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.)

A leaked draft of a House report on Hurricane Katrina, due to be publicly released Wednesday, concludes: “We are left scratching our heads at the range of clumsiness and ineptitude that characterized government behavior before and after this storm. … If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not. Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for prime time.”

Yup. (Hat tip: Andrew.)

More:

Unheeded warnings, poor planning and apathy in recognizing the scope of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction led to the slow emergency response from the White House down to local parishes, a House investigation concludes.

The 600-page report by a special Republican-dominated House inquiry into one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history concluded the federal government’s response to Katrina was marked by “fecklessness, flailing and organizational paralysis.”

It said President Bush received poor and incomplete counsel about the crisis unfolding on the Gulf Coast and that late state and local evacuation orders added to the confusion at the federal level.

“Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare,” said a summary of the scathing report obtained Sunday by The Associated Press.

“At every level — individual, corporate, philanthropic, and governmental — we failed to meet the challenge that was Katrina,” the report concluded.

“In this cautionary tale, all the little pigs built houses of straw.”

The late evacuations did more than just “add to the confusion at the federal level”; that appears to be a bit of spin by the AP, not the report’s authors. The report makes clear that the latest evacuations added to the death toll:

Mandatory evacuation in the New Orleans area either came too late or were never made, leading to incomplete evacuations, deaths, horrible conditions for those awaiting evacutation.

Again: Yup.

Also, about the president’s “poor and incomplete counsel“:

About 56 hours before Katrina made landfall, the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center cited an “extremely high probability” that New Orleans would be flooded and tens of thousands of residents killed.

Given those warnings, the report notes Bush’s televised statement on Sept. 1 that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” and concludes: “Comments such as those . . . do not appear to be consistent with the advice and counsel one would expect to have been provided by a senior disaster professional.”

Indeed. Bush could have gotten better advice from this blog than he was apparently getting from his people.

To the list of ridiculous quotes from inept federal officials, I would add: “government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur” and “Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane situation.”

Anyway, I’m glad the report apparently spreads the blame around. House Democrats boycotted the investigation because they felt it would be a partisan whitewash, but, reserving final judgment until the full report is released, it appears at first blush that the Republicans have done an admirable job of criticizing the responsible parties at all levels, without fear or favor. (As well they should; oversight is their job, after all.)

The fact is, this ought not be a partisan issue at all, any more than it ought to be a racial issue. Blanco and Nagin are Democrats; Bush, Chertoff and Brown are Republicans; Nagin is black; the rest of them are white. So what? They all screwed up. Badly. Bravo to the Congressmen for bluntly saying so.

Following up on my earlier post about the many Gulf Coast who are still officially listed as “missing,” MSNBC reports:

Nearly six months after Hurricane Katrina, more than 1,300 bodies have been found, but the real death toll is clearly higher. How much higher, no one can say with any certainty.

Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for, and some of them — again, no one is sure how many — were probably washed into the Gulf of Mexico, drowned when their fishing boats sank, swept into Lake Pontchartrain or alligator-infested swamps, or buried under crushed homes, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana medical examiner.

Cataldie noted that coffins, disgorged from the earth by the floodwaters, have been found great distances from their graveyards, and “if we have coffins that have washed 30 miles away, I can assure you there are people who have.”

“The likelihood is there are people we will not find,” he said. …

The remains of 1,079 people have been recovered in Louisiana; an additional 231 were found in Mississippi. But Louisiana officials have information on roughly 300 people whose loved ones are desperately searching for them…

“I have people trying to close estates. I have lawyers calling me. I have people calling me, saying, ‘Do you have my momma?’” Cataldie said.

The list of those reported missing to the Find Family National Call Center, run by state and federal officials in Baton Rouge, has about 2,300 people on it. Some have already been found but have not been taken off the list because family members have not notified authorities. Others are on the lam, wanted for a crime or child support payments.

But it is the others who have not been seen or heard from by family members that Cataldie worries he will never have answers for.

