Re: Does NOAA really write this way?



Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
>


> I've heard several people claim this, but I still can't see it.
> Reading through the release again, I'm still struck by the fact that
> nowhere does it mention "flooding", "levee breaches", or "water
> damage". It says that all wood-framed low-rise apartment buildings
> would be destroyed. In New Orleans, that didn't happen. It said that
> all high-rise windows would blow out. In New Orleans, that didn't
> happen. It warned of a storm that would "rival" the intensity of
> Camille. Many people, whose houses survived Camille, didn't evacuate,
> citing that expectation as their reason.
>
Were their houses hit directly in Camille? The level of complete
stupidity of some people is almost unimaginable. New Orleans had a cat 5
hurricane heading right for it but was only hit obliquely with the weak
side of a strong cat 3. Had it been the direct hit that was indeed very
possible, the loss of life would've been on a scale of the Indian Basin
tsunami and with days of warning.



> All told, it decently predicted what would happen in Mississippi and
> Alabama. To my mind, it completely missed the mark on what would
> happen in New Orleans.
>
They don't know where exactly land fall will be.


> And, indeed, had the storm described hit and
> the levees in New Orleans not broken, the actions taken beforehand (by
> the government and by most individuals) would seem to have been pretty
> much appropriate.
>
You mean not evacuating and not providing people who couldn't evacuate
with sufficient transport at least to the Superdome? Just because the
worst doesn't happen, doesn't mean you were a fool to act cautiously and
prepare for the worst. It might even mean that people who didn't act
under the mandatory evacuation order who could've acted and then needed
rescue cost the lives of those who otherwise might have been saved had
those imprudent not so behaved.



--
"How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try
to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely pouring over his
dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in
the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry
flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale
be truly and livingly found out." -+Herman Melville, "Moby ***"
.