Aug 29, 2007 11:03 pm US/Eastern
Hurricane Minute: 2-Years After Katrina
dl
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
Two years ago on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people living along the Gulf Coast of New Orleans and Mississippi.
When Katrina hit Southern Mississippi, it was a hurricane catastrophe. In New Orleans, it only got worse when the devastating damage from the storm was made even worse by a levee design and maintenance debacle compounded by a FEMA fiasco.
Huge areas of New Orleans remain in shambles and bureaucracy is blamed for holding up aid.
Think back to the pictures of New Orleans during those awful days after the storm. Think of the rooftops. The shingles were mostly intact and the wind rating on most of those shingles was 60 mph.
Compare the wind damage to those New Orleans buildings to what South Florida witnessed in Hurricane Wilma.
CBS4 Hurricane Expert Bryan Norcross says it's apparent that the winds in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina were significantly less than what hit South Florida and at worst we had a category 2.
Now picture the big levee at the lakefront, which engineers say would hold back at least a category 2 storm surge. It wasn't topped.
The point is, says Norcross, most of New Orleans got category 1 winds at most.
The city did not have a major hurricane disaster. It had a catastrophic engineering incompetence disaster.
One more interesting tidbit.
The last three times New Orleans got hit by a significant hurricane, which was in 1947, 1965, and 2005, all three of those same storms hit South Florida first.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Click to enlarge
Stumble It!
