Hurricane Katrina

On August 24th, TD12 was quickly upgraded to Katrina... It formed near the Bahamas, and was expected to move towards Florida, dumping a lot of rain.

At this time, heavy rain looks to be the main threat from this system and localized flooding is possible, particularly in central and southern Florida. Other impacts will be determined by how strong this cyclone is by the time it reaches the area. Further strengthening of the system would lead to greater wind and wave impacts across portions of Florida.

The model indicates that there is a 30% chance the storm will have time to reach Category 1 by the time it hits southern Florida

On the 25th, Katrina raked the south of Florida

RIGHT: Katrina continues to gain strength over the Bahamas.

Katrina is expected to strike Florida as a weak Category 1 hurricane (winds of at least 74 mph) or as a strong tropical storm. "It should be a rainmaker, and we're already in the middle of the rainy season," said meteorologist Jamie Rhome at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Katrina could reorganize in the Gulf of Mexico after it crosses Florida. In warmer gulf waters, it could grow into a hurricane again. Early forecasts project Katrina to hit land again somewhere on the Florida Panhandle by midafternoon Monday.

The hurricane center posted a hurricane warning late Wednesday from Vero Beach south to Florida City. The warning area included inland Lake Okeechobee. At 11:00 pm, Katrina had sustained winds of 50 mph and was located 130 miles east of Fort Lauderdale. It was moving to the west at 8 mph.

Katrina could follow a similar path into Florida as hurricanes Frances and Jeanne last year.

After an above-average number of Atlantic storms in June and July, Katrina is the first to threaten U.S. shores this month. August normally is the second-busiest month of hurricane season. September is the busiest.

Flooding is Katrina's principal threat. The hurricane center predicts 6-12 inches of rain across the storm's path, with isolated pockets of 15-20 inches.

Broward County north of Miami urged residents Wednesday to secure their houses and leave low-lying coastal zones. Public schools will be closed today and Friday, and a dozen Red Cross shelters will open this afternoon.

RIGHT: A beachgoer watches the tide break over a sandbar on Daytona Beach, Fla., Wednesday. Beach visitors may expect higher than normal tides for the next few days as Tropical Storm Katrina approaches.

Outer bands of rain and gusty wind began to slap the coast Wednesday as Katrina slowly strengthened over the Bahamas. Katrina, the 11th named storm of the season, had 45 mph winds.

Because the storm was not yet a hurricane, weather officials tried to prod complacent residents to prepare for something worse.

"Don't wait for those (rain) bands to come ashore," Rhome said. "People shouldn't take this one for granted."

Florida already is soggy. Rainfall last month was twice the normal amount. Since the start of June, Miami is more than 5 inches above normal. Naples is 9 inches above normal and Fort Myers nearly a foot. All are in the storm's path.

Stormwater managers are making room for Katrina's intense rain. The South Florida Water Management District began lowering the water level in 2,000 miles of drainage canals that empty into the ocean. Katrina will arrive "on an already full, saturated system," district spokesman Randy Smith said. "We're in pretty good shape to handle 6-12 inches. It's the next storm that really worries us."

Wednesday was the 13th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew, which blasted Florida City and other neighboring communities in the costliest natural disaster in American history. Hurricane Andrew was blamed for 65 deaths and more than $26.5 billion in damage.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush canceled a business trip to Peru on Wednesday to be in the state as Katrina arrives.

Tropical Storm Cindy and Hurricane Dennis hit the Florida Panhandle in July. Last year, four hurricanes raked the state, inflicting tens of billions of dollars in damage. Some neighborhoods are still undergoing repairs.

I CANNOT imagine me walking down that seawall when there's waves like that...

Hurricane Katrina churned through Florida's densely populated southeastern coast Thursday with sustained winds of 80 mph and lashing rain. Two people were killed by falling trees.

Sand is blown on to the roadway as Katrina closes on the coast.

The storm strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane just before it made landfall along the Miami-Dade and Broward county line between Hallandale Beach and North Miami Beach. Weather officials said flooding was the main concern as the storm dropped a foot of rain or more in some spots.

Rain fell in horizontal sheets, seas were estimated at 15 feet and blew gusts of up to 92 mph, toppling trees and street signs. Florida Power & Light said more than 412,000 customers were without electricity.

The Regional NEXRAD Radar image (L) and Total Precip NEXRAD image (R) from Miami was pretty awesome!

