Will "Wannabe Barry" Turn Into Another New Orleans Hurricane Calamity?

Serious flash flooding in New Orleans this morning. Is this a
prelude to an even bigger calamity from wannabe Barry?

New Orleans was badly flooded today as a storm that wants to become Tropical Storm Barry gathers steam in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico.

This morning's flash flood emergency in New Orleans was created by intense thunderstorms on the outer edges of that mishmash of Gulf thunderstorms that might become Barry. Up to six inches of rain fell in just three hours this morning.

Many parts of New Orleans, including the French Quarter were under water this morning. If the worst case scenarios with wannabe Barry play out, this morning's destructive flooding will look like child's play. Things have the potential to get very difficult in the Big Easy.

You might remember my post a couple days ago that mentioned a cluster of thunderstorms that had its origins in Missouri and Tennessee was drifting down to the Gulf of Mexico and had the potential for grow into a tropical storm.

That potential seems like it is being realized. The National Hurricane Center says wannabe Barry will almost certainly grow into Tropical Storm Barry by Thursday and could easily increase further into a hurricane by the weekend.

The future path and strength of wannabe Barry is wicked uncertain, but early indications are it will move west over the northern Gulf of Mexico, then turn north and make landfall somewhere west of New Orleans.

If that happens, New Orleans would get the worst of the storm surge, which is water pushed ashore by a storm.

That's bad enough for low lying New Orleans. However, under normal circumstances, a storm surge being pushed northward up the Mississippi River by the city wouldn't be that big of a deal, as a levee system would protect the area.

Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico usually hit later in the year, when the Mississippi River is typically pretty low. The levee system around New Orleans protects the city unless the water gets more than 20 feet deep.

So if a storm surge increases the water level in the river from, say, five feet to 10 feet, the city and its levees can handle it.

Here's the problem: Wannabe Barry is gettting going early in the season, so the Mississippi River is higher than it would be in say, September, the height of hurricane season.  Tropical storms and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico aren't too off the charts weird in July, but it's still a bit unusual for things to be cranking this early.

The real trouble is the Mississippi River is very, very high from all the epic rains that fell upstream in the Midwest between March and June. So the water is now at around 16 feet, which is just a little below flood stage. A storm surge from wannabe Barry could push the water up over 20 feet, which would overtop levees and potentially give us Katrina all over again.

Another levee system that kept the waters of the Gulf of Mexico out of New Orleans led to the Katrina calamity of 2005. This potential mess would be different, as the water would be from the river, not the Gulf.

Of course, this is all a big maybe at this point. Maybe the surge won't be that big. Maybe Barry won't get very strong. Maybe Barry's path will take a turn so that New Orleans need not worry about anything.

Some forecasts say the unusually high water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico might prompt Wannabe Barry to grow much more intense than current estimates. Winds in the upper atmosphere over the northern Gulf of Mexico will also become lighter, another sign that this could get pretty big pretty fast.

On the other hand, there the winds in the upper atmosphere might be stronger than forecast, or there could be intrusions of dry air, or wannabe Barry could travel closer to land during its formative stages, all of which could hobble this storm and make it not that much of  a powerhouse.

The track of the storm, which will be key on who gets the worst of it, is still a wild card, too. Nobody is sure where this thing will go.  

Yesterday, when flood forecasts put the storm surge flood expectations at 19 feet, not 20 feet, officials were sanguine about everything. Even at 20 feet, workers can reinforce levees and close flood gates to stave off flooding.

All this means that another catastrophic flood in the New Orleans area is not a done deal. At all. But it's enough to make me and a whole bunch of other people worried.

Plus, this morning's flood was no walk in the park. There's lots of damage in and around New Orleans from today's inundation. We can all hope that this turns out to be the worst of it.

As anybody in Nebraska, or California, or Washington DC or Kansas or Oklahoma or Ontario or Quebec can tell you, we've had enough flooding disasters lately.

Did Mardi Gras Beads Contribute (Slightly) To New Orleans Flooding?

Workers remove discarded Mardi Gras beads that had been
clogging a catch basin in New Orleans. Photo by Max
Becherer/New Orleans Advocate 

Mardi Gras is fast approaching and the city of New Orleans is in full party mode. The festivities obviously include all those strings of beads that are being thrown around at parade after parade.

Everything has a dark side and those beads have a small dark side. They contributed, at least in a small way, to a damaging flood in New Orleans last August.

Ten inches of rain doused the low-lying city in early August 2017, which as you would imagine caused that destructive flood. It turns out the flooding was made worse by a drainage system that hadn't been adequately maintained in years.

This prompted an emergency cleaning program of the city's catch basins, which turned out were clogged with debris. This allowed water to accumulate in the torrential downpours more than it otherwise would have.

Workers removed 7.2 million pounds of debris from the catch basins, says The New Orleans Advocate. An admittedly small part of that debris problem was the Mardi Gras beads. About 93.000 pounds of the beads were removed from the catch basins during the cleanup.

