I put the odds of New Orleans getting its levees breached and the city submerged at about 70%.
Edit: photo removed as weather event ending--Stevis 8/30/05
That's Category 5 Hurricane Katrina, currently bearing down on New Orleans. It's already the sixth strongest measured hurricane ever in the Atlantic. Here's the Weather Underground forecast for Monday in New Orleans, as of post time:
Widespread showers and scattered thunderstorms. Hurricane force winds. Some thunderstorms may produce damaging winds and heavy rainfall. Locally heavy rainfall possible. Highs in the upper 80s. Northeast winds 60 to 90 mph with gusts to around 125 mph becoming northwest and decreasing to with gusts to around 115 mph in the afternoon. Chance of showers and thunderstorms 90 percent.
That is the epitome of a calm statement about complete devastation.
Now, I'm not being facetious with the title of this post. New Orleans is below sea level, and protected by a large network of levees from the Mississippi flooding. Of course, if that system is breached--say by a huge storm surge--the water isn't getting out. The pumps which clear the city of ordinary rainfall would be submerged and useless, and you'd end up with a giant lake full of swamp critters and toxic waste. This article discusses the issue; I first saw these points as a feature out of a New Orleans paper some years ago but can't find it now.
So, in conclusion, I'd wait until late next week before making your Mardi Gras plans.
2 comments:
I'm not suggesting that, Will, disaster planners are. I agree with you thought that the post-disaster effects would not be as bad as, say, Bangladesh. But there were a lot of people shown in various breathless news reports who couldn't evacuate, and floods are a greater killer than most people realize. Look around Chicago at the homeless and poor--those are the people who wouldn't be able to get out, and who were lining up at the Superdome like the Saints were good or something.
And I did see a NOAA report that suggested the lack of drinkable water could be acute for weeks.
I do think predictions of 10,000+ were based on poor evacuations and a direct hit, neither of which ended up occuring (as of Mon. AM, even the west edge of he eyewall will miss the city, and while it'll be flooded from Lake Ponchitrain, it should be less than the catastrophic scenario).
Rereading my comments, I can't help but admit that I may have blown it a little out of proportion. Partially, I was kidding, in that the media always overreacts to stuff like this. But I was somewhat serious. New Orleans is particularly susceptible to hurricanes and this one, for a long time, looked as though it could not only destroy a large fraction of the structures throughout the city, but also transform the city into a bowl of unimaginable filth. That said, no I never thought tens of thousands of deaths was a real possibility. Fortunately, more people evacuated then I thought would, and the storm missed the city by just enough.
Storm surges turned out to be roughly half as tall as were said to be possible. Things are going to be very bad for a while--essentially every building downtown throughout the city will have sustained some amount of damage, and the city is without, power, water, sewage, and gas--but it could have been worse. Even at its worst, though, it is hard to imagine 100,000 dead in a hurricane.
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