Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, US Gulf Coast
Big shout-out to all of our friends and readers in the path of Hurricane Katrina today, including often-BB-cited bloggers

We hope you're all safely out of harm's way whenever you read this.

The New Orleans metblog is full of first-hand reports, including this evacuation account from contributor Craig Giesecke:

Not much traffic on the way out, as early as it was, and pretty much smooth sailing all the way to Florida. Part of me felt glad to be leaving, but another part felt like a quitter on my city and yet a third part was missing the action. (...)

We're determined to make this as much a vacation as we can, despite the budget limtations. I used to live in this part of the world, so I know the free stuff and the places to go. But they're also recovering from Dennis back in early July. We have no idea what we'll be going back to and, if predictions hold, my business location will be ruined. But y'know -- it's only stuff.

For now, we've got plenty of rum, some money, a pickup truck, a motel room with a pool, a box of Wheat Thins and a cooler half-full of smoked cheese. Life could be a hell of a lot worse.

The nola.com webcams, the cincystreet.com cam, and many others provide stills of New Orleans. No telling how long they'll be functional, though. Here's a composite of what three webcams on nola.com capture, as of 11:07pm LA time on Sunday (Link to full size).

Here are a bunch of animated and still radar and satellite images: Link. Here is the National Weather Service bulletin.

Boing Boing reader Mark Kraft says,

There's a very active thread over on MeFi on Katrina, and how big of a danger it is, both to the people of the city and to the U.S. oil infrastructure: Link.

I'll be collecting LiveJournal users' firsthand accounts from the hurricane again, as I did for the tsunami and for several other hurricanes. There are a lot of people who are riding out the storm, sometimes because they have too much they'd have to leave behind, and sometimes because they just have nowhere to go and no way to get there. Latest updates will be here.

If it maintains its current central pressure, Katrina will be the most intense named hurricane to impact the United States since the naming of storms began in 1950 (and second overall since the recording of hurricanes began in 1851), being larger in size and slightly stronger than 1969 Hurricane Camille's central pressure of 909 mb.

(Thanks, oboreruhito, asteropm, John Frost)

Reader comment: johnsee says,

This is pretty incredible. Back on the 11th of September 2001 (ignore the other significance of the date for 5 seconds) Popular Mechanics published an article on what could happen if a category 5 hurricane hit New Orleans: Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:43:18 AM permalink | Other blogs commenting on this post