One Katrina was Plenty

I hate to say it, but the global warming prophets of doom are having a good week, apart from the Sarah Palin pick. It looks like Hurricane Gustav is sure to hit the Gulf Coast, and there’s no guarantee it won’t strike New Orleans. And the approach of Tropical Storm Hanna is not comforting, either, although computer models and historical tracks indicate it probably won’t hit the US.

I feel so bad for people on the Gulf Coast. I always breathe a sigh of relief when a hurricane misses me, but I can’t stand the thought of Gustav approximating Katrina’s landfall. It’s good that Lousiana has Bobby Jindal instead of Kathleen Blanco, and it’s good that we have the benefit of hindsight, but this would still be a devastating blow.

One sad thing is that some people will be hoping for a major catastrophe, to deflect attention from the Republican convention and make Bobby Jindal look bad. I hope you’ll join me in praying for a different result. I would not want to see a major hurricane hit an American city during a Democrat convention, or at any other time. I hate to see the American people divided into camps that are pro- and anti-hurricane.

I believe you have to be careful in your prayers, when a hurricane is on the way. You can’t really expect to get results if you ask God to send it to another populated area. I always ask for things like a reduction in strength and a move away from concentrations of human beings.

The weather people don’t talk much about the size of storms. They should. You can get tracking and wind-strength information on just about any storm since the middle of the 20th century, but it can be tough, finding out how wide the storms were. Why is that? A wide storm is much worse than a small one. If you look at Katrina’s cumulative wind map, you’ll see that the storm was very bad, many miles from the center. Andrew, on the other hand, tore up Dade County and had little effect one county to the north. Katrina was big, and Andrew was small. Gustav is small at the moment. That’s a mercy. The models seem to predict a landing west of the city. If the storm stays small, that might limit damage.

A big storm can do as much damage as several small storms. They have a scale for wind strength. They should have one for diameter. Maybe they do, but I’ve never heard of it.

When I watch video from New Orleans, I see the sun shining, and I see order and calm. That’s comforting. Then I think about the difference a couple of days could make. I imagine the chaos and destruction. That breaks the spell.

Gustav killed 59 people in Haiti. It always amazes me to read casualty figures from undeveloped countries. Gustav wasn’t even a hurricane when it hit Haiti. If you look at casualty numbers for the most deadly storms in history, they’re all in places where the standard of living is low. Not one occurred in the Western Hemisphere. It seems like every time a big cyclone hits a place like Bangladesh or India, the casualties go into the thousands. The recent Burma storm is believed to have killed 138,000 people. It seems like a strong capitalist economy is the best defense against storm deaths, except in Cuba, where totalitarianism assures that the government can force people to evacuate.

Pray this thing shrinks and breaks up and moves away from cities. It would be great to see an improvement in the forecast.