Five Years Ago
On this date five years ago I was monitoring four weather sites, the local radio, and the NOAA radio for news about a storm in the Gulf – Katrina.
We had already been smacked by Dennis, which was a bigger mess than necessary because thanks to stalling by FEMA, we hadn’t managed to clean up from Ivan the year before, and now we were faced with another one.
On the 25th Mustang Bobby live-blogged Katrina coming ashore in South Florida [until his power failed at 8:15] as a Cat 1 hurricane after popping up the Bahamas, and the passage over the Everglades hadn’t weakened the storm appreciably. When it came into the Gulf the water was hot, in the 80s, so it had plenty of energy to build on and a minimum of wind sheer.
At around 1PM on the 28th Katrina was about 300 miles South-Southwest of me when the winds peaked at 175 mph and the pressure dropped to 902 mb, moving into the list of the five most powerful storms ever seen in the Atlantic Basin.
Having reached its maximum strength it began its relentless march to the North, building up a huge storm surge in front of it. If it had come at angle some of the surge might have slid off to the side, but couldn’t happen on the path that Katrina took. That’s why, even though we were about 200 miles East of the landfall, we had an 8-foot surge.
Katrina’s winds dropped to Category 3 strength before landfall, but the massive surge didn’t diminish at all. Waveland, Mississippi wasn’t blown away, it was washed away by the surge.
