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These posts are the creation of Doran L. Barton (AKA Fozziliny Moo). To learn more about Doran, check out his website at fozzilinymoo.org.

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Pre-Extremely Wet

Posted: 29 August 2005 at 01:19:21

Monday, 29 August, will be a very sad day for the city of New Orleans, LA. As I compose this entry, news reports around the Internet are saying Hurricane Katrina, a category 5 storm, will make landfall south of New Orleans in about five hours.

As soon as I heard New Orleans could be in the direct path of this storm, I remembered a story I read in the last few months about the catastrophic possibility of New Orleans being hit by a large hurricane. I managed to track it down as being in the April 2005 issue of Popular Science.

It's chilling to read some of this story.

Although hurricanes of this magnitude slamming directly into New Orleans are extremely rare--occurring perhaps every 500 to 1,000 years--should one come ashore, the resulting storm surge would swell Lake Pontchartrain (a brackish sea adjoining the Gulf of Mexico), overtop the levees, and submerge the city under up to 40 feet of water. Once this happened, the levees would "serve as a bathtub," explains Harley Winer, chief of coastal engineering for the Army Corps's New Orleans District. The water would get trapped between the Mississippi levees and the hurricane-protection levees. "This is a highly improbable event," Winer points out, "but within the realm of possibility."

Some news reports I've read say it could be weeks before New Orleans is habitable again. The recovery after any category-5 storm is hard because of all the infrastructure damage such as power distribution, communications, sewer, gas, etc. Add several feet of water to the mix and it makes the situation that much more bleak.

"Because the city is below sea level--with the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other--it is a hydrologic nightmare."

-- Scott Kiser, tropical-cyclone program manager, National Weather Service.

I'm seriously wondering if there's a way I could plan to pack up and head to New Orleans for a week to help in the recovery effort after this storm has passed. They're going to need all the help they can get.

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