Going forward, New Orleans will clean more catch basins annually than in previous years, to keep up with the debris removal. In and near the French Quarter, where most of the Mardi Gras festivities take place, clean up crews will sweep litter after parties and parades to the middle of the street for pickup and disposal.

They used to sweep the debris to the sides of the streets, making it more likely Mardi Gras beads could fall into catch basins.

Other cities, even here in Burlington, Vermont also have Mardi Gras celebrations. (Burlington holds their Mardi Gras celebration on March 10 this year.) Time to check the catch basins in those towns?

New Orleans Next On Hurricane Hit List?

There's good agreement among computer forecasting
models that Nate will come ashore over or near
southeastern Louisiana, but the wild card is
how strong it will be when it gets there. 

The next American city to get slammed in this terrible hurricane season of 2017 might be New Orleans.

Hurricane watches are now up for this weekend along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, including the city of New Orleans as Tropical Storm Nate gets its act together in the western Caribbean Sea today.

It's inevitable that Nate will hit the United States somewhere along the Gulf Coast over the weekend, but there are big questions on the exact path and especially the strength of Nate once it reaches the U.S.

Maximum sustained winds with Nate were 45 mph early this morning, which isn't too intense, but the storm should strengthen fairly rapidly over very warm waters north of Nicaragua today.

Nate will head north, and how the storm interacts with land when it passes over or near Mexico's Yucatan peninsula tonight will greatly determine how fierce a storm Nate will be once it reaches the United States.

If the land interaction seriously disrupts Nate's core, it won't have time to get its act together and, in a best case scenario, not even get to full hurricane strength.  However, if Nate stays organized, or somehow misses the Yucatan altogether, it could strengthen rapidly into a dangerous powerhouse.

Hurricane forecasters are generally better at predicted a hurricane's path than they are at pinpointing its future strength. That's the nature of the science.

Right now, the National Hurricane Center is going with a middle of the road approach, and predicts a Category 1 Nate with 80 mph winds when it comes ashore.

After dealing with Category 4 and 5 hurricanes this year, Category 1 doesn't seem so bad, yet it is. Up to a foot of rain might fall along the Gulf Coast in the path of Nate, and storm surges will very likely batter the coastline.

The New Orleans water pumping system, which pushes water out of the low lying city during storms, is still not fully functional after a very damaging August 5 flood there. So more flooding is very possible.

One hopeful piece of news is that Nate will be moving right along, so it won't rain heavily in New Orleans or elsewhere for a long time. It won't be like Hurricane Harvey, which pretty much stalled out over East Texas for days, which, as we all remember, caused immense floods.

New Orleans Picks Up The Pieces After Tornadoes

Aerial view of tornado damage in New Orleans East
via NOLA.com  

Tuesday's unexpectedly strong tornadoes in and near New Orleans Louisiana miraculously caused no deaths, that's the good news.

Still, though, at least 33 people were injured and at least 300 properties were severely damaged as one of the strong tornadoes plowed a 2.5 mile long path through heavily populated New Orleans East, says NOLA.com

I'm particularly stunned and grateful there were no deaths, given all the videos I saw of people gawking at the tornado when it was right next to them.

They could have easily been killed by flying debris, or they might not have had enough time to get to shelter before the tornado hit.

After all, the tornado that trashed New Orleans East was the strongest to hit the New Orleans area since record keeping began around 1850. The twister was an EF3, packing winds of 136 to 165 mph.

Specifically, according to a National Weather Service assessment, the New Orleans East tornado had winds of 150 mph, was on the ground for 10.1 miles and had a width of up to 600 yards.

While tornadoes in the EF3 to EF5 catagories - the strongest - usually get all the headlines because they are so destructive, most tornadoes reported in the United States are in the EF0 to EF2 catagories.

In all, there were 12 reports of tornadoes Tuesday in Louisiana and Mississippi.

There will be few, if any severe thunderstorm or tornadoes in the nation over the next few days.

Now some tornado videos from the New Orleans area:

Heres the tornado swirling through a shopping plaza:



Surveillance video of the tornado exploding transformers, ripping a roof off and overturning a truck. The motorist who pulled into the parking lot must have been REALLY frightened.



Drone footage shows massive damage in New Orleans East from the tornado

BREAKING: Destructive Tornadoes In New Orleans, Other Areas Of South Now

Tornado damage in New Orleans today via NOLA.com

Destructive tornadoes are sweeping parts of Louisiana and surrouding areas today, with one particularly damaging one hitting the New Orleans metro area around 11 a.m. local time.

An hour and a half later, another tornado had reportedly touched down in the New Orleans area.

Initial video shows a wide tornado lumbering through the New Orleans East, including the community of Michaud with the first wave of storms. (You can see one of the videos at the bottom of this post.)

Other video shows badly damaged houses, overturned vehicles and debris scattered over large areas.  Photos on the NOLA.com website showed numerous homes, businesses and cars destroyed or damaged in New Orleans East.

