More New Orleans
In case anyone hasn't been following the news today:
Good news is that Katrina moved slightly east and became slightly weaker (category 4, down from 5) before landfall, so the worst-case scenarios people were predicting for New Orleans were thankfully averted.
Bad news is that it's still pretty horrific. The Eastern US Weather Forums have photos of various buildings and streets in and around New Orleans. (Follow links on that page to subsequent pages to see more.) A house with the roof crushed in; a flooded street; a McDonald's (apparently just across the street from the Gulf) that was completely gutted. People on roofs, phone poles knocked down all along a street. All the windows torn out on one side of the 20-story Hyatt Hotel.
Also non-photographic reports of regions with "all homes . . . completely lost." Nine feet of water in some flooded areas.
WDSU-TV in New Orleans has streaming video of a newscast (requires Windows Media Player, but viewable in WMP on a Mac). Cars submerged; footage from a rescue boat picking people up; houses submerged almost to the roofline. Rescue workers chopping an upper-story window out of a house to let people out (and then chopping through the roof to get more people out, including an 85-year-old grandmother). Scary and distressing (but the rescue workers appear to be doing a great job).
(Quasi-amusing comment from one of the anchors, over video of police officers rescuing a family by boat: "These are gripping pictures . . . you almost don't want to talk over them." I was amused by the "almost.")
Also a plain text parish-by-parish summary of what's known.
It's not just New Orleans, of course. Here's a list from Biloxi, Mississippi, of familiar landmarks destroyed, for example. Katrina is still moving inland; currently somewhere in northern MS, on the way to Tennessee and Kentucky. I gather it's now down to a category-1 hurricane; I assume the winds will drop below hurricane strength sometime soon.
The NOAA Environmental Visualization Program has some fascinating images, notably a big image of Katrina, in which you can see that the storm was bigger than the state of Florida. And another image of Katrina.
Flickr had a bunch of photos, but most of them didn't seem immediately obviously relevant to me. But here's one of Lafayette, Louisiana, 12 hours before landfall.
Here's a elevation map of New Orleans (side view), showing just how far below sea level most of the city is. More elevation maps of New Orleans also available on the same site.
Here are a couple of blogs from yesterday: The Moderate Voice (with excerpts and links from a bunch of other blogs) and Vodkapundit. CNN's blog has a report from a few hours ago that starts: "Flooding here is epic. . . . An entire ward of the city—the 9th Ward—appears to be up to its rooftops in water."
MSNBC says there seem to be enough National Guard troops on hand, btw.
New York Times article shows a photo (on p. 2) of "three Atlantic bottlenose dolphins [that] were evacuated from the Marine Life Oceanarium in Gulfport, Miss., to a Holiday Inn pool."
I think that's all I've got for now. I imagine we'll be inundated with more images and video and other reports in the days ahead. I'm glad the damage wasn't as bad as expected—but that can't be much comfort to the people who've lost homes or family members.