As I mentioned before, this is similar to what happened after 9/11, both in terms of the bloated missing-persons list and the fact that some bodies will never be found. But this situation is probably somewhat worse, in terms of the ability to eventually identify all the victims accurately, because of the vastness of the area and the larger number of poor people affected. There is simply going to be less of a “human paper trail,” if you were, than there was with the vast majority of 9/11 victims.

Former FEMA director Michael Brown, who earned my everlasting ire when he spouted utter absurdities like “Katrina was much larger than we expected” and “Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane situation” and “[we thought] the water would drain away fairly quickly,” is now doing a heck of a job laying the blame elsewhere, unloading on Homeland Security in his testimony before Congress.

Actually, I suspect that Brownie is quite right when he says that “the policies and decisions that were implemented by DHS put FEMA on a path to failure.” But I’m not about to let Brown off the hook just because he’s playing the victim here. Was he scapegoated? Yes. Was he also an incompetent failure in the Katrina response? Yes. There’s a lot of that to go around: Brown, Chertoff, Bush, Nagin, Blanco, etc.

A.J. makes a good point: as the “Internet’s #1 Katrina blog,” I really should be blogging about the tornadoes that hit New Orleans today:

Tornadoes early Thursday tore through New Orleans neighborhoods that were hit hard by Hurricane Katrina just five months earlier, collapsing at least one previously damaged house and battering the airport, authorities said.

Roofs were ripped off and utility poles came down, but no serious injuries were reported. …

Electricity was knocked out at Louis Armstrong International Airport, grounding passenger flights and leaving travelers to wait in a dimly lit terminal powered by generators. The storm also ripped off part of a concourse roof, slammed one jetway into another, and flipped motorized runway luggage carts.

“There’s more damage to the terminal than I saw during the hurricane,” airport spokeswoman Michelle Duffourc said.

NOLA has more.

In other news, Tropical Storm Cindy, which hit Louisiana on July 5 — following virtually the same path that Katrina would take less than two months later — has been posthumously upgraded to a hurricane at landfall. This brings 2005’s record-shattering hurricane count to 15. (The previous record was 12, in 1969.)

P.S. Then there’s this:

Failure to designate a single person in charge of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina led to confusion and a lack of decisive action in the aftermath of the devastating storm, congressional investigators said on Wednesday. …

A report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog agency, said neither Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff nor former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown filled a leadership role in the response to the hurricane.

The report also faulted Chertoff for waiting until a day after the storm hit and much of the Gulf Coast region was already devastated before he declared the area an event of national significance. That designation frees up federal funding and personnel to assist local officials.

Investigators said Chertoff should have designated the storm a catastrophic event [Gee, ya think?!? -ed.], which would have triggered a broader federal response.

“As a result, the federal posture generally was to wait for the affected states to request assistance,” the report said.

“In the absence of timely and decisive action and clear leadership responsibility and accountability, there were multiple chains of command, a myriad of approaches and processes for requesting and providing assistance and confusion about who should be advised of requests.”

GAO Comptroller General David Walker said at a news conference that in the future, the president needs to designate a single individual to take charge and cut through the bureaucratic red tape.

He said a similar recommendation made by GAO more than a decade ago after Hurricane Andrew went unheeded.

The same article quotes Mayor Ray Nagin as saying that New Orleans will be “pretty well protected by the next hurricane season.” Well, that’s reassuring.

Anyway, here’s the PDF file of the full GAO report. A Congressional report will follow in the coming weeks. (Hat tip: A Nun Mouse.)

UPDATE: The Star-Ledger reports:

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke attacked the GAO’s preliminary report as “premature and unprofessional.” He called it incomplete, filled with “obvious errors” and displaying “a significant misunderstanding of core aspects of the Katrina response.”

(Hat tip: Lojo, who has more.)

 
[UPDATE, 8/22/06: For the latest, up-to-date commentary on Spike Lee’s film — which I was in — please visit my homepage or my Katrina category.]
 
 

Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been busily taking care of odds-and-ends in Connecticut: ripping my CD collection into MP3 form, searching for various old archived files that I need for Bloypedia entries, giving my parents a wedding slideshow, etc.

