If you haven’t read Brendan Loy’s archives, you should, moving upward from this starting point, posted at quarter to 2 pm on Tuesday, August 23:
T.D. 12
Just a few hours after Tropical Depression Jose was declared dead over Mexico, Tropical Depression 12 formed over the southwestern Bahamas. It could become Tropical Storm Katrina.
UPDATE: Hurricane Katrina? It could happen…
Brendan Loy is a 2L law student at the University of Notre Dame. Most of his posts are about school, about his fiancee, about politics. He is also a weather enthusiast.
Starting at the post linked above and scrolling upwards, you watch as his other interests fall away and he begins full-time Katrina-blogging, linking all the while to radar maps, official forecasts, and articles from past years that gloomily predict the New Orleans doomsday scenario that has now come to pass.
Eventually he begins to plead with residents to get out of town.
Just before 7 pm on Saturday, August 27:
Hurricane watches, as expected, have been extended eastward to the Alabama/Florida border, but that doesn’t indicate a rightward lurch in the track; the NHC simply put the Louisiana warnings up early, to give New Orleans and vicinity more time to prepare. The track has actually edged ever-so-slightly to the left, but the below-sea-level city of New Orleans is still directly in the crosshairs.
For some reason that I can’t even begin to comprehend, the evacuation order for New Orleans is only "voluntary" at this time. The mayor says he might issue mandatory evacuations tomorrow morning, depending on what the forecast says. What is he waiting for??? The forecast calls for a DIRECT HIT! This is the story we’ve been fearing for decades! And if he waits until 24 hours before landfall to order people to leave, it may very well be too late!
In the next post, entitled "The mayor of New Orleans is an idiot," Brendan writes,
I can’t emphasize enough what a bad decision I think it is for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to delay the mandatory evacuation order until tomorrow morning. According to the Weather Channel, lots of tourists in the French Quarter are happy the evacuation is only "voluntary," and are planning to stay in town until it becomes mandatory…
Will Ray Nagin go down in history as the mayor who fiddled while New Orleans drowned? Could be.
Read it.
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