Hurricane Katrina
Posted by Tim.
Wow… This one’s pretty bad-ass, even by my standards.
I sure hope that anybody’s friends or family ain’t caught in this one, as the New Orleans and coastal Mississippi areas are really catching hell this time around.
[EDITED: too long for the front page, Tim!]
See more in the comments…
This entry was posted
on Monday, August 29th, 2005 
at 12:57 pm and is filed under weather.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 29th, 2005 at 1:11 pm Using
This one came ashore with central pressure just above 900 mbar, making it one of the strongest tropical lows ever, not to mention those that came ashore stateside. If I remember my trivia properly, the lowest ever pressure was 888 mbar at the center of Hurricane Gilbert, back in 1988. I remember watching that one, which appeared to be a much bigger storm than Katrina, as the cloud coverage from Gilbert filled the whole damn Gulf of Mexico at one point. Heck, we even got some of the outermost squall lines from Gilbert back home in coastal Alabama, and it went ashore down in Mexico, just a little ways south of Brownsville, TX.
For comparison’s sake, the last hefty storm that hit New Orleans was Hurricane Betsy, back in 1965, which tipped the scales as a 125 mph Category 3 when it came ashore in Lousiana a bit southwest of the city. As a result, the city suffered severe flooding, on account of catching the worst rainfall and highest surge on the eastern side of the hurricane.
Katrina will rate up there, but still falls short of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Camille in 1969, which came ashore in in the Gulfport-Biloxi area of Mississippi, and pretty much leveled everything with its 200 mph sustained winds. (As a local benchmark for comparison, the highest windspeed ever recorded on Mt. Washington was 231 mph.) I suspect that while Katrina will definitely leave its mark, the fact that we have much better forecasting abilities, building design, and infrastructure will result in fewer casualties than Camille caused just 35 or so years ago.
One final bit of storm trivia: the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 (back before they named them), clocked in at 193 mph and ruined that port so heavily that Houston was shoved into a port role, despite being at the inland end of Galveston Bay. The roles have pretty much been reversed ever since, with Houston now one of the country’s major ports and responsible for far more commerce than Galveston over the last 100 years.
So, Katrina is a bad storm, but the old timers in that area will assure you that they’ve survived worse, and that folks will pull through storms just as bad or worse in the future. Still, I would expect the tourism/entertainment economies of New Orleans and coastal Mississippi to take a couple of years to fully recover.