About my interview with Spike Lee yesterday… it was fun. When I walked into one of the conference rooms at the Park Central that the production company had reserved, I expected to be greeted by an assistant producer or something; instead, I was greeted by… Spike Lee! He was very pleasant and friendly. Immediately noticing my USC sweatshirt, he asked if I’d been to the Notre Dame game and what I thought about the Bush Push. Heh. We later chatted about Notre Dame’s struggling men’s basketball team and the restructured, massive Big East. (Spike thinks 16 teams is too many.)

Another picture of Spike Lee and me.

When it came to the actual interview, I was pretty satisfied with Spike’s questions and my answers. I have no idea what (if anything) he’ll use for the film, of course, but I thought the best parts were when I chronologically described what happened from my perspective during the days leading up to Katrina’s landfall, and when I answered his question about what lessons we should learn from Katrina. (I emphasized the importance of adequately preparing for predictable, ultimately inevitable disasters before they happen, e.g., a San Francisco earthquake, a Mount Rainier eruption, an East or West Coast tsunami, etc.) I also think I did a pretty good job pointing out how much worse Katrina could have been for New Orleans, if not for the “dumb luck” of a last-minute eyewall replacement cycle and a miniscule (but massively important) right-hand turn.

I touched on the racial aspect as well, explaining that I don’t believe there was any “racial animus” involved in Katrina — that the slow federal response was a symptom of incompetence, not malice. I said I think it’s preposterous to claim that the feds responded slowly because Bush “doesn’t care about black people.” And I pointed out that there’s simply no reason to buy into the idea that the government blew up the levees; the floods are perfectly well explained by what we now know about the levees’ shoddy construction. Again: incompetence, not malice.

Of course, I also emphasized the failures of the local and state governments. I was, as always, hard on Mayor Ray Nagin, explaining that I believe his administration’s failure to implement a timely and effective evacuation plan before the storm hit is worse than any of the multiple government failures after the storm, because, again, it was only dumb luck that prevented the storm’s immediate impact from being so horrifyingly severe and deadly that the slow response would have been almost a non-issue. There wouldn’t have been thousands of people waiting for days at the Convention Center, because the vast majority of those people would have died in the storm itself instead of being able to get themselves to higher ground while their city slowly drowned. And if those thousands of people had died, the focus of the blame game would have (quite rightly) centered on the local government’s failure to adequately prepare instead of the federal government’s failure to adequately respond. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and Mayor Nagin could have prevented a lot of the misery in the aftermath of Katrina if he had heeded the sound advice of those who knew better and ordered a mandatory evacuation earlier — and used the resourses at his disposal (like those drowned school buses) to help people get out.

In addition to interviewing me, Spike had me read several of my blog entries aloud on camera. He picked five posts: New Orleans in peril, Humbled by Katrina, Evacuate, The mayor of New Orleans is an idiot, and NHC urges N.O. mayor to issue mandatory evacuation. In reading the last one, I got to say the f-word. Hehe. :)

Anyway, because I was reading these posts off my computer screen, I used WireTap Pro to audio-record myself doing my dramatic readings. :) Here’s a clip of me reading “Evacuate,” including my infamous “get the hell out” line:

source file
MP3 File

I don’t know what Spike will do with the hour-plus of footage that he shot of me. I presume only a minute or two will be in the film, if that. I just hope my opinions and statements are treated fairly and accurately. Spike seemed like a really nice, intelligent guy in person. Here’s hoping his treatment of me in the film lives up to the high opinion I had of him yesterday.

Incidentally, as I was leaving, a member of the crew stopped me in the hallway and said words to the effect of, “I’m going to check out your blog when I get home. I haven’t heard of it before, but I really like you — you seem to be all about the truth. You don’t have an agenda, you’re just about the truth.” That was nice.

