[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]
Ten years ago, at roughly this hour, I published a blog post titled “New Orleans in peril.” I was just a law student with a moderately popular blog, and hurricanes were one of the many things that I liked to blog about, so of course I was going to write something about the newly plausible threat that a strengthening storm in the Gulf of Mexico posed to America’s most hurricane-vulnerable city.
At the time I wrote it, I had no inkling that this would become my most famous blog post ever. I couldn’t have dreamed that it would eventually be quoted in the New York Times (in an article whose headline called me a “weather nerd”) and the Washington Post, among many other places – still less that I would ultimately read the post aloud in a Spike Lee movie.
Anyway, this is what my old website, “The Irish Trojan’s Blog,” looked like on August 26, 2005, with that post on top:
Later that night, I would get Instalanched, and then I would publish my almost-as-famous “Get The Hell Out” post. And the rest is history.
“100,000 dead” wasn’t hyperbole, by the way. As awful as Hurricane Katrina
was, it very easily could’ve been far worse with just a slightly
different track and slightly different timing of its eyewall replacement cycles and dry-air entrainment in those last critical 6 to 12 hours before landfall.
Anyway, for those unfamiliar with my Katrina blogging a decade ago, here’s a backgrounder. And here, courtesy of the Internet Archive, is my contemporaneous reverse-chronological blog archive, working backwards from 16 hours after landfall (when we realized that the New Orleans “bowl” was in fact “filling”) all the way back to the formation of a humble tropical depression over the Bahamas, T.D. 12.
P.S. As always, I hasten to add that my "15 minutes of fame” vis a vis Katrina are utterly
unimportant in the grand scheme of things – or even the medium-sized
scheme of things. I’m writing about them because, well, this is my Tumblr, and sometimes I use it to write about my life. But as surreal and unforgettable and defining as those days in
August 2005 were for me personally, it’s the people of Louisiana & Mississippi whose experiences actually matter. Not mine.
P.P.S. Also, as I’ve said for a decade, I did not “predict” anything,
display any usual foresight, or say anything unique about Katrina on my
blog during those insane, surreal days. I just shouted obvious things
into the void – a void that soon became less void-like, thanks to links
from Instapundit and others – at a time (namely Friday & Saturday,
the 26th & 27th) when many in the media and government (at all
levels*) were seemingly asleep at the switch, failing to adequately
grasp and respond to Katrina’s transition from run-of-the-mill hurricane
to potential world-historical event.
P.P.P.S. I’d like to be
able to say that we, as a country and a society, learned valuable
preparedness lessons from Katrina. But seven years later, as
Hurricane Sandy approached, Mayor Bloomberg made the same fucking mistakes
as Mayor Nagin. (And some new ones to boot!)
Pardon my French, but it really pisses me off.
*Wondering what I mean when I refer to government failures “at all levels”? I’ll show you!
Here’s my
personal, off-the-cuff power ranking of government officials/agencies
who were utter failures with respect to Hurricane Katrina:
1)
Mayor Ray Nagin (because, as bad as the subsequent post-storm response
failures were, they pale in comparison to the epic pre-storm preparedness #FAIL by the Nagin Administration, including the delayed evacuation order that
could have doomed tens of thousands of people to a mid-storm death – with no chance for even a timely “response” to save them – in a plausible worst-case
scenario that Nagin and his administration had no right, at the time they were dithering, to assume wouldn’t happen … all of which I said at the time, not just in hindsight, BTW)
2) The Army Corps of
Engineers (because, given the not-even-close-to-worst-case scenario that actually ultimately occurred, what with the storm weakening and
turning right at the last minute, New Orleans should have been fine, and
Katrina should have been remembered as NOLA near-miss and a Mississippi disaster… but
instead, the levees inexcusably failed in what amounted to a Category 1 hurricane in
NOLA, with perhaps a Category 2-level surge there, which the Army Corps’ system was supposed to be able to handle)
3) FEMA (because the response was
unconscionably slow, disorganized, ill-conceived and poorly
communicated, despite the fact that everyone remotely knowledgeable
about disaster preparedness had always known that a big hurricane
hitting NOLA was a top-level national disaster threat, and despite the fact that Katrina
was extremely well-forecasted 60-72 hours out, so they had plenty of time to get their act together beforehand)
4) President
George W. Bush (because the buck stops with him for failure number 3, and once it became clear that Katrina was a potential world-historical event rather than just a standard-fare ‘cane, POTUS should have made it his top priority and gotten actively involved, sooner and more forcefully, to make sure FEMA and other agencies were on track)
(Side note: Bush’s infamous “airplane flyover” was not a failure. That criticism was totally unfair and wrong-headed. I say this as a Democrat; I voted for Gore and Kerry. But Bush was
absolutely right not to divert first responders, mid-crisis, to provide security
for a presidential photo op.)
5) Governor Kathleen Blanco (because
she & her administration should have more effectively coordinated
and worked with both the local government and the federal government,
both pre-storm and post-storm, to make sure that this well-forecasted, obviously-potentially-cataclysmic,
long-predicted, not remotely “unforeseeable” event was handled properly)
Honorable Mention: Any idiot in any government agency, at any level, who,
at any point, in any context, ever used the word “unforeseeable” to
describe Katrina (because OMG … I. Can’t. Even.)
How about a power ranking of Katrina government successes? Let’s see…
1) The United States Coast Guard (because they stepped in where others
were failing, and rescued like 50,000 people, or something crazy like
that, if I recall correctly)
2) The National Weather Service / National Hurricane Center (because their forecast was spot-on, and gave
the targeted areas adequate time to prepare – which, despite all the
failures listed above, unquestionably saved many, many lives – and they
produced that forecast while relying on modeling technology that, a
decade later, looks positively primitive compared to what we have now)
(However, the NWS / NHC loses a few points for the evident breakdown in
communication with Mayor Nagin & others, which, while it wasn’t
primarily their fault, they probably should’ve done more to recognize
and remedy sooner)
3) uh, yeah, that’s pretty much it
NOTE: This post originally misidentified Governor Blanco as “Governor Mary Landrieu.” Landrieu, of course, was Louisiana’s senator, not its governor. I just mixed up the names after all these years. My apologies.
UPDATE: A recent article by Michael Brown in Politico, “Stop Blaming Me for Hurricane Katrina,” punctures various aspects of the narrative about Katrina (in particular the notion that FEMA dallied while the Coast Guard saved lives) and is certainly worth a read. While the article might seem self-serving, and unquestionably “Brownie” has a bias and his account should be taken with a grain of salt, I gotta say – without having researched it or anything, just assessing it at face value – that various aspects of what he’s saying ring true to me.