New Orleans Storm Thread: Merged

[NYJJared]

Went down to a Cat 4 overnight, and the eye looks like it's going to be just east of New Orleans. This is good as the right side has the largest storm surge. Either way NO will still be underwater. The Superdom won't actually get the 155 MPH winds, maybe some gusts that get that high but by that point inland it'll be in the 120-140 range. Still though, that's pretty damn fast. Mississippi looks to get the worst.

[faba]

I hope everyone is all right and no casualties from the storm

buildings and structures can always be replaced - loved ones and family can not be

[NYJJared]

Word has it the power's gone in NO and they've had to stop pumping. The water's up to the curb now. I think in order to get generators they'd have to have people go down there. Yikes.

[Jets28]

how was i being insensitive?

he made it sound like they were boarding up a downtown hotel, and i suggested that one could easily walk and get 20 miles further away from the storm surge, which comes off the sea and does the most damage and killing.

if i had 24+ hours, id be walking to higher ground away from the coast rather than planting nails near the coast.

...they are in the best place they could be in which is indoors. trying to secure where they just happen to be stuck in. To suggest anything other than best wishes is insensitive. You think he wants to hear about walking somewhere from you....he wants to hear that his parents will be ok. He needs support and not what you think they should have done. They are there and not necessarily in a place as it is. Have a heart.

[dickkotite]

omg i cant say anything around here anymore. i still fail to see where i was insensitive. my best wishes for his folks is implied, i dont have to say it. i was just commenting on the being stuck downtown thing thasts all ahhh forget it im going to make a ham egg and cheese sangwich

[Bugg]

Say a prayer-they're gonna need it-and a sheetload of ice, fresh water and construction supplies-

When The Levee Breaks

(Bonham/Jones/Page/Plant/Memphis Minnie)

If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break, (X2)

When The Levee Breaks I'll have no place to stay.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, (X2)

Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,

Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.

Don't it make you feel bad

When you're tryin' to find your way home,

You don't know which way to go?

If you're goin' down South

They go no work to do,

If you don't know about Chicago.

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,

Now, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,

When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.

All last night sat on the levee and moaned, (X2)

Thinkin' about me baby and my happy home.

Going, going to Chicago... Going to Chicago... Sorry but I can't take you...

Going down... going down now... going down....

[Bugg]

2 outcomes-

1. Saints figure to be moving to LA anyway for the immediate future. Don't see how they can have the roof-challenged Superdome and the flooded City of NO ready by 9/18 home game vs. the Jints.And may be longer than that.

2. Gas will be $4 a gallon by next week. Oil companies will gouge us all, even though there are storms in the Gulf of Mexico every year and these type of interruptions are built into their production cycle. I voted for and support President Bush, but as long as we elected an oilman, the least he could do is keep oil companies from doing this.

A reminder-how would they evacuate NYC and LI if such a thing happened?

From the NY Times

August 28, 2005

Dreading a Replay of the 1938 Hurricane

By JOHN RATHER

THE national commission that studied the terror attacks of Sept. 11 concluded that the lapses in preventing or responding to the attacks stemmed from a collective failure to imagine that such a catastrophe could happen.

Emergency officials and meteorologists fear a similar failure of imagination on Long Island about major hurricanes.

Conditions are right this year for one or more especially severe storms to lash the Island, they say. But it's been a long time - 67 years - since the last Big One, and officials worry that Long Islanders accustomed to the glancing blows of minor storms have little grasp of just how devastating a major hurricane could be.

"The only people who really have any idea are those who lived through the 1938 storm," said Michael E. Wyllie, the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service office in Upton, referring to the unnamed hurricane that laid waste to eastern Long Island that year. "And you are talking about people who are into their 70's to even remember it."

The 1938 hurricane killed more than 50 people on Long Island, even though it struck the sparsely populated East End on Sept. 21, long after the crowds of summer visitors were gone. It killed hundreds more in Rhode Island as it roared northward, flooding that state's cities. Over all, the storm took 600 lives and did about $308 million in damage to insured property, the equivalent of $4.1 billion today, according to the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group.

Scientists and officials using newly refined computer models say that a repeat of that storm today would be many times as destructive, because so much valuable real estate has since been developed on or near the shore, directly in harm's way.

Timely evacuation of threatened areas, impossible in 1938 because there was almost no warning of the storm's approach, could prevent most loss of life in a repeat. But officials cite this danger: many people may think they can ride out a major hurricane as easily as they have the tamer storms the Island has seen lately.

It's been two decades since the last significant hurricane hit Long Island, and that one was Gloria, a Category 1 storm, the lowest rung on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, with sustained winds of no more than 95 miles an hour. That fast-moving 1985 storm, remembered mostly for tree damage and lengthy power failures, gave little hint of the worst that can be expected from a Category 3 hurricane like the 1938 storm, Mr. Wyllie said.

If ever there was a year for big hurricanes to strike Long Island, 2005 would seem to be it. High water temperatures in the Atlantic, weak atmospheric wind-shear conditions and the storm-steering influence of the seasonal weather phenomenon known as the Bermuda High all seem to be providing a window for a fearsome storm to charge up the East Coast. The season peaks in September.

