The magazine Popular Mechanics declares the House Republicans’ report on Hurricane Katrina “riddled with poor logic, internal contradictions and exaggerations.” Fair enough; I haven’t read the report in full, so perhaps that’s true. But when you dig into PM’s criticisms, it becomes clear that “poor logic,” at least, is something the magazine’s editors are apparently quite familiar with.

PM says the House report “consistently blam[es] individuals for failing to foresee circumstances that only became clear with the laser-sharp vision of hindsight.” Hmm. Well, as someone who has gotten a considerable amount of attention for foreseeing a number of those circumstances contemporaneously, not just in hindsight, I feel that I should respond.

Basically, the magazine’s conclusions are crap.

Popular Mechanics quotes the House report’s statement that: “Fifty-six hours prior to landfall, Hurricane Katrina presented an extremely high probability threat that 75 percent of New Orleans would be flooded, tens of thousands of residents may be killed, hundreds of thousands trapped in flood waters up to 20 feet, hundreds of thousands of homes and other structures destroyed, a million people evacuated from their homes, and the greater New Orleans area would be rendered uninhabitable for several months or years.” PM then states:

This statistic is referred to often, and refers to computer modeling of a direct Category 5 hurricane landfall in New Orleans. However, it’s also a distortion. According to the data the Committee itself examined, 56 hours prior to landfall, Katrina was a relatively weak Category 3 storm, heading west in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next few hours, it began its turn north, but where the storm was going to make landfall along the Gulf Coast was any weatherman’s bet (the average 48-hour margin of error is 160 miles). In fact, it was not until the next day, Saturday, that it became more of a certainty that the hurricane was heading toward New Orleans. Furthermore, hurricane forecasters and emergency managers tell PM that until about 24 hours before landfall, hurricanes are too unpredictable to warrant the sort of blanket evacuation orders the report describes.

That last statement is absolutely fascinating, considering that all of the studies in the years before Katrina indicated that it would take 72 hours to successfully evacuate New Orleans. So, according to the “hurricane forecasters and emergency managers” that Popular Mechanics inteviewed, I guess we shouldn’t even have bothered.

Look, it’s absolutely correct that, at 56 hours out, it wasn’t “certain” that Katrina would strengthen to a Cat. 4-5 system, or that she would hit New Orleans. Hell, none of that was “certain” at 48 hours out, and the track remained “uncertain” even at 24 hours… 12 hours… 6 hours out. So if the House report says it was “certain,” the report is wrong.

But in terms of assessing whether evacuations should have occurred earlier, the lack of “certainty” is entirely irrelevant, because it is completely and utterly impossible for ANY hurricane forecast to EVER be “certain,” particularly when we’re talking about several days before landfall. Thus, evacuation decisions must ALWAYS be made on the basis of “uncertain” information. This is pretty basic stuff, and I’m not sure what PM finds difficult to understand about it.

In this particular case, the threat to New Orleans 56 hours before landfall — although admittedly “uncertain,” indeed not even a better-than-50% probability — was virtually as grave as the threat could ever possibly be at 56 hours out. The forecast track was aiming almost directly at the Crescent City, and it was a “high-confidence forecast” — i.e., one in which the steering currents are strong and well-understood, and the computer models are all in good agreement. Thus, if we accept Popular Mechanics’s premise that this forecast was too “uncertain” to justify evacuation at that point, then it follows logically that all 56-hour forecasts would be too “uncertain”; evacuation could NEVER be justified so far before landfall. The magazine’s unnamed “hurricane forecasters and emergency managers” seem to explicitly confirm this.

But how can that be? Early evacuations are absolutely crucial when major cities are threatened, because of the length of time that evacation takes — and this is even more true when the major city in question is New Orleans, mandating the need to evacuate almost everyone, instead of just selected regions of the city (because far more people in New Orleans are affected by the latter portion of the phrase “hide from the wind, run from the water”). Another reason more time is needed for a New Orleans evacuation is the well-understood problem of poor people without the means to evacuate; more time was needed to round them up and get them out of town, using those ultimately drowned school buses and such. For these and other reasons, it was universally understood before Katrina that 24 hours was NOT enough time to completely and effectively evacuate New Orleans.

