About 20 hours prior to Hurricane Katrina's landfall in Louisiana, the National Weather Service bulletin for the New Orleans region issued a unusually strongly worded statement warning of the devastation that Hurricane Katrina could wreak upon the Gulf Coast of the United States, and the human suffering that would follow once the storm left the area.

A National Weather Service assessment of its Hurricane Katrina activity found the bulletin's "unprecedented detail and foreboding nature of the language used ... helped reinforce the actions of emergency management officials as they coordinated one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history." The bulletin "helped reinforce the message from emergency management officials for residents in southeast Louisiana and southern Mississippi to heed evacuation orders from local officials."

Background

Multiple levee failures in New Orleans, heavy flooding and losses exceeding $1 billion during Hurricane Betsy in 1965 raised concerns about flooding from hurricanes. In response, Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1965 which authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to design and construct the region's hurricane flood protection. The project was called the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project (LPVHPP). The LPVHPP was initially estimated to take 13 years, but when Katrina struck in 2005, parts of the project were 60–90% complete with a revised projected completion date of 2015.Westerink, J.J.; Luettich, R.A. "The Creeping Storm ." Civil Engineering Magazine. June, 2003.

On the evening of Thursday August 25, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane near the Miami-Dade–Broward county line in southern Florida and weakened into a tropical storm as a result. The next morning, after passing over the state, Tropical Storm Katrina moved into the Gulf of Mexico, and reintensified back to hurricane strength. As the hurricane passed over the warm waters of the Loop Current, the hurricane began to undergo rapid intensification.

At 5:00 p.m. EDT on Friday August 26, the National Hurricane Center's prediction models shifted in unison away from the Florida panhandle, and New Orleans was moved to the center of the cone of uncertainty. As New Orleans is located on the Mississippi River Delta and parts of the city are below sea level, a strong hurricane could have a devastating effect on the city. Previous warnings, such as the one made by the Houston Chronicle in 2001, told of a disaster that "would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water" following a severe hurricane making landfall on the city.Berger, Eric. "Keeping its head above water: New Orleans faces doomsday scenario ." Houston Chronicle. December 1, 2001. Max Mayfield, who was the director of the National Hurricane Center at the time, indicated that the Mississippi/Louisiana area has "the greatest potential for nightmare scenarios." Other publications, such as Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, and The Times-Picayune had given doomsday scenarios in which a sinking city would drown and its residents would be left homeless.Wilson, Jim. "New Orleans is Sinking ." Popular Mechanics. September 11, 2001.Fischetti, Mark. "Drowning New Orleans." Scientific American. October, 2001.McQuaid, John; Schleifstein, Mark. "Washing Away." The Times-Picayune. June 23-June 27, 2002.

By the next morning, on Saturday August 27, the NHC issued a hurricane watch that included the New Orleans metro area, which was upgraded to a hurricane warning by 10:00 p.m. CDT that same evening. At this point, Katrina was a Category 3 hurricane with 115 mph (185 km/h) winds and about 335 miles (540 km) to the south-southeast of the Mississippi River's mouth. Governor Kathleen Blanco ordered the contraflow lane reversal evacuation to begin at 4:00 p.m on Saturday, August 27.

Bulletin text Over the course of the overnight hours of August 27, 2005, Hurricane Katrina rapidly strengthened, reaching Category 5 status by morning, with maximum sustained winds of 175 mph (280 km/h) by 10:00 am CDT on August 28. (By this time, evacuation of New Orleans was well underway and would be completed seven hours later.) A few minutes later, at 10:11 a.m. CDT (1511 UTC), Robert Ricks, a meteorologist with the New Orleans/Baton Rouge NWS office, issued the following statement as part of the event synopsis text of an inland hurricane wind warning being issued:

A similarly worded warning was issued at 4:13 p.m. CDT.

Impact In the months following the storm, Congress appointed a bipartisan committee to investigate the response to Hurricane Katrina and the preparations prior to its landfall. The committee concluded that the forecasts given by the National Weather Service were timely, were not responsible for failures in other agencies, and were likely responsible for saving thousands of lives that would have otherwise been lost in the raging hurricane.

During an internal assessment by the National Weather Service, the 10:11 bulletin and its impact were analyzed. The report called the bulletin "a significant moment for the NWS during Katrina," as its detailed and explicit language did not have any precedent, though the message was based on a template designed by the Tampa Weather Office in the 1990s. The strongly worded statement urged residents to evacuate, and was highlighted by national news media. As a result, the level of detail was highlighted as an "innovative best practice" in the NWS assessment, which recommended issuing warnings with similar levels of detail in the future. The bulletin was described as "perhaps the most chilling ever issued" by the NWS.

Although it was reported that Mayfield cautioned the levees would be breached, no such warning was issued. “What I indicated in my briefings to emergency managers and to the media was the possibility that some levees in the greater New Orleans area could be overtopped, depending on the details of Katrina’s track and intensity,” Mayfield said.

Ricks, a native of the Ninth Ward, later told NBC Nightly News that he wrote the bulletin based on his previous experiences with Betsy and Camille. He also said that he was looking for statements to take out, but decided to leave the bulletin more or less intact because it seemed valid for a storm that he was convinced would be "the big one" longtime New Orleans residents had been predicting for some time. He admitted that he and his colleagues hoped to have been wrong about just how powerful Katrina would become, "but our local expertise said otherwise." He added, "We always prepare for the big one, we just didn't think it was going to come this soon."

The bulletin, and the rosary that Ricks clutched as he and his fellow forecasters weathered the storm in their office, are both now in the National Museum of American History.

See also

Effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans Tropical cyclone watches and warnings

References