If the 1938 hurricane, the strongest to strike Long Island in the last century, were to hit today, emergency officials say that Suffolk County alone would suffer more than $24 billion in losses. Nassau's losses would be smaller because the track of the storm would be well to the east, but it, too, might suffer damage in the hundreds of millions or more. The county has not calculated a dollar estimate.

Officials are more circumspect about projecting human casualties. The toll would depend on whether people heeded evacuation orders, they say. Those who did not would be on their own as winds and waters rose and police and emergency crews hunkered down to ride out the hurricane.

"The cavalry will not be coming over the hill," said Thomas O'Hara, an ambulance services consultant in Suffolk's Department of Fire, Rescue and Emergency Services. "So when we tell you to go, it's time to go."

The most prudent residents, Mr. O'Hara said, will bypass public shelters and clear out of Long Island entirely. "Get in the car and go visit Aunt Tillie in Highland Falls," he said. "The last place you want to end up is isolated and alone, and the second-last place is in a public shelter, because I assure you, you will not get a mint on your pillow."

County emergency planners and Federal Emergency Management Agency recommend preparing for a hurricane by taking these basic precautions: gathering a "go kit" of essentials, including medications; filling the car's gas tank; keeping bottled water, flashlights with fresh batteries, and a battery-powered radio or television on hand in case the power goes out; and having a family emergency plan.

The two counties and the State Emergency Management Office are currently surveying residents in coastal areas to gauge their preparedness and to find out what they would do in the face of an approaching storm. The survey results will help officials fine-tune plans for evacuation and shelters.

"Everybody over the years has gravitated towards the water, and we have gotten complacent and are not thinking about the ramifications of that," said Joseph Williams, Suffolk's commissioner of fire, rescue and emergency services.

The projections of economic loss, generated by a new computer program called Hazus-MH that was released to state and local governments last year by FEMA, are one indication of the Island's vulnerability.

Aided by Hazus-MH and other continually updated programs that leave less and less to the imagination, officials see an ever-clearer picture of what hurricanes could do. And it is not a pretty sight.

Gregory J. Caronia, the director for emergency preparedness in Nassau's Office of Emergency Management, recently produced a map that showed how Long Island would fare in a worst-case hurricane - a Category 4 storm hitting at high tide, with winds as high as 155 m.p.h., moving west-northwest at 30 miles an hour. The Island looked like a swamped boat with water pouring over the gunwales.

Based on National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Slosh maps (an acronym for "sea, lake and overland surges from hurricanes"), the map showed the entire city of Long Beach under more than eight feet of water, enough to obliterate houses and put oceanfront high rises at imminent peril of being undermined and toppled. A tidal surge running up to 21 feet above normal high tide would flood low-lying communities all along the South Shore and as far as five miles inland.

Tides could run more than 30 feet above normal in Little Neck Bay and 24 feet above normal around Manhasset Bay and Hempstead Harbor, the map shows, as wind-driven water piles up relentlessly in the narrower westward reaches of the Sound with nowhere to go but ashore.

In Suffolk, Fire Island and its summer communities would be overrun by waves. The surging waters would cut off the eastern end of the South Fork at Napeague, making an island out of Montauk, and would swamp much of the North Fork. Ocean surf would cause major erosion.

In West Hampton Dunes, an Army Corps of Engineers project to rebuild dunes and close a breach in the barrier island, completed in 1993, would be no match for the raging surf, and the multimillion-dollar homes built there in recent years would almost certainly be washed away.

Clifford Jones, the project manager for the corps, said the beach rebuilding was designed to protect against more modest storms, the kind that occur about once in 44 years on average. He said the corps estimated a 50 percent chance that the new beach and dunes would be overcome during the project's 30-year expected life.

Along with pounding surf, a Category 4 hurricane would bring with it lightning strikes, torrential rain, major inland flooding, tons of airborne debris and fallen trees - and, if the winds were high enough, roofs and walls all over the Island would be torn away, not just at the shore.

The Long Island Power Authority estimates that in a major storm, as many as one million homes and businesses - in other words, nearly everyone on the Island - could lose power, some for long periods.

As calamitous as all that would be, it would still pale in comparison to the damage in New York City, where the Rockaway peninsula, parts of Wall Street, many subway stations and all of John F. Kennedy International Airport would be under water.

Forecasters say that while it is possible for such a Category 4 hurricane to reach Long Island, it probably will not happen more than once in 500 years. The strongest storm of all, a Category 5, is considered all but impossible this far north, because water temperatures here are never high enough.

The computer maps generated by Mr. Caronia, Nassau's emergency preparedness director, show how damage would diminish in lesser storms. A Category 2 hurricane - weaker than the Category 3 storm in 1938 but still stronger than Gloria, with 110 m.p.h. winds - following the same track as his hypothetical Category 4 and also striking at high tide, would still swamp Long Beach, but the tidal surge would be 14 feet above normal high tide, not 21 feet. There would still be flooding and wind damage across the Island, but many more buildings would remain intact.

