OK, I can't resist. I just want to settle one thing. New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. It was built to withstand a category 3 hurricane. It got hit by a category 4. It drowned. No matter who was President, no matter what treaties were signed, no matter what money was spent on the levee system, it was not designed to withstand a category 4 hurricane like Katrina. And before we start blaming the good people of New Orleans for living like that, I doubt there's a major city in the United States built to withstand a possible natural disaster, from earthquake to volcano to hurricane to tornado to forest fire to you get the idea.
Let me balance that with a couple of worthwhile Katrina posts:
Great post and two great links to new bloggers I had not read yet.
I'm currently taking the Oceanography class, and my class project will deal with storm surge and storm setdown. The National Hurrican Service has storm surge models (SLOSH, HRSM, and ADCIRC) that they run when something like Katrina is approaching. But you don't need those models to tell you that water will pile up on the right-hand side of the hurricane as it rotates counter-clockwise in northern hemisphere.
Here's what happened. The eye of Katrina passed just a bit to the east of New Orleans. As it approached, the storm surge built up against the Gulf Coast and was driven into Lake Pontchartrain by winds out of the southeast. Any inlet acts as a concentrating basin for the storm surge. As Katrina moved northward, the winds over Pontchartrain now came out of the northeast and then the north. So the big pile of water, trapped in the Pontchartrain basin, was driven straight south over the levee and into New Orleans. That's why the dikes broke _after_ the storm passed by.
You can spin you finger around over a map of Louisiana along the storm track for a little demonstration. Hopefully someday I'll be able to use my classroom knowledge to save people's lives . . .
Whizbang (evacuated from New Orleans before the storm) has some great suggestion for how people can help besides contributing money, see his post http://wizbangblog.com/archives/006933.php A Note to my fellow bloggers and the MSM: some key grafs
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Heck- Somebody make an "Evacuee survival guide" with laser precision information on how to get help without clicking 50 links or waiting on hold 2 hours. If you can save 25,000 people 5 hours of looking up the same information, think of the power in that!
Think of the simple things- Thousands of people lost their glasses. Somebody set up a website where they can coordinate donations of (known) prescription glasses from people who no longer need them. Get a freight company to donate the freight. I bet FedEx will give you an account number that will route all the glasses to some agency in New Orleans.
If you do something to help the victims, ping this post... If there is a lot of people helping out, Kevin will set up a post with the links. (I just volunteered him ;)
Think about it for a second from my chair... (I'm not whining but) I'm almost 40 years old.... Here is the sum total of all my worldly possessions: 4 pairs of shorts, 5 shirts, 2 pairs of shoes, 4 pairs of underwear, 1 pair of blue jeans, a box of family pictures, 2 flashlights, a piece of trench art my grandfather brought back from WWI and my father's hammer. (Hey, it means a lot to me!) That's it. Everything else is gone. And BTW, I'm unemployed.
I tell you that not to whine but to let you see the tree thru the forest. Multiply my situation by about a million. Stop and think about that... A million people homeless and unemployed.
If you're a blogger then (by near definition) you're a self proclaimed talented person. Prove it. They'll be plenty of time for punditry and pontification next month... In the mean time there is work to be done. Figure out how to help the victims.
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