Twenty years ago this morning I was handling the weather for the CBS Early Show from Miami. We were carefully watching as Katrina made landfall in southeastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. Up until 9:15 AM ET / 8:15 AM CT, we had been cautiously optimistic that the levees and flood walls protecting New Orleans were going to hold up well enough to avoid a disaster, but we were very concerned for the Mississippi coast.
Just 36 years earlier, Hurricane Camille had produced unimaginable storm surge that devastated the towns along the Mississippi Gulf coast. No one thought that a storm could be worse than that, and then Katrina happened. The storm surge forecasts were quite accurate that Monday morning, but unbelievable. The water was forecast to rise as high as 28 feet above the normal tide level—3-4 feet higher than in Camille.
Seconds before I was set to do the weather segment at 9:15 AM ET, we heard a report from WWL radio via the internet that there was a levee failure in the Lower Ninth Ward. I glanced at the screen next to me that displayed emergency weather bulletins and saw the report. A flood wall had failed. The Gulf of Mexico was pouring into that eastern part of the New Orleans.
Things escalated from there, of course. Other massive failures of the flood wall and levee system occurred when Katrina’s vast wind structure pushed water from Lake Pontchartrain south into the drainage canals in the north part of the city. Power was lost. Communications went down. We knew it was bad, but it took days to understand the scope of the catastrophe and the depth of the human suffering.
New Orleans, UNITED STATES: A plea for help appears on the roof of a home flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, 04 September 2005. New Orleans began counting its dead 04 September as US troops turned to the gruesome task of harvesting bloated corpses from the hurricane-torn city’s flooded streets and homes.
(ROBERT GALBRAITH/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)
After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, I never imagined I would see pain and anguish like we saw in the suburbs south of Miami again in the United States. But Katrina was worse. Unimaginably, the scale was even bigger. There were epic failures to manage the disaster before and after the storm despite heroic efforts by thousands of people, even though the forecast was as good as it will ever be.
The lesson and the rule that we and our government should learn from catastrophic hurricanes like Andrew and Katrina is to imagine the worst possible scenario and plan for worse than that. It’s much easier to scale a plan back than it is to create a new plan when the crisis is underway.
In the tropics today
The National Hurricane Center is drawing a potential development area off the coast of Africa. The disturbance in question is forecast to move into the Atlantic about Sunday. The NHC odds are in the low category that at least a tropical depression will develop somewhere in that area.
The various computer models are in unusual agreement about the timing and track of the disturbance. They give it a decent chance of organizing into a depression or low-end tropical storm, and forecast it to slowly migrate across the tropical belt. The forecast motion is so slow that the system is not even in the vicinity of the Caribbean islands by early the following week.
The atmospheric conditions are generally unsupportive of significant development, so even if it can form a circulation, it doesn’t look likely to be very strong or last very long. If it makes it to the vicinity of the islands, the upper-level winds are forecast to become extremely hostile.
The tropical outlook for the Atlantic.
(Bryan Norcross / FOX Weather)
We’ll also watch off the Southeast coast late next week. The cold front that has pushed offshore of the East Coast will just sit there. Low pressure is forecast to develop. So far it does not look like a tropical system, but more like a nor’easter.
Otherwise, the tropics look to stay fairly quiet until the second week of September or the middle of the month. The various factors that have created an unsupportive atmospheric pattern are forecast to wane about that time. There’s no way to know exactly what will happen and when, of course. But there’s no reason to think the second half of Hurricane Season 2025 won’t be busy.
Katrina’s Wrath: 20 Years Later
Tonight at 9 PM ET on FOX Weather, you can watch all four parts of our special series, Katrina’s Wrath: 20 Years Later. We look at the disaster as it unfolded, the vibrant city that still bears the scars today, and the future.
If you’re not sure how to get FOX Weather on your TV, tablet, computer, or phone, go to foxweather.tv. We are always on and always free.
