Diary of a mad hurricane: Storm experts feared the worst
For several days as Hurricane Katrina first threatened and pounded the Gulf Coast, then flooded New Orleans, dozens of government agencies and private researchers helped predict, resist, and recover from the storm. In a series of timelines, U.S. News staffers detail the activities of:
FEMA officials: On paper, feds gave an upbeat analysis;
Climate researchers: Experts feared the worst;
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: 'It all started crashing pretty fast';
The Army's 82nd Airborne Division: A waiting game;
The Coast Guard: 'Hoisting up every vulnerable-looking thing;
The National Guard: 'We did respond with amazing speed';
State and local emergency officials: Getting through the storm;
and airborne storm chasers: A view from the eye.
Here, the climate researchers' story:
Two Louisiana hurricane experts pieced together their day-by-day recollections of Hurricane Katrina as it unfolded. Here are their accounts:
Barry Keim, the Louisiana state climatologist
Keim is based on the Louisiana State University campus in Baton Rouge, which also houses LSU's Hurricane Center, the Southern Regional Climate Center and the university's geography department. During Katrina, the LSU-based groups worked with state emergency officials, providing regular briefings on the storm's behavior. The scientists got satellite images of the storm, pinpointed flooded areas and even 911 calls on interactive GIS maps, used computer models to predict the storm surge, and analyzed the storm for officials as it developed.
THURSDAY, August 25
"I recall vividly, I was teaching a class, and showing the students the morning weather broadcast. The forecast at that time was for landfall in Apalachicola, Fla., or points east. But the storm had been very slow across Florida, causing a lot more damage than was anticipated, because the steering currents [large-scale wind patterns] were very sluggish. And that makes it very hard to forecast where it's going."
FRIDAY, August 26
"By Friday morning the hurricane shifted track somewhat westward, and as the day went on it started migrating into a more serious threat for us. On Friday afternoon I saw that steering currents were not really there, there was nothing to keep it from running to us. . . . It could have ended up anywhere from Louisiana to Florida."
SATURDAY, August 27
"By Saturday morning, [the national hurricane center was] locked onto southern Louisiana. It was a pretty darned good two-day forecast, and nobody trusts four- to-five-day forecasts anyway, whether it's a hurricane or not." Keim gives the first of his many weather briefings to state homeland security and Office of Emergency Preparedness officials late that morning. He was officially "activated" to duty at the Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge at 2 p.m. In the briefings, a duty that Keim shares with LSU scientist Kevin Robbins and others, "we take the forecast and localize it with local information, like wave buoy data, local wind speeds, and so on, and tell the elected and appointed officials so they can make decisions." In this first briefing, "the forecast was calling for a Category 4 hurricane, and that's enough to get anyone's attention. Nobody dreamed at that time that it would be as bad as it was, but they were very concerned."
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