Using Hazus-MH software, Mr. O'Hara, the ambulance services consultant, studied a possible storm in the Category 2 range hitting at high tide in the Babylon area. He estimated that it would cause $122.5 million in property damage and business interruption in Suffolk and generate 1.45 million tons of debris.

Mr. O'Hara's computer studies, combining topographical, storm surge, demographic and building data, project that residences would suffer most of the $24.5 billion in damage that a 1938-type Category 3 storm might do in Suffolk. Members of some 62,000 households would be left homeless, and 37 percent of all buildings in the county would sustain at least moderate damage.

A separate study by AIR Worldwide, a catastrophe risk-modeling company in Boston, came up with somewhat different estimates for such a storm. The company, which does most of its work for insurance companies, said if a 1938 hurricane struck today, the total insured losses for the entire Atlantic Coast would be $24.5 billion. S. Ming Lee, a senior vice president of the company, said that of that figure, $11.6 billion in losses would be in New York State, mostly in Nassau and Suffolk.

Even so, the damage would be greater than from all four hurricanes that battered Florida last year combined, or even from the strongest storm to hit the United States in memory, Hurricane Andrew in 1992, whose 155 m.p.h. winds devastated South Florida and the Louisiana coast.

In dollar-damage terms, it would be a disaster second only to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, which led to more than $30 billion in insurance payments.

Insurers say that many Long Island homeowners could be in for a shock after a big hurricane. Those who have not updated their policies to reflect home improvements may find that they have too little insurance to cover replacement costs.

Loretta Worters, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, said that a study by her group found that 64 percent of all homes in the United States were underinsured, by an average of 27 percent. Federal flood insurance is capped at $250,000, much less than many shorefront homes are worth.

Officials consider Long Beach, with 60,000 people living on a low-lying barrier island about 10 feet above sea level, to be the most vulnerable point on Nassau's South Shore. "It's the weak link, as far as Nassau is concerned," said Richard Rotanz, the county's commissioner of emergency management.

Emergency plans try to compensate with early evacuation over the three bridges out of the city, two of them at low elevations and certain to flood in a bad storm. At least 18 hours before the predicted landfall of a hurricane, fire sirens are to begin sounding four single blasts, evenly spaced and repeated for 30 minutes. Emergency teams using loudspeakers are to drive through city streets telling residents to leave.

"The biggest thing is early warning," said James P. Hennessy, the president of the City Council.

The city manager, Charles Theofan, said that Long Beach had to be alert. "We really are very vulnerable," he said.

Still, the city has declined to approve a proposal from the Army Corps of Engineers to build new dunes along its beaches as part of a storm protection project.

On Fire Island, the most vulnerable coastal area in Suffolk, evacuations would be mostly by ferry, well in advance of a predicted landfall. Gerald Stoddard, the president of the Fire Island Association, a property owners' group, said hurricanes were the general topic of conversation among summer residents.

Protecting Fire Island and the entire South Shore from Jones Inlet to Montauk Point has been a bone of contention for years. The Corps of Engineers has been discussing a dune-building and beach-widening project since the 1960's and is now studying a revised plan. But Irving Like, a lawyer for the New York Coastal Partnership, a group of Fire Island and South Shore home and business owners, said that the Interior Department and the corps had failed to comply with a directive from Congress to submit a shore-erosion protection plan for Fire Island by the end of 1999.

Close calls with hurricanes do not count with the public, but they are agonizing for emergency officials and meteorologists who are trained to expect the worst. In August 2003, Hurricane Isabel gave them a scare, building up Category 5 winds of 167 m.p.h. and threatening to make landfall anywhere from the Carolinas to eastern Long Island. But wind shear weakened the huge storm while it was still over water, and a high pressure system over New England steered it onto the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where it struck at the low end of the Category 2 range and soon declined to a tropical storm, sparing Long Island.

Still, experts say that the Island cannot count on being lucky every time.

[gg]

downgraded to a catagory 3 storm. nature is amazing and can be both beautiful and scary .. and it just shows how fragile and fleeting life is.

[DireJet38]

Parents are fine, thanks for all the best wishes.

Will be stuck there fo awhile and also said the only thing left to contend with is LOOTING with in the city. Haven't seen the media talk about this yet, but supposively it could get real ugly.

[The Gun Of Bavaria]

Parents are fine, thanks for all the best wishes.

Will be stuck there fo awhile and also said the only thing left to contend with is LOOTING with in the city. Haven't seen the media talk about this yet, but supposively it could get real ugly.

Direjet glad to hear they are safe and sound. In the end, the damage means nothing as long as loved ones and others make it through safe.

As for the looting, I hope the National Guard are allowed to carry bullets when they move in, unlike the LA riots years ago.

[Maxman]

Parents are fine, thanks for all the best wishes.

Will be stuck there fo awhile and also said the only thing left to contend with is LOOTING with in the city. Haven't seen the media talk about this yet, but supposively it could get real ugly.

Dire:

This is great news! Great news. Thanks for the update goes.

As far as the looting is concerned, I hope they get you something nice!

TomShane wears an adult medium if they ask!