Reading History Via Katrina

[Annie]

Links, natch!

http://instapundit.com/archives/025311.php

September 02, 2005

MICKEY KAUS quotes a reader email:

the authors of the [2002] times-picayune series, the designers of the government desktop exercise, and all the other authors of studies on the danger facing N.O. are now as a group getting a big thumbs up for prescience from the CW. But hey, which one of them saw what was developing for 72 hours over Miami and the Gulf and sent up a timely flare last week, warning, "Hey, the levee is going to fail and N.O. will be over 50% inundated!" If somebody said it, I did not hear it. That would have been prescient.

Well, none of them may have, but hurricane-blogger Brendan Loy wrote this on August 26: "Residents of New Orleans and the surrounding areas need to realize now just how serious the threat from Hurricane Katrina really is. . . . That's not to say a Florida landfall isn't still possible -- it certainly is -- but people need to be making preparations RIGHT NOW all along the northern Gulf coast, especially New Orleans." (And I didn't say that, but I did link to it.)

The next day -- long before the mandatory evacuation -- Loy had this to say: "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." (My comment: "If I lived in New Orleans I'd be gone by now.")

Loy had this called way before most people, and was warning about New Orleans when most media were still predicting a second Florida strike. And looking at his archives now makes me wish more people had been paying attention then.

UPDATE: More prescience here. Advantage: Blogosphere! (Thanks to reader Amy Lopez for the link).
posted at 09:50 PM by Glenn Reynolds