Katrina forecasters were remarkably accurate

MIAMI - For all the criticism of the Bush administration’s confused response to Hurricane Katrina, at least two federal agencies got it right: the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center.

They forecast the path of the storm and the potential for devastation with remarkable accuracy.

The performance by the two agencies calls into question claims by President Bush and others in his administration that Katrina was a catastrophe that no one envisioned.

For example, Bush told ABC on Sep. 1 that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” In its storm warnings, the hurricane center never used the word “breached.” But a day before Katrina came ashore Aug. 29, the agency warned in capital letters: “SOME LEVEES IN THE GREATER NEW ORLEANS AREA COULD BE OVERTOPPED.”

National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield also gave daily pre-storm videoconference briefings to federal officials in Washington, warning them of a nightmare scenario of New Orleans’ levees not holding, winds smashing windows in high-rise buildings and flooding wiping out large swaths of the Gulf Coast.

A photo on the White House Web site shows Bush in Crawford, Texas, watching Mayfield give a briefing on Aug. 28, a day before Katrina smashed ashore with 145-mph winds.

‘Incredible’ human suffering predicted
The National Weather Service office in Slidell, La., which covers the New Orleans area, put out its own warnings that day, saying, “MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS ... PERHAPS LONGER” and predicting “HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.”

Mayfield and Paul Trotter, the meteorologist in charge of the Slidell office, both refused to criticize the federal response.

But Mayfield said: “The fact that we had a major hurricane forecast over or near New Orleans is reason for great concern. The local and state emergency management knew that as well as FEMA did.”

And the risk to New Orleans in particular was well-recognized long before Katrina.

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“The 33 years that I’ve been at the hurricane center we have always been saying — the directors before me and I have always said — that the greatest potential for the nightmare scenarios, in the Gulf of Mexico anyway, is that New Orleans and southeast Louisiana area,” Mayfield said.

Heeding Mayfield's warnings, FEMA conducted a ‘Hurricane Pam’ exercise 13 months before Katrina struck to assess how New Orleans would handle a theoretical Category 3 hurricane. The exercise predicted a gap in the levee system would flood major portions of the city and damage as much as 87 percent of New Orleans' homes.

The hurricane center and the weather service have not been without critics. Some private meteorologists laud the accurate forecasts but wonder why those dire predictions were not issued earlier. They also argue that residents were bombarded with too much information from several sources.

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