August 28, 2005
HOLY HELL
The latest on Hurricane Katrina is sickening. It's like watching one of those slow-motion punches in "Raging Bull":
* Maximum sustained winds of 175 mph
* Expected to strengthen before landfall
* Bigger than Hurricane Andrew
* Interstate 10, which was converted Saturday so that all lanes headed one-way out of town, is totally gridlocked.
* The storm has the potential for storm surge flooding of up to 25 feet, topped with even higher waves, as much as 15 inches of rain, and tornadoes, the National Hurricane Center said.
* Only three Category 5 hurricanes — the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale — have hit the United States since record-keeping began. The last was 1992's Hurricane Andrew, which leveled parts of South Florida, killed 43 people and caused $31 billion in damage. The other two were the 1935 Labor Day hurricane that hit the Florida Keys and killed 600 people and Hurricane Camille, which devastated the Mississippi coast in 1969, killing 256.
* "This is a once in a lifetime event," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said. "The city of New Orleans has never seen a hurricane of this magnitude hit it directly."
* Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, says that if it came ashore with the intensity it has now and went to the New Orleans area, it would be the strongest we've had in recorded history there." He said loss of life was "what inevitably occurs" with a storm this strong.
Ah, but remember, Salad Man, the traffic wasn't "gridlocked," as you pointed out earlier, since all six lanes of Interstate 10 are going one direction. The AP missed it, too -- it was in their lede.
Leave it to a copy editor to make a statement like that in his first comment on a blog he's been reading for at least a year. Keep up the good work.
Posted by: Niko at August 29, 2005 02:11 AMYou know, I wondered all day if someone would notice that.
:)
Good on ya, Niko.
Posted by: Jeff at August 29, 2005 03:22 AM