NOLA.com reported the New Orleans East tornado struck at least one school, which was full of students.

There were no injuries immediately reported at the school, as faculty and students received a tornado warning in advance and took cover.

Tornado damaged house in New Orleans East today.
Photo via Twitter, Matt Sledge. 

More tornadoes and severe weather are likely in the South for the rest of the day.  As of 2 p.m. EST, parts of eastern Louisiana, and the southern portions of Mississippi and Alabama were under tornado watches.

The watches include the cith of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, which was badly damaged in a January tornado.

It had been hoped and it appeared in advance hat today's severe weather would not rival that of a destructive tornado outbreak in the South last month. However, as we can see, large, damaging tornados are striking populated areas today.

I'll update the story as we go along.

Below is a video of the very large tornado moving through Michaud, Louisiana, in the New Orleans area today:

Jindal Politicizes Katrina By Begging Obama Not To "Politicize" It

President Obama greeting people in New Orleans this week
as he marked the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  

One of the strangest sideshows in the current orgy of 10-year Hurricane Katrina retrospectives is Louisiana Governor and Presidential Candidate Bobby Jindal's letter to President Obama.

Obama went to New Orleans to talk about the progress the city has made in the 10 years since Katrina and the sorely lacking things that need to be done.

Before Obama arrived, Jindal wrote the president a note asking him not to talk about climate change, says Think Progress, a left leaning news site.

Jindal wrote in part:

"Although I understand that your emphasis in New Orleans will - rightly - be on economic development, the temptation to stray into climate change politics should be resisted.......While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, this not a view shared by many Louisianians. I would ask you to respect this important time of remembrance by not inserting the divisi e political agenda of liberal environmental activism."

I suppose the letter is smart politics on the part of Jindal. After all, Republican presidential candidates have to appeal to their base. And this year the base is really base. So to be a viable candidate, you have to pretend climate change doesn't exist in order to keep your potential voters happy.

I love the anti-intellectual part of the letter, too. I guess that's politics, too.   Climate change policies are apparently a goofy attempt to "legislate away hurricanes"? Huh? When did anybody say that they can make hurricanes go away by passing a law banning them?

Bobby Jindal, you're so silly.

Plus, Jindal's letter is a classic example of the political playbook that if you don't talk about something then it doesn't exist. By pressuring Obama to not discuss climate change in Louisiana, everybody an pretend it doesn't exist, or at least can be safely ignored.

Obviously, we don't know for sure if climate change made Katrina a worse storm than it otherwise would have been.

But sea levels are rising because of climate change, and since New Orleans and the rest of coastal Louisiana is so at risk by this rising tide, it makes sense that Obama would throw in a comment about climate change in his visit to the Katrina zone.

In his New Orleans speech, the transcript shows Obama, as expected, focused on the city's recovery, the government's success and failures, the resilience of Louisiana's and what needs to be done.

But he did briefly bring up climate change, which must have irritated Jindal. Or maybe delighted him, by showing Republicans that those evil liberals will insert their climate change bullshit into anything.

However, reality based policy makers like Obama know that something has to be done to make us more resilient to climate change.

I just wish Republicans would give us their conservative options to deal with this, so we can have a realistic debate on how we as a nation should combat climate change.

If you bury your head in the (beach) sand, the rising tide of global climate change will otherwise just drown us.

Watch Horrible Monday New Orleans Storm Blow Train Cars Off Bridge

Train cars on the ground beneath a New Orleans bridge
after strong thunderstorm winds blew them off.
Photo from the Times-Picayune  

A line of really, really bad thunderstorms tore through much of Louisiana this morning and early afternoon.

The part of the storms that everybody is talking about is how the incredibly strong winds blew rail cars off the Huey P. Long bridge in New Orleans. It was dramatically caught on video, which you will see at the bottom of this post.  

There was widespread other trouble in New Orleans and elsewhere in Louisiana. Winds gusted to 70 mph at the International Airport and a tornado was spotted by sheriffs in the area.

It's not clear as of late afternoon whether other tornadoes touched down in the New Orleans, Lafayette and Baton Rouge areas, but there were reports of roofs blown off of some houses and businesses.

That damage could have been caused by tornadoes, or powerful straight line winds.

Power failures affected tens of thousands of homes and businesses and flooding was widespread.

As of late afternoon, it wasn't over yet for Louisiana.  More severe storms were developing over parts of the state, packing high winds and large hail. The threat will continue into the evening.

Some incredibly strong storms were also offshore from Galveston, Texas and were heading northeast toward coastal Louisiana. If they hold together, these storms will join the chorus of heavy rain, large hail and high winds affecting much of Louisiana.

Flash flood watches also remain in effect for much of Louisiana.

This isn't one of those famous Louisiana hurricanes, but to many residents, I'm sure it felt like it.

Here's that train video. Yikes!!