Late Thursday, Katrina was centered in northwest Miami-Dade County, heading west at 6 mph. An estimated 5.9 million Florida residents were in Katrina's projected path.

The storm proved fatal for two people who ignored warnings to stay inside until the worst was over. A man in his 20s in Fort Lauderdale was crushed by a falling tree as he sat alone in his car, while a pedestrian was killed by a falling tree in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Plantation.

Once clear of the land... Katrina will get stronger, possibly growing into a Category two storm...

Hurricane warnings are up from Morgan City, La., to the Florida-Alabama border. This includes the city of New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain. A tropical storm warning and a hurricane watch have been issued from the Alabama-Florida border eastward to Destin, Florida and from west of Morgan City to Intracoastal City, Louisiana.

Effects from Katrina will not be confined to coastal areas. Once Hurricane Katrina makes landfall, it will progress inland Monday into Tuesday with a trail of flooding rains and strong winds across Mississippi and Alabama and then into Tennessee. Torrential, flooding rainfall is possible with the remnants of Katrina well inland, possibly into the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes and the Northeast later this week.

The pressure dropped as low as 902 mb on Sunday afternoon but has since risen. The 902 mb pressure reading was the 4th lowest on record in the Atlantic Basin. Stu Ostro explains the significance of pressure from his blog posted earlier today..."We look at pressures as a good barometer (pun intended) for intensity. The difference in pressure from one location to another, known as the pressure gradient, is associated with wind speed. There are other factors involved, but basically, the greater the pressure gradient in hurricanes, typically the higher the wind speed."

Hurricane Katrina made its final landfall around 10 a.m. CDT along the Louisiana/Mississippi border with top winds of 125 mph. That landfall point is a little west of where Hurricane Camille made landfall in 1969. Hurricane Katrina made its first landfall of the day near Buras, Louisiana at 6:10 a.m. CDT with top winds of 140 mph and its second landfall was around the border of Louisiana and Mississippi at 125 mph.

While not the worst case scenario for New Orleans, Katrina rocked the city Monday morning. Wind gusts to 86 mph were reported at the Lake Front Airport before they stopped sending observations. Estimates are that winds reached 100 mph. Significant structural damage and widespread flooding has been reported in New Orleans due to Katrina. The eyewall of the hurricane, where the strongest winds, largest surge and waves are, remained just east of the city. Areas east of New Orleans in Louisana and along the Mississippi coast were hit hardest. The Weather Channel's storm tracker Jim Cantore reported a storm surge of at least 27 feet in Gulfport, Miss., as the eye of Katrina approached.

The pressure dropped as low as 902 mb on Sunday afternoon but has since risen. The 902 mb pressure reading was the 4th lowest on record in the Atlantic Basin. Stu Ostro explains the significance of pressure... "We look at pressures as a good barometer (pun intended) for intensity. The difference in pressure from one location to another, known as the pressure gradient, is associated with wind speed. There are other factors involved, but basically, the greater the pressure gradient in hurricanes, typically the higher the wind speed."

The storm knocked the NEXRAD radar station offline...

Before it was knocked out... it recorded about 10-12 inches of rain...

Mobile's Station, which did not go down, recorded considerably more... 12-16 inches of rain...

Heavy floodwaters block many of the roadways in and around New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina Roars northward.
 

The roof of the Superdome is shredded by strong winds of Hurrcane Katrina

Rescuers head out to help someone during the storm...

A Red Cross truck was caught up by the floodwaters along with other vehicles.

The HUGE storm blows inland...

Wow...

Say hello to Katrina, who was born during the storm...

Rescue effort to pull people off their rooftops...

A stuck car shows where the roadway was in Mobile AL...

Shoring up the walls after a tree fell, in Baton Rouge, LA

Except for the signs and trees, Its hard to know where the ocean ended sometimes...

Not very happy about his car...

Pascagoula, Miss is nearly a total loss as far as buildings go... seems that the trees did much better...

Waiting for rescue in New Orleans

ouch.

Putting up police tape around a store that was damaged when another store's roof crash landed on it...

Hurricane Katrina's legacy will live on for generations. The levee on Lake Pontchartrain at 17th street in New Orleans was breached early Tuesday morning sending more floodwaters into the city. Rescues from roof tops have been occurring all day.

Incredible storm surge reports have been received from the Mississippi coastline. A team from the National Hurricane Center has been dispatched to the scene to officially measure how high the surge got. It appears it may be the record surge in the U.S.

