Gustav headed to New Orleans?

Not again....


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... refer=home

Gustav is a model of the worst possible scenario for New Orleans.

Katrina started north of the islands, Gustav is probably going to come off the west-most tip of the islands.
What that means is that Gustav will have more time over open warm water to strengthen.
It's not good that Gustav has returned to hurricane strength before getting into the Gulf of Mexico, it can only strengthen once it gets there.

If this storm continues to move as slow as it has down south, and hits New Orleans as some anticipate, Katrina is going to look like an afternoon thunderstorm compared to Gustav.

What I'm hearing is mandatory evacuation starts tomorrow. Voluntary has already begun.

One of the scarry things is the erratic movement storms seem to be having when they get over land this season.

If Gustav makes landfall around New Orleans and displays the same behavior as it did over Haiti and that other storms have displayed, it could end up making landfall then side-stepping along the coastline instead of just heading inland.

I hate to be the ass hole here, but I have absolutely no sentiment for people in New Orleans. They wanted to build a city somewhere, so they built levies and pumped out the water, then built the city under sea level. And when a big bad storm came they were surprised that it was so devastating. And then they wanted people to feel sorry for them because their homes and cities were wrecked. I do feel sorry for their losses, don't get me wrong, they lost their livelihoods and they're sense of security. But logic and common sense says that if it happens once it will probably happen again like we are anticipating now. If they have the same reaction this time as they did last time I will probably throw a brick at my television and scream.

well to be fair, there's not much difference between you watching the TV to see if they're going to do that, and them sitting there watching the TV to see if the storm is going to hit them.

But the thing is that they know it has happened in recent history, and they are getting good warning that it is about to happen again. So if are shocked that something like that could happen to such a great and unique city like New Orleans then we'll just have to get out some 3 or 4 year old recorded news highlights to refresh their memories a little.

I live in tornado ally, and around here we accept it. Yes, when our towns are turned to rubble we do rebuild, but we just do it, we don't make a big deal about how much damage there was and how hard it is going to be to rebuild. We get a bull dozer and stuff and burry the rubble, then start over. A few years ago the entire town of Halem Nebraska was wiped off the map by a tornado, and now they are almost completely rebuilt. They did get federal assistance and stuff just like N.O., but they didn't go piling their dead bodies on the streets and start complaining about the stink.

To be fair, i think you may have been too harsh here Kc0tma. When the bodies were on the street, it wasn't because they wanted to leave them there.

I can only go by what i've heard through various sources, but the government didn't treat Hurricane Katrina as a big thing for New Orleans in that they were agonisingly slow to get any assistance. With the death count there was there wasn't enough help from the goverment to rid the streets of the bodies which is why they would have been compaining about that.

You've also got to remember, and be a bit realistic here, that the people that live in New Orleans up until then hadn't faced a disaster of that size before. Yes the city was built under water, but unless you really think about things like that being a potential issue alot of people weren't going to care. I wouldn't be so surprised if alot of the people that were in New Orleans didn't even consider the "under water level" part prior or during the hurricane. And just one other thing, it was widely reported here that alot of the people that failed to flee the last time were people who had very little money and either chose not to leave their possessions in fear of luting or simply couldn't afford to leave. So, put all these situations together and you can understand why alot of people were upset.

I think I have to lean toward siding with kc0tma. I mean the first time, the severity of the disaster was surprising even though everyone living there should have known it could have happened at anytime. But after seeing what Katrina did, what part of "Don't bother to rebuild a doomed city" didn't they understand? But they did anyway and moved back. Granted Joe your points are valid, but if I had lived in New Orleans the first time, you could be damned sure I would have bugged out of there even if all I left with was the shirt on my back.

This could be said about the entire south east coast of the US. From Galveston to Norfolk. Remember Andrew? Remember Hugo? Hell, the majority of Florida is only a wee above sea level. It's high spot is only 345 ft.

I consider New Orleans to be a unique part of the US and our culture and well worth preserving. I don't think it's chances of being doomed are any greater than the rest of the Caribbean.

Looks like Gustav is a category 3 again already and it hasn't even reached the Gulf of Mexico yet.
http://www.baynews9.com/images/news/200 ... v8308a.jpg

For reference, here's Katrinas' path with the hurricane intensity along the way. (intensity scale is towards the bottom-right)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Katr ... _track.png

As you can see, Katrina was well into the Gulf of Mexico before it was a category 3 hurricane.

Okay, so there is still that chance should Gustav reach New Orleans that it will have died down a bit if we were to make the comparisons to Katrina.

You may be siding with Kc0tma, ATNO, but you picked up on different points to the ones i was commenting on and to be honest to a very slight extent i do agree. In saying that New Orleans is such a famous city for it's music and it was always a city i wanted to visit for that very reason. I only hope it's remotely like what it used to be before the Hurricane in 2005.

It's a "high level" category 3 & is expected to strengthen to a category 4 this (Saturday) evening. It's supposed to enter the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.

Excuse my ignorance, but how often does it go as high as a catagory 4 or 5 (if there is such a thing)?

There actually was hurricane winds off the west coast of Scotland a few years ago, weather we very very rarely ever get, i remember being outside trying to tie things down and that was living in the east coast. Never experienced winds like it before, got as high (in my area) as 100mph.

My bro's wife phoned from the states saying she had heard about it on the news saying how it was being described as a hurricane over there. I kinda laughed.

I need to offer an apology, when I was typing that last night I was tired and I'd had a few too many beers, so I was typing before thinking. But I still say that if you build a house in a flood plain, don't act surprised when you're under water. Sorry for being a jerk!