In other news, before meeting with Spike, I met up with Vicki, fellow former Trojan Hall resident and Becky’s ex-roommate from sophomore year. I hadn’t seen her in, oh, I don’t know, maybe five years? So it was great to see her and catch up. Here’s a picture of Vicki and me outside the Park Central:

 
[UPDATE, 8/22/06: For the latest, up-to-date commentary on Spike Lee’s film — which I was in — please visit my homepage or my Katrina category.]
 
 

Well, that went well… I think. I guess I’ll find out for sure when the movie comes out. :)

Here’s what I was looking at throughout the interview:

I’m on the bus back to Connecticut now (blogging via cell-phone modem). I’ll probably post some more thoughts on my meeting with Spike later.

UPDATE: Much more on the interview here.

 
[UPDATE, 8/22/06: For the latest, up-to-date commentary on Spike Lee’s film — which I was in — please visit my homepage or my Katrina category.]
 
 

I mentioned back in November that Spike Lee wants to interview me for his documentary about Hurricane Katrina. Well, tomorrow’s the day. He’s flying me from South Bend to Hartford tonight, I’m taking the bus down to New York tomorrow morning, and then I’m meeting with Spike at the Park Central around midday. Should be interesting.

I have no clue what Spike wants to ask me; I’m just the weather nerd with the blog, so I’m not sure what I can add to his film, exactly. I’ll find out tomorrow, I guess. I’ve made clear to Spike’s producer that I don’t agree with Katrina race-baiting, let alone any “Bush blew up the levees” absurdity. She said she’d passed along my e-mails to Spike, and assured me that Spike wants to include a “wide range of viewpoints” and so forth. All I can hope, really, is that if I end up being in the film, my views won’t be twisted beyond recognition. We shall see. I figure it’s worth the risk just for the free trip home. :)

My main debate now is over what to wear. When I was on MSNBC, I wore a shirt and tie, figuring I should try to look professional. But if I show up tomorrow as the nerdy white guy in a shirt and tie, I figure the temptation to cast me as “The Man” would become irresistible. :) So I’m leaning toward wearing a USC sweatshirt. Gotta give props to my alma mater!

Anyway, after meeting with Spike & co., I’ll then head back to Connecticut and stay at my parents’ house Friday and Saturday nights, before flying back to South Bend on Sunday. Unfortunately, I probably won’t have time to hang out with friends while I’m in the 8-6-0, as it’s a very quick visit and, in addition to visiting with my parents, I have lots of odds & ends to take care of (e.g., looking for some old photos & videos that I’ve been wanting; re-ripping my CD collection in the wake of losing my laptop; etc.). So, if you’re a Newingtonian and you don’t hear from me while I’m in town, don’t be offended. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it back for a slightly longer visit later this semester or over the summer.

So that’s my story. Blogging by yours truly will be primarily cell-phone-based from tonight through Sunday… though perhaps not entirely, and guestbloggers are, of course, free to continue doing their thing. Anyway, wish me luck!

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush pledged to leave no stone unturned in investigating what went wrong in the government’s response. In his address to the nation on September 15, 2005, the president said:

I also want to know all the facts about the government response to Hurricane Katrina. … Four years after the frightening experience of September the 11th, Americans have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency. When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I, as President, am responsible for the problem, and for the solution. So I’ve ordered every Cabinet Secretary to participate in a comprehensive review of the government response to the hurricane. This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. We’re going to review every action and make necessary changes, so that we are better prepared for any challenge of nature, or act of evil men, that could threaten our people.

The United States Congress also has an important oversight function to perform. Congress is preparing an investigation, and I will work with members of both parties to make sure this effort is thorough.

Alas, in keeping with a pattern of Bush Administration behavior that should be familiar by now, it is beginning to sound like this was, to be blunt, a lie. And “members of both parties” are rightfully upset. The AP reports:

The White House is crippling a Senate inquiry into the government’s sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina by barring administration officials from answering questions and failing to hand over documents, senators leading the investigation said Tuesday.

In some cases, staff at the White House and other federal agencies have refused to be interviewed by congressional investigators, said the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In addition, agency officials won’t answer seemingly innocuous questions about times and dates of meetings and telephone calls with the White House, the senators said.

