Brendan Loy’s attention to detail
Wow. This 23 year old blogger did an amazing job of watching data accumulate on Katrina, and logically proceeding to the likeliest outcome. The NYT was impressed and so are we. Here is an excerpt of his process ten days ago:
I was basing my statements on solid, publicly available information — National Hurricane Center advisories, computer models, etc. — combined with a long-standing, well-justified apprehension about hurricane threats to New Orleans. I say “well-justified” because the catastrophic potential of a major hurricane striking the Big Easy had been widely known for many years. So when I saw Katrina turn southwestward last Thursday, I was immediately concerned, and when I saw the computer model predictions shift westward on Friday morning, I was downright alarmed. When the official National Hurricane Center track caught up with the computer models at 10:00 PM Friday, and the NHC declared the new, New Orleans-centered track a high-confidence forecast, I knew this was the gravest threat to New Orleans in my lifetime, and it was time to start seriously thinking about evacuations. This was Friday night, and what’s extraordinary isn’t that I saw the gravity of the threat, it’s that so many others seemingly didn’t. [emphasis added]
In the Times article, I am quoted as “acknowledging” that “I am more willing to pull the trigger because I don’t have to deal with the consequences if they had had an evacuation and the storm hadn’t hit. It’s easy for me to sit here and say, ‘Everyone leave.’ ” That’s an accurate statement, and I’m glad I said it. But I wish I had added something along the lines of: “That said, given how grave and potentially deadly this particular threat was, I feel that ‘pulling the trigger’ on Saturday morning was clearly necessary, not just in hindsight but based on what was known at the time. For whatever reason, Mayor Nagin delayed the mandatory evacuation until Sunday morning, and that was a very bad decision on his part.” (I wrote at the time [in a post titled "The Mayor of New Orleans is an Idiot" -- ed.]: “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. … Will Ray Nagin go down in history as the mayor who fiddled while New Orleans drowned? Could be.”)
It is true, as some have pointed out in comments, that Katrina was not “likely” to hit New Orleans as of Saturday morning, or even Sunday morning for that matter. New Orleans was the hurricane’s most likely target — it remained in the crosshairs of the official forecast track all weekend — but in terms of statistical strike probabilities, even the most likely target at 24-48 hours out still has a less-than-50% chance of getting hit, thanks to the uncertainties inherent in hurricane forecasting. However, given the technology that we currently have, you simply could not have a greater threat to a specific location, 48 hours before landfall, than the threat that New Orleans faced on Saturday morning. It was, as I said, a “high-confidence forecast,” and one with enormously catastrophic potential. Thus, if an evacuation was not appropriate then, then it follows that an evacuation must never be appropriate at 48 hours. And that can’t be, because really, 48 hours is already too late; studies have long shown that it would take 72 hours to completely empty the city of New Orleans. So unless the city’s hurricane strategy was to throw up its hands and say, “there’s nothing we can do,” a mandatory evacuation — school buses and all — was most certainly called for on Saturday morning. As I wrote on Saturday afternoon, “If you knew there was a 10 percent chance terrorists were going to set off a nuclear bomb in your city on Monday, would you stick around, or would you evacuate? That’s essentially equivalent to what you’re dealing with here. I sure as hell would leave.”
Mr. Loy’s logic is brilliant and irrefutable: if Katrina did not trigger an evacuation 48 hours before hitting, then no storm ever could do so — which is obviously absurd. Previously we looked at a few of these factors in retrospect to see what actions should have been taken by the deplorable Blanco and Nagin. But that’s hindsight (not always a valid argument against criticism, by the way). Now we see in real time, as it were, the rather obvious logic that should have poured down like rain on Blanco and Nagin; but it did not. Nagin’s inability to make timely decisions adequately in advance of events has been particularly tragic. [Full disclosure: we got out of Miami almost 24 hours before Category 1 Katrina, a day before we were scheduled to leave, just to be on the safe side.]
Kudos to Mr. Loy.
As for Mr. Nagin, the NYT reports his timing and judgment appear, at the very least, to be consistent: “City to Offer Free Trips to Las Vegas for Officers.”