So basically, I’d really like to know what “hurricane forecasters and emergency managers” this magazine is talking to, because I’m calling b***s***.

The magazine goes on to say:

The death tolls listed in the congressional report presuppose: A) certainty that the storm would hit New Orleans directly, and B) certainty the storm would strengthen to a Category 4 or 5. Neither of these propositions was certain 56 hours prior to landfall.

Again, if the report really does presuppose “certainty” of those things, that’s obviously stupid. However, why should “certainty” be the standard, anyway? In other words, what is Popular Mechanics’s point, exactly? The magazine seems to believe that there are only two options: either something is “certain,” or it couldn’t have been anticipated except in hindsight. But that’s ridiculous! Obviously, our disaster planners need to be prepared for uncertain, and perhaps statistically unlikely, but reasonably plausible worst-case scenarios. It’s no defense at all to say, “Well, we weren’t certain things would go badly.”

Nobody can deny that there was a realistic, reasonable, plausible possibility on Friday and Saturday that Katrina would strengthen to Cat. 4-5, and that it would hit New Orleans. And everybody knew what a calamity that would be, if that were to happen. Isn’t that more than enough to firmly establish that we needed to be ready for the worst? Again, why is “certainty” the standard? Why is it considered an unfair application of “hindsight” to suggest that officials should have more adequately prepared for the “uncertain” but realistic prospect of catastrophe?

The House report may be riddled with errors, but it appears to me that Popular Mechanics’s report is even worse.

(Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

UPDATE: Welcome, InstaPundit readers!

It has been suggested in comments that “by [my] reasoning, every city and town on the coast should evacuate whenever a hurricane is potentially (number of evacuation hours) from hitting.” That’s absurd, and my own blog archives disprove it. Was I calling for wholesale evacuation, 48-60 hours in advance, of Mobile, Alabama? Of Biloxi, Mississippi? No, even though I acknowledged that those cities were, at that point, just about as likely to get hit as New Orleans, statistically speaking. So why was I so selective in calling for evacuations? Because New Orleans is a special case. Everyone knows this. More importantly, everyone knew this, long before Katrina.

There’s a reason FEMA, circa the year 2000, listed a hurricane landfall in New Orleans as one of the three most likely U.S. catastrophes (along with a major earthquake in San Francisco and a terrorist attack in New York City). It’s not because New Orleans is the most likely major city to get hit (that distinction would probably go to Miami), it’s because unlike anywhere else in the country, the entire city is in danger from catastrophic flooding. Thus, whereas in other places, only the shoreline and low-lying areas need to evacuate (”hide from the wind, run from the water”), in New Orleans everybody has to evacuate, which makes it essential that evacuations occur as early as possible. This is precisely why I, and so many other people, were contemporaneously calling for immediate evacuations as early as Saturday morning. Indeed, I was already urging people to leave Friday night, on the assumption that the mayor would order everyone out on Saturday.

Another reason early evacuation of New Orleans in particular is essential: when the flood happens, it doesn’t recede for weeks, leading to all the disgusting problems we saw in the aftermath of Katrina (toxic chemicals and oil slicks in the water, corpses floating around, etc.). This, too, was anticipated years in advance. That’s unlike any other storm-surge zone, where the water comes in, then recedes fairly quickly. In New Orleans, it’s all the more crucial to evacuate because the conditions will remain horrible for a long time after the actual storm, and, if you survive the storm (quite unlikely in a true direct hit; thank God Katrina wasn’t), you won’t be able to get around because of all the (toxic) water surrounding you. As it was, at least a lot of the city was still above water; not so if Katrina’s path had been 30 or 40 miles to the west of where it was — a variation which is impossible to confidently predict until the very last few hours before landfall, long after the evacuation window.

