased their police force in proportion to the increase in population. Houston did not, and dealt with it by blaming all New Orleanians. Studies have shown that the increase in crime in Houston was in line with what you would expect considering the increase in population. (Although, because I am the devil, I had a tiny bit of admiration that our criminals, who I live with, might be just that much better than other places’. Like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca saying the Nazis couldn’t take New York because their criminals were too tough.)
@lamh35: I know what you mean, brah. I never watch Treme because I can’t see New Orleans on TV anymore. It’s like a psychological thing.
@Violet: A lot of people have a lot of love for Houston in this city, deep love, baby.
@Heliopause: About half of Orleans Parish is under sea level. Ever been to the Netherlands?
@SiubhanDuinne: FEMA didn’t have buses, those were school buses, which were under the control of the state. What would the buses have done? Rolled around the city in the 48 hours between the notification that the track had been confirmed as hitting NOLA and asked everyone still there to come jump in? In the most optimistic scenario, a thousand people would have run to the buses like kids to the ice cream truck, and then spent 8 hours getting to Baton Rouge. Don’t fall for FOX News propaganda.