Dave’s Rants

I’ve always been fascinated by extreme weather, Thunderstorms, Tornadoes, Hurricanes etc. Most of the fascination probably comes from the fact that in Ireland we don’t get bad weather, people still speak about the storm we had Christmas Eve in 1997 as if it was the worst thing to hit the country and the winds that day were probably only about 100 km/h. So I regularly watch the documentaries on Discovery Channel about extreme weather and around this time of the year check the NHC website regularly to see what’s happening. In fact I’m even subscribed to the NHC RSS feed!

So towards the end of last week I noticed Katrina and on Friday/Saturday it brought heavy rain to Florida but wasn’t a big deal until yesterday. At some stage yesterday the Hurricane began to strengthen and make a bee-line for New Orleans. It’s actually interesting to look back at the Boards.ie thread and see how suddennly Katrina became something to worry about. Likewise on the Wikipedia page someone made the following comment which looks like it couldn’t have been more wrong!

Why the hell does that have its own page? The cyclone was not notable in any way except for the fact that it made landfall. bob rulz 21:43, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

I remember from watching documentaries and even the near misses of Dennis and Ivan last year that New Orleans getting hit by a Hurricane was a disaster even if it was only a small hurricane as the city is below sea level. Then I learned that this hurricane was going to be a Category 5, the highest there is. So basically it could not be conceivably worse. I really do hope I wake up in the morning and everyone will have been wrong but I fear that this will make Andrew look like drizzle.

Update 29 August 2005 00:10 BST: I’m going to sleep soon but if you’re looking for some good streaming video to keep you up to date on what’s happening check out this TV station, they are currently talking about 20m seas! The Metafilter thread is also interesting. They are also talking about the possibility that the storm may be turning away from New Orleans.