Hopes and prayers
by Jack GrantI really do hope these predictions regarding the effects of a hurricane the size of Katrina are wrong:
The first warning shot came in 1969.
Sound from an old newscast with Walter Cronkite on CBS:
“The remnants of killer Hurricane Camille continue to spread death and destruction today, triggering flash floods in Virginia…”
Hurricane Camille shook the country, it was one of those rare Category Five storms, and here’s the problem: When the government built the levees to protect New Orleans, they designed them to handle much smaller storms. Government officials did not expect that such a massive hurricane would hit the city in our lifetimes.
Sound from old newscast:
“The country’s chief hurricane experts declared today that Hurricane Camille was the greatest storm of any kind ever to hit the nation…”
It missed New Orleans, but only by a hundred miles, which suggested that officials had been short sighted.
—
Maestri says imagine what happens if a huge storm hits just to the east of the city.
“The hurricane is spinning counter-clockwise, it’s now got a wall of water in front of it some 30 to 40 feet high, as it approaches the levees that surround the city, it tops those levees,” describes Maestri. “The water comes over the top - and first the communities on the west side of the Mississippi river go under. Now Lake Ponchetrain— which is on the eastern side of the community—now that water from Lake Ponchetrain is now pushed on the population that is fleeing from the western side, and everybody’s caught in the middle. The bowl now completely fills and we’ve got the entire community under water, some 20 to 30 feet under water.”
Remember all those levees that the U.S. Army built around New Orleans, to hold smaller floods out of the bowl? Maestri says now those levees would doom the city, because they’ll trap the water in.
“It’s going to look like a massive shipwreck,” says Maestri. “Everything that the water has carried in is going to be there. It’s going to have to be cleaned out— alligators, moccasins and god knows what that lives in the surrounding swamps, has now been flushed -literally—into the metropolitan area. And they can’t get out, because they’re inside the bowl now. No water to drink, no water to use for sanitation purposes. All of the sanitation plants are under water and of course, the material is floating free in the community. The petrochemicals that are produced up and down the Mississippi river—much of that has floated into this bowl… The biggest toxic waste dump in the world now is the city of New Orleans because of what has happened.”
Even though I was very young, I recall Camille hitting the Gulf Coast. I recall the image in the Memphis newspaper of a map showing the position of the storm a day after it had hit land, and it showed the hurricane in the south of Mississippi, apparently moving north towards Memphis, where I lived.
Terrifying, that, for a four-year-old.
Now, I’m thousands of miles away.
Yet, I fear for those in the path, especially in that grand city of New Orleans, so vulnerable.
Some have linked to a previous post here at Random Fate stating that they doubt this storm “will cause widespread damage”.
I dearly, truly hope they are correct.
Disregarding the potential loss of life and culture if New Orleans is heavily damaged, there are other aspects that might affect the United States as a whole (see the last paragraphs of the link).
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