A White House spokesman said the administration is committed to working with separate Senate and House investigations of the Katrina response but wants to protect the confidentiality of presidential advisers.

“No one believes that the government responded adequately,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. “And we can’t put that story together if people feel they’re under a gag order from the White House.”

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the committee’s Republican chair, said she respects the White House’s reluctance to reveal advice to President Bush from his top aides, which is generally covered by executive privilege.

Still, she criticized the dearth of information from agency officials about their contacts with the White House.

“We are entitled to know if someone from the Department of Homeland Security calls someone at the White House during this whole crisis period,” Collins said. “So I think the White House has gone too far in restricting basic information about who called whom on what day.”

She added, “It is completely inappropriate” for the White House to bar agency officials from talking to the Senate committee.

There’s executive privilege, and then there’s obstructionism for obstructionism’s sake. This clearly appears to cross the line into the latter category.

A White House spokesman says the administration has “cooperated” because “the administration’s deputy homeland security adviser, Ken Rapuano, has briefed House and Senate lawmakers on the federal response” and another homeland security adviser will present the senate with “a ‘lessons learned’ report” in several weeks. Riiiight… by that logic, if the police want to investigate me for murder, I can “cooperate” with their investigation by “briefing” them on the fact that I was not involved and submitting a “evidence report” listing all relevant items they might have found in my house, all the while refusing to be interviewed or searched.

The shameless, arrogant bullsh*t seems to know no bounds with this administration. (Hat tip: A Nun Mouse.)

It just occurred to me check something that, in 24 years, I can’t believe I’ve never thought to check before: Was there an active tropical cyclone in the Atlantic when I was born?

The answer, according to Wikipedia and Unisys, is yes. Tropical Storm Jose was wandering the east-central Atlantic, several hundred miles southwest of the Azores, on 9:22 AM on October 30, 1981, when one Brendan Loomer Loy came into the world. Jose fizzled out over the ocean on November 1, and did not hit land. Track here.

Jose formed more than 24 hours before I was born, on October 29, 1981 at 7:00 AM EST. That brings us to the question that winds up producing the far more interesting factoid: what was the first tropical cyclone to form during my lifetime? Answer: Katrina, the first storm ever to bear that name. It formed in the western Caribbean at 7:00 PM EST on November 2, 1981 and hit Cuba as a Category 1 hurricane on November 5 before accelerating to sea. (So that makes it the first hurricane of my life, as well as the first cylcone to form during my life.) Track here.

“Katrina” was on the rotating list of storm names again in 1987 and 1993, but those seasons weren’t active enough to produce a “K” storm. But by 1999, we’d entered this new, more active tropical cycle, and the second Tropical Storm Katrina in Atlantic-basin history formed just off the coast of Nicaragua on October 29, 1999 at 2:00 PM EDT, just hours before my 18th birthday. (I wasn’t watching the tropics, but rather, was getting ready to leave for Disneyland with some friends from my dorm, including this girl named Becky who I had a crush on.) Katrina hit Nicaragua as a minimal T.S. and quickly weakened — though not before I had become a legal adult while it was still an active cyclone. Track here.

And then, six years later, came the Katrina we all remember, the monster hurricane that killed more than 1,300 people and devastated the Gulf Coast. The storm itself was unspeakably tragic, of course — but, meanwhile, the attention it brought to BrendanLoy.com turned me into a media mini-celebrity, which has been a long, strange, but mostly enjoyable trip. Anyway, perhaps it was this weather nerd’s fate, since the first hurricane of my life was named Katrina and I entered adulthood during the next Katrina, that the last Katrina would be a momentous event in my life! (I say “last Katrina” because 2005’s Katrina will be the last storm ever to bear that name, as it will be retired and a replaced with a new “K” name starting in 2011.)

More than 3,200 people are still officially listed as missing from Hurricane Katrina, although some “likely have already been found by their relatives but the [Find Family National Call Center] hasn’t been notified of their status.”

