MarsBlog.net

• Video on Fox tonight showed more of the marina area near the 17th Street Canal levee break. The courts at Coconut Beach were somewhat flooded, though it doesn’t look as deep there as around the condos on the other side of the berm. The Dock and the surrounding restaurants are completely gone, and the wreckage is not only piled up against the nearby bridge but also in the corner of the courts opposite the clubhouse. A part of the clubhouse appears to still be standing, as is the grey, two-story building next door (the one with the beauty shop) and the aforementioned garage building behind, but there didn’t seem to be anything standing beyond that, towards the lake.
• On the other hand, the homes along the periphery of the marina (which appear to be houseboats…I never noticed that before) seem from a distance to be largely intact. Not so the boats, which are piled up here and there.
• Douglas Brinkley is reporting that the old Georgian and Greek revival homes in the Garden District survived the storm well, but the newer “prefab” houses, shotgun shacks, and projects didn’t.
• It sounds like the situation downtown has deteriorated so much that the TV crews have largely evacuated. Not just looting, but rapes, murders, and roving armed gangs, even inside the Superdome itself. It is truly amazing that so little seems to be being done. Three days? How on earth can it be that hard to get truckloads of supplies into town, if they can get buses in and out? It’s apalling. The National Guard is finally going in tonight, so hopefully things will return to some semblance of order and sanity soon, if not soon enough.
• On the other hand, I don’t buy the NOPD being overwhelmed or the National Guard being stretched too thin and suchlike as excuses for the lawless and uncivilized behavior being reported, or even the extreme conditions the people are living under there. Are they, particularly those in the Superdome, doing anything to organize themselves, or to take responsibility for managing the situation on their own? They may indeed, and it simply escapes the attention of the reporters on the scene.
• Randi Rhodes, hive queen of the barking moonbats at Air America Radio, seems to think Bush is enjoying himself in all this, what with all the people dying…y’know. I listened to about twenty minutes of her show yesterday and again today on my drive home — it was non-stop whining about Bush and how everything is his fault and how he could have prevented the disaster. I typically flip between Hugh Hewitt and Randi Rhodes on my drive home each day, and today Hewitt was talking about storm aid charities and providing information on how to help out, while Rhodes was on a non-stop petulant rant about how the hurricane and every other bad thing under the sun is the fault of George W. Bush. The contrast between right-wing hate radio and high-minded progressive radio couldn’t have been more striking.
• More hurricane exploitation here.
• MSNBC is showing some fascinating video of the storm and storm surge plowing into — and then through — a building…from inside.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin also has a recap of hurricane exploiters, and a rebuttal of some of those “the levees broke because Bush cut the money” arguments. Hint: the danger has been known since at least Camille, the decision to prepare for only up to a Category 3 hurricane was made decades ago on a cost-benefit analysis, and the levees that did break had just been rebuilt and upgraded. I had forgotten that — for a year or so, there were large cranes working on the 17th Street Canal near where the break is, visible from the West End area.

She also points to this accumulation of reports on the status in the Westbank area. The Oakwood Mall has been intentionally torched by looters, but the area seems to have fared well in terms of storm damage and flooding (relative to New Orleans, that is). I wonder how much more arson is going to happen once the waters begin to recede and the looters have more freedom of movement, in the period before the National Guard can spread out and restore order.

Keith Cowing has also opened a check-in topic at NASAWatch for Michoud and Stennis employees.

UPDATE: updated the NASAWatch URL.

