Brendon Loy looks back at Katrina

Who?
Brendan Loy, the smart young man whose layman's expertise in climatology placed him among the experts last year because he saw what was about to happen almost before anyone else -- and said so. I put him on the blogroll last week mainly to keep up with this year's hurricane season. There is no such thing as too much information.

Go now and read his retrospective on last year's events. He hammers away at the theme that the storm, as bad as it was, was nowhere near as bad as it might have been. He even advances the argument that at some level the consequences of the storm may actually have resulted in many lives being saved, because had the broken levee not failed during the evacuation it might very well have done so with no warning at all at some later date. This is not a stretch.

And guess what? It could still happen. I said so last year and I still believe it.

The real tragedy is that what we see is not what could have been the worst. Had the eye of that storm landed a few degrees to the West, say about New Iberia instead of Slidell, the resulting tide would have dumped itself right into the New Orleans "bowl." We would not be looking at the roofs of houses and sending a cavalcade of busses to ship Superdome City to Houston's Astrodome for Thanksgiving. Instead we would be filling up body bags as rapidly as possible to avert a loss of life and property of biblical proportions...just like the predictions have advertised. No, this was still not the Big One.

That's why I'm still watching weather reports.