It’s worth remembering that the list of those “missing” after 9/11 was similarly bloated for quite a long time, such that, as I recall, a few of the people whose names were read aloud at the Ground Zero memorial service on September 11, 2002 were actually alive and well.

Still, one can’t help but wonder whether some of these “missing” people really are dead — washed out to sea or whatever — and whether the death toll, currently at 1,386, may yet rise significantly. Hopefully not.

P.S. In a related story, FEMA has drastically increased its estimate of the number of people displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The number now stands at 2 million. (Hat tip: A Nun Mouse.)

Following up on my previous post… the AP reports:

Mayor Ray Nagin apologized Tuesday for a Martin Luther King Day speech in which he predicted that New Orleans would be a “chocolate” city once more and asserted that “God was mad at America.”

“I said some things that were totally inappropriate. … It shouldn’t have happened,” Nagin said, explaining he was caught up in the moment as he spoke to mostly black spectators, many of them fearful of being shut out of the city’s rebuilding. …

On Tuesday, Nagin said his comments about God were inappropriate and stemmed from a private conversation he had with a minister earlier. “I need to be more sensitive and more aware of what I’m saying,” he said.

Indeed.

As a punishment, I suggest that Nagin write “GOD IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR MY FAILURE TO EVACUATE MY CITY” on the chalkboard 200 times, and then compose a 15-page essay explaining why it’s important for local governments in disaster-prone cities to have effective evacuation plans and be prepared to implement them in a timely manner. (If he wishes, he can explain that God wants it to be that way.)

I also suggest that New Orleans voters kick this bum out of office, whenever the election actually happens.

But it’s nice that he apologized. Alas, it doesn’t change my firm belief that he’s an incompetent fool.

P.S. Eugene Volokh has a thoughtful post on this subject, though I think it’s too charitable by half to Mayor Nagin.

Hurricane Katrina and other recent storms are a sign that “God is mad at America,” according to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin:

“Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it’s destroyed and put stress on this country. … Surely he doesn’t approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses. But surely he is upset at black America also. We’re not taking care of ourselves.”

He added that the rebuilt New Orleans will be a majority black city because “it’s the way God wants it to be.”

Cripes.

The NHC has issued the final advisory on Tropical Depression Zeta. As of 4pm EST on Jan. 6, 2006, the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, the busiest and costliest ever, is finally over. Appropriately enough, it is the latest ending ever. Happy New Year. :)

Adding one final record to its remarkable mother lode of records, the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season has now lasted longer than any other Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history. Tropical Storm Zeta, which formed on my wedding day and became only the second cyclone ever to span two calendar years, is still clinging to life, albeit as a weakening tropical depression, as of 10:00 AM today:

…ZETA WEAKENING AND BECOMING DISORGANIZED OVER THE CENTRAL ATLANTIC OCEAN WELL AWAY FROM ANY LAND AREAS…

MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS ARE NEAR 35 MPH… 55 KM/HR…WITH HIGHER GUSTS. ADDITIONAL WEAKENING IS FORECAST DURING THE NEXT 24 HOURS… AND IT IS POSSIBLE THAT ZETA COULD DISSIPATE LATER TODAY OR TONIGHT. …

THE NEXT ADVISORY WILL BE ISSUED BY THE NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER AT 5 PM AST.

When that next advisory (4pm EST) is issued, Zeta will have lasted 15 hours longer than the previous record-holder, Hurricane Alice, did in 1954-55.

Zeta probably won’t last much longer, though. The 4pm advisory, or perhaps the one that follows at 10pm, could very well be the last, according to the discussion:

THE COMBINATION OF STRONG NORTHWESTERLY WIND SHEAR AND VERY DRY AIR AHEAD OF THE [APPROACHING MID- TO UPPER-LEVEL LOW-PRESSURE] SYSTEM SHOULD BE ENOUGH TO…FINALLY…BRING THE 2005 ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON TO AN END…POSSIBLY AS EARLY AS THIS AFTERNOON OR EVENING.

The Storm Track writes, “See ya latah Zeta.”