By David L. Brown
Here’s the good news: Since Katrina the Army Corps of Engineers has spent billions of dollars beginning the task of girding up levees to protect the City of New Orleans should another hurricane strike.
The bad news is that the work is nowhere near complete and won’t be done until 2010 or later, while Hurricane Gustav is only about one day away. Here is the current storm track chart:
As you can see, Gustav is presently a Category 3 storm after having passed over western Cuba as a Cat. 4. It will probably gain power as it continues across the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The “spaghetti model” shows alternative projected paths the hurricane might take according to several different weather prediction models. It is telling that all of the lines strike southern Louisiana, and the two on the right exactly bracket New Orleans. Even if Gustav follows one of the other paths, it will hit the Louisiana coast near enough to cause serious potential damage to the city, which is below sea level.
See followup comment at the bottom of the page for a report on Gustav’s actual effect.
A measure of how serious a threat is posed by Gustav can be taken from the fact that New Orleans is under a 100 percent evacuation order. As of early this morning all highways were opened to allow traffic to flow outward in all lanes, including both sides of Interstates. Mayor Ray Nagin has declared that the Super Dome will be locked and there will be no “haven of last resort.” Anyone who stays past the curfew that will be put in place later today will be on their own. There will be no rescues attempted and only a skeleton force of police will remain in the city to maintain the curfew and arrest or shoot looters on sight.
It remains to be seen whether the worst will happen, but it is not unlikely the city will take it on the chin. The storm has been described by Mayor Nagin as “the mother of all storms.” It is likely to generate a 20 foot storm surge and up to 15 inches of rain, according to weather forecasts. “This is the real deal, not a test,” FoxNews.com quoted Nagin as he issued the evacuation order Saturday night. “For everyone thinking they can ride this storm out, I have news for you: that will be one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life.”
What will it mean if New Orleans is flooded once more? I have predicted before that a second major disaster there would almost certainly lead to at least partial abandonment of the city. Since Katrina the federal government has undertaken to invest billions of dollars to attempt to create a “100 year” levee system after Katrina, a system planned to resist a storm expected to occur only once in a century.