One valid point was made in response to my argument, and that is that the contraflow worked better than expected. It didn’t take 72 hours, as expected, to evacuate the city. People weren’t stuck on the roads. That’s true, thank God. (It’s a risk the mayor absolutely should not have taken, since it could easily have proven otherwise; he didn’t have any valid reason to think things would go so well. But he lucked out.) However, the fact remains that, although it’s true that many people chose to stay (in some cases because of mixed signals from the mayor; I heard tourists on TV on Saturday saying they would have left if the evacuation was mandatory, but because it was only voluntary, they didn’t — and then by Sunday it was too late, rental car agencies were running out of cars, etc.), there were still plenty of other people who couldn’t leave… and those drowned school buses, and other effective local evacuation plans, could have gone a long way to getting them out. But it would have taken more than 24 hours to coordinate all that. Also, if the mayor had ordered a mandatory evacuation 24 hours earlier, the message would have been a lot more unequivocal at an earlier time, and I guarantee you a lot more stragglers would have left voluntarily.

It is frankly mind-boggling to me that people defend the lateness and inadequacy of the evacuation. If Katrina has been as bad as she almost was, tens of thousands people would have died. As I explained in an earlier post:

As horrible as the catastrophe has been, please realize that it actually could have been far worse. What occurred was not the long-feared “worst-case scenario,” which involved not a levee breach equalizing the water level in Lake Ponchartrain and “Lake New Orleans,” but rather a storm surge over-topping the levees and causing the water level in “Lake New Orleans,” hemmed in by the still-intact levees, to rise substantially higher than the water level in the lake. If the storm had wobbled a meteorologically insignificant 20 or 30 miles to the west, and/or had not weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 4 at the last minute, that scenario would have occurred, and instead of a slowly developing 10-20 foot flood, New Orleans would have suffered a rapidly developing 30-40 foot flood. (Jackson Square would have been underwater, whereas in the real-world scenario it remained high and dry.) The whole thing would have happened Monday morning, and at the same time as the city was rapidly and massively flooding, the devastating winds that demolished the Mississippi coastline would have been tearing New Orleans apart instead. All of those attics where people took shelter would have been either submerged or shattered to bits. The French Quarter would have been swamped, instead of mostly surviving the flood. Second-floor generators in hospitals might well have drowned. Bottom line, there would be a lot fewer refugees and a lot more corpses.

If that had happened, would y’all still be saying that I’m being unreasonable in expecting New Orleans’s local government to evacuate the damn city in a timely fashion when a clear and present mortal danger is on the doorstep? Honestly, look yourself in the mirror and ask whether you’d be calling for Nagin’s head if 50,000 had died on his watch. If so, and yet you’re defending the late evacuation now, then you’re the one engaging in “20/20 hindsight.” On Saturday, when he chose not to order a mandatory evacuation, the worst-case scenario was still absolutely within the realm of realistic possibility. (It remained so until mere hours before landfall.) So he needs to held responsible for the extremely dire consequences that almost happened on his watch, in addition to those that actually occurred. We’re idiots if we give him the benefit of “lucking out.”

Oh, one last thing. To those who say they’re sick of “finger-pointing”… I understand where you’re coming from, I really do. But how and when, exactly, do we hold officials accountable for their gross failures, if “finger-pointing” is going to be considered verboten after a tragedy like this? One man’s “blame game” is another man’s legitimate exercise in holding democratically elected officials accountable for their actions. (And on the latter point: Ray Nagin is up for re-election in a few months. I certainly think it’s appropriate to point out his utter failure in the run-up to Katrina, in light of the fact that his constituents are about to decide whether to keep him around for another four years.)

Sorry for the lack of updates all day today. I was at work, and then have been busy working on other things. (More on one of those things below.)