For one of those countries among our alleged “betters” insofar as learning and historical perspective are concerned, the Germans seem to be forgetting something: Katrina Should be A Lesson To US on Global Warming

The toughest commentary of the day comes from Germany’s Environmental Minister, J?rgen Trittin, a Green Party member, who takes space in the Frankfurter Rundschau, a paper owned by the Social Democrats, to bash US President George W. Bush’s environmental laxity. He begins by likening the photos and videos of the hurricane stricken areas to scenes from a Roland Emmerich sci-fi film and insists that global warming and climate change are making it ever more likely that storms and floods will plague America and Europe…

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung also delivers a punchy plea for more attention to global warming, saying politicians should pay more attention to Katrina’s alarming images than to election polls and economic forecasts. “Hurricane Katrina has delivered terrible photos. Experts are already calling it the worst hurricane of all time. But this year’s hurricane season has only just begun. Flooded villages, mud slides, sandbags….Scientists are quite calmly saying that we will see this kind of thing more often. After all, this is what they have been forecasting for years — climate change, human-caused and irreversible. But a change of policy is not in the cards. Politics is trapped between voters and industry lobbyists. And of course, there is the killer argument: Protecting the environment impedes economic growth.” This is not how it should be, the paper opines. Indeed, more “pictures from New Orleans should encourage us to follow science’s advice on climate protection.”…

“People will argue about the causes of climate change for a long time to come,” the paper writes. “But its effects are already reality. They are called Katrina, or the flood catastrophes in southern Germany, Romania, Switzerland and Austria….”

The S?ddeutsche Zeitung uses its feature page as a defacto editorial by focusing on the hurricane as its theme of the day. Among its articles, it cites a study by US hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that shows a rising tendency for hurricanes that exactly reflects the curve of greenhouse gases. German scientists from the Max-Planck Institute hail the study as the first proof of a real link. “If this man-made warming continues, we will have to expect stronger storms in future” Emmanuel tells the paper….

I saw some talking head from NASA on one of the news channels yesterday, showing some data on the warmth of the water in the Gulf over some recent span of time (not sure how far back), and illustrating in time lapse the elevated water temperatures this year. The elevated temperatures, he explained, fed the storm system, helping to turn Katrina from a smallish hurricane as it left Florida into a monster as it passed over the Gulf and inland over the Delta.

Which is similar to the descriptions of the circumstances of the Galveston Storm of 1900, an event of which the better-informed German eco-left is probably not aware. That hurricane, too, came as a surprise, during a hot summer in which unusually warm water temperatures were recorded in the Gulf.

Looking back in time to similarly catastrophic events which precede the bulk of the “greenhouse gas” emissions which eco-moralists seem to nowadays blame for every natural disaster which pops up would undermine their ability to pin the blame on human activities, of course, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise. Like the religious moralists who will certainly proclaim in the days to come that God Himself sent Katrina to punish the region for its embrace of gambling, boozing, lewd behavior, and homosexuality, there are sure to be those even in this country who will see in Katrina the retributive hand of Gaia or Mother Earth, punishing Man for his prodigious production of “greenhouse gases”, pursuit of economic growth and profit over “sustainability”, dependence on technology, alteration and exploitation of “natural” “ecosystems”, and a host of other green sins symbolized by the commercial and industrial activities of the area.

ADDENDUM: And of course, there will inevitably be sneering rebukes from some quarters over any plan to focus resources on getting oil production back up to pre-storm levels…”putting profit over people”, for example. Halliburton will no doubt be referenced.

But as Isaac Cline himself recorded less than three weeks after the storm which bears his name, such an ordering of priorities isn’t new, nor is it proof of some moral defect of modern society — it’s the forward-looking response of those determined to recover from the experience, repair the damage done, and move into the future:

The grain elevators which were full of grain suffered the smallest damage. Ships have resumed loading and work is being rushed day and night. The railroad bridges across the bay were washed away, but one of these has been repaired and direct rail communication with the outside world was established within eleven days after the disaster. Repairs and extensions of wharves are now being pushed forward with great rapidity. Notwithstanding the fact that the streets are not yet clean and dead bodies are being discovered daily among the drifted debris, the people appear to have confidence in the place and are determined to rebuild and reestablish themselves here. Galveston being one of the richest cities of its size in the United States, there is no question but that business will soon regain its normal condition and the city will grow and prosper as she did before the disaster. Cotton is now coming in by rail from different parts of the State and by barge from Houston. The wheels of commerce are already moving in a manner which gives assurance for the future. Improvements will be made stronger and more judiciously; for the past twenty-five years they have been made with the hurricane of 1875 in mind, but no one ever dreamed that the water would reach the height observed in the present case. The railroad bridges are to be built ten feet higher than they were before. The engineer of the Southern Pacific Company has informed me that they will construct their wharves so that they will withstand even such a hurricane as the one we have just experienced.