The world record for surge in a tropical cyclone is 42 feet in Bathurst Bay, Australia in 1899. Storm surge has been reported as far away as the Florida Panhandle. Damage reports have been slow to come in because it is near impossible to get to some of the areas hit hardest by Katrina. Power is still out as far inland as Jackson, Mississippi.

More AFTERMATH Photos...

Almost 80% of New Orleans is under water...

Watter flows through a large breech in the levy on the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal.

A traffic median becomes an Island as floodwaters rise...

A flooded neighborhood

“Total devastation. Apartment complexes are wiped clean. We’re going to rebuild, but it’s going to take long time. Houses that withstood Camille are nothing but slab now,” Teresa Kavanagh, 35, of Biloxi, said as she shook her head is disbelief while taking photographs of the damage in her hometown. Hurricane Camille killed 256 people in Louisiana and Mississippi in 1969.

Seeking refuge on top of the roof...

The roof of this restaurant, the "Backyard Barbeque" sails away in the winds of Katrina...

A deer rests as water rises on the solder of Interstate 10 at the Mississippi-Louisiana State Line

Roads were largely left unpassable...

Interstate 10 was left looking almost like the Kuwait-Baghdad highway...

A man and his dog wait for rescue on their burned out roof...

Looking for folks to rescue, and guiding them to safety

Downtown streets that were relatively clear in the hours after the storm were filled with 1 to 1 ½ feet of water Tuesday morning. Water was knee-deep around the Superdome. Canal Street was literally a canal. Water lapped at the edge of the French Quarter. Clumps of red ants floated in the gasoline-fouled waters downtown.

This building failed the Hurricane stress test

The Super Dome failed the test, also... with most of the outer layer of its roof peeled away...  You can see the upper floors of the building down wind damaged, probably by the superdome debris...

There's flooding even AT the Super Dome...

The Carnage continues...

Forecasters said that as the storm moves north over the next few days, it could swamp the Tennessee and Ohio valleys with a potentially ruinous 8 inches or more of rain. On Monday, Katrina’s remnants spun off tornadoes and other storms in Georgia that smashed dozens of buildings and were blamed for at least one death.

This Oil Rig is beached, broken away from its anchorage

According to preliminary assessments by AIR Worldwide Corp., a risk assessment company, the insurance industry faces as much as $26 billion in claims from Katrina. That would make Katrina more expensive than the previous record-setting storm, Hurricane Andrew, which caused some $21 billion in insured losses in 1992 to property in Florida and along the Gulf Coast.

This bridge on I-10 was pretty much ruined...

The National Guard hauls residents to the safety of the Super Dome, the "shelter of last resort", after their neighborhoods were flooded.

Cleanup of just this residence will be expensive!

These barge boats floated off their moorings... one of them is lodged on the land...  That's several hundred TONS of boat that needs to be moved...

They're quite a ways up on the roadway, and they've crushed the bridge that crossed there...

These containers floated off the trains they were on, awaiting delivery to container ships in the harbor...

The flooding will soften the railway bedding, and some of the trains are leaning, one track sunken deeper than the other...

Whole neighborhoods are flooded out

Its amazing...

The cleanup of just this yard is going to take a long, long time...

The railway looks more like a river channel...

 

KATRINA AFTERMATH PICS

The US Army is now in on the rescue efforts... using Federal Troops is a big deal, actually.. I'm surprised they were able to get through the red tape this quickly...

My Guess is that this bridge will be out for a while...

U.S. retail gasoline prices will probably vault well over $3.00 per gallon in most parts of the country as early as this weekend after Hurricane Katrina devastated the energy industry in the Gulf Coast, analysts said Wednesday.

"This in many ways is the worst-case scenario that the oil industry has been fearing," said Geoff Sundstrom, spokesman for the AAA motorist group.

"On a national average, we could hit $3.25 at the pump easily, potentially even by this weekend," said Jason Schenker, economist at Wachovia Corp. "This is going to cut into consumer demand."

Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast on Monday, shutting nearly all of the Gulf of Mexico's oil production -- about a quarter of the nation's oil output -- and closing down nine refineries and several pipelines along the coast, according to government figures.

The virtual shutdown of the energy industry in the region has pushed wholesale gasoline prices roughly a dollar higher this week to over $3 a gallon on concerns that fuel supplies could run short.

The Gulf of Mexico is home to the majority of the nation's refineries and pipelines, meaning problems there will be felt across the country.