Notre Dame beat South Florida tonight, 62-55, handing the Bulls their 13th straight loss and keeping alive the Irish’s hope of reaching the Big East tournament (and thus maybe, just maybe, somehow, some way, the NCAAs).

Notre Dame has now won two straight games — albeit against weak opponents — and is tied in the loss column with Rutgers and St. John’s for 12th place in the Big East standings. That’s significant, because only 12 teams make it to the conference tourney. Up next: a crucial game at Seton Hall on Saturday, then a near-certain loss at UConn on Tuesday. After that, two of ND’s last three games are at home: Marquette on Feb. 25, at Providence on March 1, and DePaul on March 4. I’m thinking that if Notre Dame goes 3-2 over those five games, that should get them in, but it will depend on what other teams do.

I actually didn’t end up going to the game tonight, because I couldn’t find anyone to go with. Becky didn’t want to go (she didn’t want to miss the Olympic moguls), and none of the friends I usually sit with were going either. (Unfortunately, I didn’t know I wasn’t going until it was too late to try and get into the Monologues. Oh, well.)

Elsewhere, Bruce Pearl’s surging Tennessee Vols (I feel like we should say “Gentlemen Vols” to distinguish them from the ladies, heh) set a new school record for most three-pointers by a team in a game, one day after Duke’s J.J. Redick became the NCAA career leader for three-pointers made by an individual.

Here in the state of Indiana, of course, the big basketball story is Mike Davis’s fate.

In other basketball-related news, one of the things I’ve been working on is a spreadsheet combining the standings of all 257 contestants who have entered a total of 759 brackets in my twenty Living Room Times NCAA pools (11 men’s, 9 women’s) since 1996. Here is the result. Or, to view everyone’s scores sorted by point total, see here. A work-in-progress Bloypedia entry is here. Standings from each of the individual pools can be found here. This is all part of my effort to have a complete archive of pool-related history ready to go by the time the 10th anniversary pools get underway next month. I’ve been working on this piecemeal for several weeks, and am actually pretty close to done with it. Stay tuned!

This should be awesome:

Tomorrow the International Law Society will be holding a panel with Professor Rick Garnett and Father John Coughlin to discuss the protests over the cartoons depicting Mohammad which have been posted in various locations in the US and across Europe.

This meeting will be held Thursday, February 16th, in Room 121 from 12-1.

There will be Jimmy Johns as long as the sandwhiches last.

Why “awesome”? Well, first of all, it’s an interesting topic. Second of all, Professor Garnett rocks. And third of all… Jimmy John’s!! Woohoo!!

I have class till 12:15, so I hope there’s still Jimmy John’s left when I get out…

Heh:

Scalia criticized those who believe in what he called the “living Constitution.”

“That’s the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break.”

“But you would have to be an idiot to believe that,” Scalia said. “The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn’t say other things.”

Proponents of the living constitution want matters to be decided “not by the people, but by the justices of the Supreme Court.”

“They are not looking for legal flexibility, they are looking for rigidity, whether it’s the right to abortion or the right to homosexual activity, they want that right to be embedded from coast to coast and to be unchangeable,” he said.

(Hat tip: my dad.)

Okay, question. If our resident Buffalo readers can make fun of our resident East Coasters’ puny snowstorms, does that mean our resident California readers can make fun of the Buffalonians’ puny earthquakes? :) Seriously, it was a 2.6, people… Governor Schwarzenegger stomping on his office floor in frustration after losing a ballot initiative causes more shaking than that.

Could be, according to new blogger and New Mexico State freshman Colin Pedicini, if shooting victim Harry Whittington dies.

Personally, I’m with Jon Stewart, begging Mr. Whittington to “please, please get better.” Not only is that obviously the moral and humane thing to hope for, but it will also allow the jokes to remain funny. :)

P.S. My previous posts about “Cheneyquiddick,” as it’s been dubbed by Victoria Spurs (hey, it’s more creative than “Cheneygate” — and, as Ann Althouse notes, “it even has the ‘dick’”), can be found here and here.

