As I sought the lyrics to the Tragically Hip song "New Orleans is Sinking," I found an article from Popular Mechanics with the very same title. It details exactly what has transpired in the past week and then discusses a storm surge early warning system that to date has not been fully implemented.
"New Orleans is Sinking" by Jim Wilson
The fact that New Orleans has not already sunk is a matter of luck. If slightly different paths had been followed by Hurricanes Camille, which struck in August 1969, Andrew in August 1992 or George in September 1998, today we might need scuba gear to tour the French Quarter.
While many diaries, articles and news reports have refuted Mr. Bush's statement that nobody could have predicted such a catastrophe, this one struck me as particularly eeire since it was published on September 11, 2001.
The scenario spelled out in the article is as follows:
During a strong hurricane, the city could be inundated with water blocking all streets in and out for days, leaving people stranded without electricity and access to clean drinking water. Many also could die because the city has few buildings that could withstand the sustained 96- to 100-mph winds and 6- to 8-ft. storm surges of a Category 2 hurricane. Moving to higher elevations would be just as dangerous as staying on low ground. Had Camille, a Category 5 storm, made landfall at New Orleans, instead of losing her punch before arriving, her winds would have blown twice as hard and her storm surge would have been three times as high.
Wilson also describes how development has compounded the threat by contributing to erosion along the coast.
The point of the article, however, was the implementation of WAVCIS: the wave-current surge information system. He explains how this system of buoys was put in place to give forcasters notice of approaching storm surges. The issue for NO, though, was that there was only one buoy out there, waaaay out there, that covered the LA coast:
From the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Louisiana-Texas border, there are no buoys. Only one buoy serves Louisiana, and it is 62 miles east of the Mississippi River and more than 300 miles to the south. So it's a bit like predicting the weather in Boston when your thermometer is in Philadelphia.
This is all dated information.
In an effort to fill this gap, Additional buoys were deployed in yet to be completed project based at LSU. The WAVCIS website at Louisiana State University shows a map with buoy placement on its home page.
Unfortuanately, the site appears not to have been updated since February of this year, though a few news items from April have been posted.
Oddly, ScienceDaily posted an article "Louisiana Professor Taking The Guesswork Out Of Hurricane-Surge Predictions" in April of 2000 which pre-dates the Popular Mechanics article. It describes WAVCIS:
In the past two years, Stone and his team from LSU's Coastal Studies Institute have received funding for four new platforms, one of which just went online last month. The stations, which were designed and built by Stone and his team, include instruments attached to oil platforms above and below water and on the floor of the Gulf. The information gathered at these offshore sites is transmitted to computers at LSU's Coastal Studies Institute via a satellite-based cellular telephone network. There, it is examined for quality-control purposes and distributed worldwide via the Internet. The data are also archived at LSU for ongoing research.
Added to the data collected from the existing buoys, the information from the new stations will help scientists and emergency-preparedness personnel more accurately predict storm surges and plan voluntary or mandatory evacuations.
"We now have more offshore information pertaining to waves and currents than we've ever had before," Stone said. "For the coming hurricane season we will be in a better position than ever to assess the early effects of hurricanes as they come into the Gulf. We have crossed a new threshold."
This NOAA site indicates that there are 5 stations online while 10 more were "under construction or planned."
I would be curious to know more about WACIS and its role in storm prediction, its funding and whether or not information from this system aided in forcasting what was to occur.