The 11:00 PM EDT advisory is out. Gustav’s intensity appears to have plateaued, and it’s expected to make landfall right around its current intensity — a borderline Category 2/3 hurricane — in the late morning or around noon, in the marshlands south of Houma. That city of 30,000, where The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore is stationed, will take the brunt of the storm. Significant deviation from this track now appears unlikely (though small, last-minute “wobbles” are always possible).
New Orleans will most likely dodge a bullet, avoiding catastrophic flooding, unless the levees perform worse than expected. This will not be the “mother of all storms.” There may be significant flooding in the West Bank, but if so, it will be mostly because of the levee system’s fragile and incomplete state, not because of anything extraordinary about Gustav. In any case, we should not see a citywide repeat of Katrina — let alone something worse, as once seemed quite possible — assuming the Army Corps of Engineers has done its job this time.
The media should, at this point, be ramping down the hype about Gustav. Twenty-four hours ago, the hype was justified, and the evacuation of New Orleans was totally appropriate and necessary. But now, anyone who is still treating Gustav like some sort of unprecedented apocalypse is just ignoring the data. There will be death and destruction, yes, but certainly not on a “storm of the century” scale. Gustav is no longer “expected to rival Hurricane Katrina in its destructive power.” And the worst effects will be south and west of the Crescent City — again, assuming the New Orleans levees do their job. The storyline now isn’t, will the monstrous Hurricane Gustav destroy New Orleans? It is, will the levees perform up to snuff this time, and survive a surge that they manifestly should be able to handle? (This is a reasonable question, of course, since they also should have handled Katrina.)
Journalists often fail to grasp how quickly and drastically things can change with hurricanes. Yesterday evening, we were looking at a 150 mph monster in the Caribbean, and imagining intensification in the Gulf today to perhaps 175 mph, with limited opportunity for pre-landfall weakening. Instead, thanks to its totally unexpected post-Cuba weakening and failure to intensify significantly over the Loop Current, Gustav now looks to be a run-of-the-mill, low-end Cat. 3 event, at worst. Top winds right now are 115 mph, which are of course nothing to sneeze at — but this is just a regular old major hurricane, not a world-historical event. It may even weaken to Cat. 2 before coming ashore. If journalists continue to act like Gustav is going to be the end of the world, it will only feed public cynicism about hurricane warnings once it comes ashore and “disappoints.”
Anyway… I’m about to go to bed. I’ll try to post an update early in the morning, but I have plans tomorrow and I may not be able to blog again until midday — at which point Gustav will probably be making, or will have just made, landfall in Louisiana. To keep things fresh, here is a constantly updated, live NWS radar loop from New Orleans:
Also, there’s a wealth of good information at the sites listed in my sidebar at right, so if you want the latest even when I haven’t updated this site in a while, just look there. In particular:
* For news from Louisiana, the Times-Picayune Hurricane Center, the WWL-TV live stream, and Best of New Orleans Blog.
* For the latest official information on the storm, the National Hurricane Center. Specifically, the latest forecast track is always here.
* For live satellite imagery of Gustav, the visible satellite loop, the infrared satellite loop.
* For radar imagery of Gustav, the New Orleans long-range and short-range loops; the Mobile, AL long-range and short-range radar loops; and the Lake Charles, LA long-range and short-range radar loops.
* For weatherbloggers’ perspectives, Dr. Jeff Masters, Eric Berger and Alan Sullivan.
Best of luck to everyone on the Gulf Coast. My thoughts and prayers are with you.
P.S. A reminder: timestamps at the top of each post are in PDT, which is three hours behind EDT.
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