P.P.S. It seems slightly odd that Cheney would be subject to a grand jury investigation only if Whittington dies. After all, his culpability in the shooting — i.e., whether or not he did anything wrong — can’t rationally be affected by whether the guy lives or dies. I mean, if he did do something wrong, obviously a death would make the consequences of that wrongdoing far more dire, and thus the punishment more severe. But if he didn’t do anything wrong, his non-culpable action doesn’t become wrong even if a hundred people die as a result! That’s just basic logic. So, the question is, why does it seem like Cheney is currently completely “in the clear,” but if Whittington dies, suddenly he’s in big trouble? My guess: the grand-jury investigation is a standard procedure in Texas in response to any death caused by another person; it doesn’t actually imply that Cheney is “in trouble,” it’s just an automatic (or virtually so) ramping up of the investigation to a more heightened status because of the higher stakes, if you will. If there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, the investigation will be over quickly. Anyone know if my guess is right?

UPDATE: The Washington Times, hardly a Bush-hating liberal rag, reports:

Experienced hunters yesterday said Vice President Dick Cheney alone bears the blame for a weekend mishap in which he accidentally shot a hunting companion in the face and chest with a shotgun.

Ouch. Read the whole thing.

President Bush greeted college football’s national champions on Tuesday at the White House. Alas, thanks to the superhuman efforts of a man named Vince Young six weeks ago today, the footballers from the University of Southern California were, for the first time since 2003, not present at the annual South Lawn ceremony. Instead, it was a day for Texas pride:

The Longhorns’ visit even played into a joke by Scott McClellan about the Cheney hunting accident:

Mr. McClellan joked that the Texas Longhorns, the N.C.A.A. football champions who were at the White House to meet with the president, would be in their team color, orange, and “the orange that they’re wearing is not because they’re concerned that the vice president will be there.”

Heh.

Normally, the president meets with the champions of college football, women’s volleyball, and men’s and women’s soccer on the same day. As a result, USC had actually been represented at these ceremonies for three consecutive years: in 2003 and 2004, the USC women’s volleyball team was there, and of course, in 2004 and 2005, the football team was there. (In 2004, both the USC and LSU football teams were there. Because, you know, they were both national champs, contrary to some people’s claims. Previous discussion of that issue here.)

However, I can’t find any evidence that Bush met with the University of Washington women’s volleyball team, the University of Maryland men’s soccer team or the University of Portland women’s soccer team on Tuesday. Dunno what’s up with that. (He certainly didn’t meet with USC’s current reigning national championship team — men’s water polo — but that isn’t standard practice anyway.) Apparently, the only teams Bush greeted Tuesday were his home state’s Longhorns and, in a separate ceremony, the Major League Baseball champion Chicago White Sox. Go figure.

Anyway… this is the perfect opportunity to post a funny picture that about a half-dozen people have sent me over the past month or so, which I’ve been meaning to post but keep forgetting about. As you can see, it shows a USC Song Girl appearing to cheer for a Texas touchdown:

As Larry the Cable Guy would say, “I don’t care who you are, that’s funny right there.” :)

There are several variations, but the caption on the photo goes something like this:

Cheerleading, tumbling lessons and camps since age 3: $30,000
Annual cost of attending USC: $35,000
Total cost for staying just the right shade of blonde: $10,000
Cheering when the other team scores: Priceless

Heh.

BEAT THE RAZORBACKS!!!

CORRECTION: As a commenter points out, USC’s 2004-05 champs — the undisputed ones — actually didn’t go to the White House. Scheduling issues got in the way, according to BoiFromTroy. I had forgotten that. Oops!

Anyway, here are the White House transcripts from 2003 and 2004. The latter includes the following quote from President Bush: “Both schools, LSU and USC, are, in fact, national champs. And we’re proud to call you national champs.” Hey… the man has to occasionally get something right. :)