Word: stormings
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...night before Katrina with a "hurricane box" containing a sledgehammer and life jackets. They laugh no more, he says. This year Charity, which can barely sustain an emergency room in a defunct Lord & Taylor store, plans to shut down and evacuate for anything greater than a tropical storm...
Forecasters at Colorado State University believe there's nearly a 50% chance of a major hurricane hitting the coast between Florida and Texas this year, up from a normal 30% chance. New Orleans officials are assuming the worst in planning for a big storm, having learned the hard way that commercial phone lines will fail, cell-phone towers will topple, repair teams could take days (or, more likely, weeks) to show up and the National Guard will come packing guns but no walkie-talkies. "In the end, you can only count on yourself," says deputy mayor Greg Meffert, the city...
...truth is, New Orleans, if hit, will flood. How badly depends on the hurricane. In his book The Storm (Viking; 320 pages), out this week, Louisiana State University researcher Ivor van Heerden argues that Katrina wasn't the mythical Big One, a frightening conclusion for a city entering a new hurricane season. The storm made landfall east of New Orleans as a fast-moving Category 3, he notes, but the winds that lashed the city--weakened by wetlands and miles of subdivisions--registered only as a Category 1. Van Heerden, deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center in Baton Rouge...
...that the Corps' design was largely to blame. According to Van Heerden, the team's report, set for release May 31, will show that 87% of the water that flooded New Orleans came through breaches in the floodwalls, not over the tops of levees. That's key because a storm surge topping the levees would have lasted but a few hours, leaving at most 3 ft. of water in New Orleans, he calculates. The breaches, by comparison, let water pour in for days, inundating houses up to their rooftops...
...nation's chief engineers for playing it "too close to the margins" of safety in the past. He gives them kudos for getting the city's levees "back to where we were" before Katrina--but that's also what worries him as the city prepares for a new storm season. Every levee, says Daniel, is still too low by a couple of feet because the Corps didn't calculate for the ground subsiding. "If they find other areas that were a hairline away from failure before, they need to fix those right away," he says...