ADDENDUM: Moonbattery has an interesting set of graphs showing the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. by decade. For all hurricane categories, the number has been below the historical average since 1951, and the number of major hurricanes (category 3-5) below the historical average since 1961. Was there that much global warming in the 1940s? I’m sure George W. Bush was to blame, somehow, despite being just a toddler at the time.

Spent the last hour or so watching video of the storm damage in the New Orleans area.

Near as I could tell from the unfamiliar angle of the aerial shots:

• the Yacht Club was on fire — it’s pretty much a goner
• Lakeside was under ten-plus feet of water
• the Hyatt had lost a good portion of its glass facade
• the shiny white membrane installed on the Superdome for the 2002 Super Bowl had largely peeled off, along with at least two of the vent hood thingies ringing the apex of the dome
• Clearview Mall in Metairie got hammered, with the Veterans Blvd facade of the new Target store ripped apart and the parking lot a couple of feet deep in water
• what I think was Esplanade Mall near the I-10/Williams Blvd. interchange was under water
• there was a Fox reporter standing near what looked like the new pump heads along I-10 near the I-10/610 merge (which were, unfortunately, just barely breaking the surface due to being knocked out)
• the main tourist area of the French Quarter appears to have held up and didn’t appear to be flooded
• the racetrack clubhouse appears to have lost a good chunk of its roof
• MSNBC is really, really milking their inside footage of the Superdome leak

Strangely, despite ominous sounding descriptions of what CNN’s Jeanne Meserve had seen on a filming trip from which she had just returned, there hasn’t been any video coverage of New Orleans East, the 9th Ward, and St. Bernard Parish, the parts of the metro area which reportedly suffered the worst damage. Nor has there been any footage showing the Causeway or the Twin Span. From Meserve’s report, we’ll probably see new video tomorrow like that of the morning of September 12, when the smoke had cleared and the first clear footage of Ground Zero became available. She was convinced that there were hundreds of fatalities waiting to be uncovered, and reported seeing many bodies floating in the water.

As far as Michoud goes, Space.com reported this afternoon that MAF had suffered some roof damage and water intrusion, but that the facility was on onsite power and its pumps were up and running.

ADDENDUM (12:30am): Holy crap…apparently there is a two-block-long breach in the 17th Street Canal in Lakeside, allowing water from the lake to run down Canal Street with whitecaps. Unbelievable. Not good at all.

Water at Tulane University Hospital is rising at a rate of an inch every five minutes, They’re currently working with FEMA to arrange evacuation by air.

None of the news services have been out to Metarie, where I used to live.

CNN is showing video of looters cleaning out stores. Yeah, color me surprised.

ADDENDUM: Fox reports this morning that the Twin Spans are “gone”. Wow. But again, it’s not all that surprising considering they’re twenty feet above the water at the outlet (or in this case, sea entrance) of the lake. The older Highway 11 bridge and train bridge beside the Twin Spans are probably gone, too, as is the bridge at the Rigolets. I saw some video last night showing the High Rise and Downman lift bridge still standing. Something tells me the Causeway (if it is still intact) is going to be seeing a huge increase in traffic for the next year or two, as there is no other viable route from Slidell to New Orleans.

ADDENDUM: Then again, maybe there won’t be enough of Slidell left for commuting to be a concern. CNN is reporting that there has been no word out of Slidell yet, and that it apparently took a direct hit by the storm surge.