Archive of stories pre April 2007 | The so far mercifully low casualties inflicted upon the United States by the "perfect storm" of Hurricane Katrina bear testimony to the superb efficiency of the high-tech, space based early warning weather system that serves the U.S. East Coast and Southeast.
The extremely low casualties suffered in the Category 5 hurricane's path, despite the material havoc and billions of dollars of damage inflicted, stand in striking contrast to the horrific death toll of around 250,000 from the tidal waves caused by an enormously powerful earth quake deep beneath the Indian Ocean in December.
After that catastrophe, there was rapid realization that if the kind of real-time warning infrastructure that already existed to warn of tsunamis, or tidal waves, in the Pacific, had existed for the nations circling the Indian Ocean from India to Indonesia, the death toll would have been far, far lower.
In the case of the warnings that preceded Hurricane Katrina, they were all thanks to space-based weather reconnaissance satellites, a service now globally taken for granted but still inconceivable half a century ago except in the minds of a few visionaries like Arthur C. Clarke.
For Katrina was the kind of storm that seemed heaven -- or hell -- ordained to take Florida and Louisiana by total surprise and wreak total havoc.
At first it appeared to be a tropical storm and it was moving slowly, then it unexpectedly picked up speed. As late as Wednesday evening, no more than a small hurricane was anticipated. Then a series of apparently random and improbable events, like a text book fulfillment of the famous "Butterfly Effect" in mathematical "Chaos Theory", gave it extra power and duration as it swept over Florida with sufficient strength remaining to draw new energy from the favorable weather and tidal conditions in the Gulf of Mexico, especially the loop current of hot tropical seawater south of Louisiana.
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