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The Mad Monk
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of Ice Cream
Mar 2000
time: 23:24
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quote:
Cayman Islands reeling after beating from storm
FORECAST: CUBA LIKELY TO AVOID WORST EFFECTS OF HURRICANE
By Martin Merzer and Nancy San Martin
Knight Ridder
MIAMI - Hurricane Ivan brutalized the Cayman Islands on Sunday and threatened to bury western Cuba under a mammoth storm surge. One of the most powerful storms ever recorded, it crushed homes in the Caymans, covered Havana with black clouds and provoked panic.
``Oh my God, oh my God, the roof is coming off!'' a woman at the Adams Guest House in George Town, on the main island of Grand Cayman, told Knight Ridder by phone. Then, the line went dead.
Sustained winds of 120 mph blasted the island. Numerous buildings lost their roofs, five feet of water flowed through homes, and power was out throughout the island.
According to ham radio operators, people were standing on their roofs because of storm surges of up to eight feet above normal tide levels.
Most communications networks were severed, and no casualty reports from the Caymans were available. Across the Caribbean, 60 deaths have been blamed on the hurricane.
Forecasters said Ivan did not pose a significant threat to south Florida, but it kept defying predictions. As a result, watches and warnings were posted from Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, through all of Cuba and all the way to the lower Florida Keys, where the storm was expected to brush by the islands.
High winds prevented Cayman officials from assessing damage immediately. But Donnie Ebanks, deputy chairman of the British territory's National Hurricane Committee, estimated that as many as half of Grand Cayman's 15,000 homes were damaged.
Ivan still was expected to strike the Florida Panhandle later this week, possibly as a Category 2 hurricane with 105-mph winds. State officials urged residents of the Panhandle to prepare for evacuations.
In Cuba, some hope surfaced that the nation would avoid Ivan's worst effects. Each forecast seemed to take the storm's eye wall a little more west, possibly missing Cuban soil entirely, and Havana seemed unlikely to experience hurricane winds.
But extremely nasty weather will sweep through Cuba today. Rain fell across nearly the entire island Sunday and, until Ivan passed completely, many people cowered in fear.
``I would say the atmosphere is one of terror, anguish,'' a man told Knight Ridder by phone as he and his family prepared to evacuate their house in the center of Havana and flee to an inland suburb.
As it did in Jamaica, the hurricane's core -- and its 155-mph winds -- veered away from Grand Cayman at the last minute, but the three populated Cayman Islands absorbed a terrible beating.
Initial reports from the popular scuba-diving destination and banking center spoke of roofs flying off many houses, crashing into nearby buildings, tearing open the door of a public storm shelter.
The storm's towering waves and torrential rain produced another disaster: flooding. Six-foot floods swamped George Town, the capital. Ambulances were under three feet of water.
``I'm at work, and the water is up to my knees,'' Devon Chisolm, a firefighter in George Town, said Sunday morning. ``We can't help anyone -- there's too much wind and water.''
About 45,000 people live in the Caymans, a low-lying British territory of three populated islands. Some residents and tourists fled ahead of the storm.
The Cayman Islands were better prepared for the punishment than Grenada and Jamaica, which were slammed by Ivan in the past week -- though Jamaica was spared a direct hit Saturday. The Caymans have strict building codes and none of the shantytowns and tin shacks common elsewhere in the Caribbean.
Forecasters said Ivan's nearly inconceivable winds diminished slightly, falling from 165 mph late Saturday to 150 mph Sunday evening, but they said the difference was hardly significant.
Ivan remained an extraordinarily dangerous storm, one that inflicted death and widespread damage in Grenada and Jamaica.
At one point Saturday night, hurricane hunter crews measured a central barometric pressure of 910 millibars, making Ivan the sixth most intense Atlantic basin hurricane in history. The central pressure of Andrew, which ravaged South Miami-Dade in 1992, never fell below 922 millibars.
In Cuba, wind damage already was reported in the southeastern province of Santiago de Cuba, where two homes collapsed and at least 10 others were damaged. Thirty-foot waves raked the beaches of two hotels, the Bucanero and the Costa Morena.
