Not Again
A battered Gulf coast and a storm season for the ages
Hurricane watchers--and this year, who isn't one?--like baseball fans, have a couple of things in common: They're crazy for statistics and nuts about history. As Katrina's evil twin, Rita, made landfall on the Gulf Coast this past weekend, the metrics for the two hurricanes were decidedly different. Both Category 5 killers as they lurched monsterlike north toward the coast, both lost a bit of strength as they approached land but still packed a wallop virtually unmatched in history, Rita clocking in earlier in the week as the third most powerful hurricane on record, Katrina, at the peak of its strength, at No. 5. Only twice before, in 1960 and 1961, have there been two Category 5 blows recorded in the same hurricane season, making Rita and Katrina the meteorological equivalent of, say, the 1927 Yankees. But more than the meteorological, climatological, and other data points the specialists will be pondering over years from now, this year's extraordinary hurricane season may be most remembered for another kind of impact, or series of impacts.
The most immediate was in the lessons-learned department. Skewered for their sluggish response to Katrina, officials from the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency all went to great lengths to demonstrate their readiness for Rita. Early last week, after his Marine One helicopter landed on the deck of the USS Iwo Jima, President Bush headed straight toward one of the ship's mess halls, where he took his seat beside Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and listened intently to the National Hurricane Center's projections for Rita. The president, still smarting over comparisons between his take-charge response to the 9/11 attacks and his desultory reaction to Katrina, made sure he was on top of the action when Rita hit, bunkered in at the Pentagon's Northern Command headquarters facility in Colorado Springs, Colo., his key aides and cabinet officers poised to jump as soon as the storm gave them a chance.
"Worst disaster season." The difference was like night and day. Coast Guard officials had small-boat rescuers moving from New Orleans to Houston. The Texas National Guard yanked 1,300 of its soldiers out of Louisiana, and 4,000 more military personnel stationed in the state were made available for immediate deployment in Texas. FEMA, having been so beaten up after Katrina, had its game face on for Rita. Long before the hurricane made land, agency officials had dispatched more than 100 semi-tractor trailers filled with ice, food, water, and generators to San Antonio and Fort Worth. They also had some 400 people in 18 urban search-and-rescue and mobile medical assistance teams fanned out across the state--more than they had in place for the entire Gulf Coast region in advance of Katrina. Still, the agency was taking no chances. A top FEMA official circulated a memo, obtained by U.S. News : "FEMA is facing the worst disaster season in its history."
There were other kinds of lessons learned, too. While Rita was still far out in the Gulf, the sun smiling over a placid Galveston Bay, Texans even many miles inland from the coast were streaming north. The traffic jams, in 100-degree heat, were horrific, to be sure. But by the time Rita came ashore, there was virtually no one there to greet the storm, the indelible images of New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish, and Gulfport, Miss., having amply delivered their message: Stay behind--and pay the price.
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