Forecasters warned Cubans to expect a huge storm surge -- a wall of water up to 25 feet high -- if Ivan's core reverses course again and makes landfall on the Isle of Youth and then in the province of Pinar del Río.
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http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/merc.../9650533.htm?1c
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The Mad Monk
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of Ice Cream
Mar 2000
time: 23:24
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quote:
Direct Hit by Ivan Could Sink New Orleans
2 hours, 31 minutes ago Add U.S. National - AP to My Yahoo!
By BRETT MARTEL, Associated Press Writer
NEW ORLEANS - The worst-case scenario for New Orleans — a direct strike by a full-strength Hurricane Ivan — could submerge much of this historic city treetop-deep in a stew of sewage, industrial chemicals and fire ants, and the inundation could last for weeks, experts say.
If the storm were strong enough, Ivan could drive water over the tops of the levees that protect the city from the Mississippi River and vast Lake Pontchartrain. And with the city sitting in a saucer-shaped depression that dips as much as 9 feet below sea level, there would be nowhere for all that water to drain.
Even in the best of times, New Orleans depends on a network of canals and huge pumps to keep water from accumulating inside the basin.
"Those folks who remain, should the city flood, would be exposed to all kinds of nightmares from buildings falling apart to floating in the water having nowhere to go," Ivor van Heerden, director of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Public Health Center, said Tuesday.
LSU's hurricane experts have spent years developing computer models and taking surveys to predict what might happen.
The surveys predict that about 300,000 of the 1.6 million people living in the metropolitan area would risk staying.
The computer models show a hurricane with a wind speed of around 120 mph or more — hitting just west of New Orleans so its counterclockwise rotation could hurl the strongest surf and wind directly into the city — would push a storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain over the city's levees. Ivan had sustained wind of 140 mph Tuesday.
New Orleans would be under about 20 feet of water, higher than the roofs of many of the city's homes.
Besides collecting standard household and business garbage and chemicals, the flood would flow through chemical plants in the area, "so there's the potential of pretty severe contamination," van Heerden said.
Severe flooding in area bayous also forces out wildlife, including poisonous snakes and stinging fire ants, which sometimes gather in floating balls carried by the current.
A rescue of people who stayed behind would be among the world's biggest since 1940, when Allied forces and civilian volunteers during World War II rescued mostly British soldiers from Dunkirk, France, and carried them across the English Channel, van Heerden predicted.
Much of the city would be under water for weeks. And even after the river and Lake Pontchartrain receded, the levees could trap water above sea level, meaning the Army Corps of Engineers would have to cut the levees to let the water out.
"The real big problem is the water from sea level on down because it will have to be pumped and restoring the pumps and getting them back into action could take a considerable amount of time," said John Hall, the Corps' spokesman in New Orleans.
Hall spoke from his home — 6 feet below sea level — as he prepared to flee the city himself. The Corps' local staff was being relocated 166 miles north to Vicksburg, Miss.
New Orleans was on the far western edge of the Gulf Coast region threatened by Ivan, and forecasters said Tuesday that the hurricane appeared to moving toward a track farther east, along the Mississippi coast.
If the eye came ashore east of the city, van Heerden said, New Orleans would be on the low side of the storm surge and would not likely have catastrophic flooding.
The worst storm in recent decades to hit New Orleans was Hurricane Betsy in 1965, which submerged parts of the city in water 7-feet deep and was blamed for 74 deaths in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida. That storm was a Category 3, weaker than Ivan is expected to be.
Even if New Orleans escapes this time, van Heerden said, it will remain vulnerable until the federal and state governments act to restore the coastal wetlands that should act as a buffer against storms coming in from the Gulf.
Louisiana has lost about a half million acres of coast to erosion since 1930 because the Mississippi River is so corralled by levees that it can dump sediment only at its mouth, and that allows waves from the Gulf to chop away at the rest of the coastline.
"My fear is, if this storm passes (without a major disaster), everybody forgets about it until next year, when it could be even worse because we'll have even less wetlands," van Heerden said.
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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=sto...e_new_orleans_1
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14-09-2004 02:51
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