Kevin Myatt

Latest entries from the Weather Journal blog

• Weather Journal remains on break
• Coastal low prompts Southwest Virginia flooding
• Hurricane Ida: Something extraordinary may be happening

About Kevin

Kevin Myatt grew up in Arkansas to the tune of tornado sirens and the rhythm of hailstones, aspiring to be a meteorologist before his studies and career were turned to journalism instead. Though he often chases storms, he prefers living in the cooler, more tranquil weather of the Blue Ridge. He moved to Roanoke in 1999 to take a job on the copy desk of The Roanoke Times; writing headlines and editing copy is his principal work for the newspaper today.

Each May, Kevin assists Pulaski County High School / Virginia Tech meteorology instructor Dave Carroll in leading college and high school students to the Plains to observe severe weather firsthand. The accounts of many of his storm chases can be found here on the storm chasing page of his weather blog on roanoke.com.

Kevin was an editor for "Hurricanes and the Middle Atlantic States," a book written by D.C.-area weather enthusiast Rick Schwartz and published by Blue Diamond Books that documents hurricanes striking the mid-Atlantic states since colonial times.

The Weather Journal column began in 2003 and appears on Friday's Virginia section front in The Roanoke Times. The Weather Journal blog began in 2006 and follows weather day-by-day between the larger columns.

Yes, it can get much worse than Katrina

Long before Aug. 29, 2005, we had all heard about the ultimate hurricane nightmare that would one day happen.

A Category 5 storm roars through the Gulf of Mexico then slams into New Orleans. A city below sea level would be buffeted for hours by winds well over 100 miles an hour, leveling frame homes, ripping roofs off and scattering shards of glass from skyscrapers like bullets. Then, the floods would come, as storm surge alternately from the Gulf of Mexico to the south, the wide and muddy Mississippi River downtown and Lake Pontchartrain would inundate the city.

"I wish I had better news, but we're facing the storm most of us have feared," Mayor Ray Nagin told his city and the world the day before Hurricane Katrina's landfall.

The National Weather Service in New Orleans issued the most ominously worded warning ever disseminated to the public. "Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks ... perhaps longer," the weather service warned at midmorning Aug. 28. "The majority of industrial buildings will become nonfunctional. ... High-rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously ... a few to the point of total collapse. All windows will blow out. Airborne debris will be widespread ... and may include heavy items such as household appliances and even light vehicles."

A year later, with much of a major U.S. city still uninhabited, a huge chunk of coastline still wrecked, more than 1,800 people dead and uncounted thousands displaced, it is obvious that the Gulf Coast is still living a nightmare.

But the scariest part is this: Hurricane Katrina was not that ultimate nightmare storm that was long feared for New Orleans. It was something less ... and yet still this horrible.

Katrina veered east just before landfall, putting New Orleans on the weaker western side of the eyewall. Also, its winds calmed to under 135 mph, still a powerful Category 3 storm but not the caliber of winds seen in infamous storms of the past such as Andrew, Camille or Hugo.

In fact, according to the National Hurricane Center report on Hurricane Katrina, there were no recorded wind gusts greater than 98 mph in New Orleans itself, which would rate a mere Category 2. No land-based instrument anywhere in the United States recorded a gust higher than 135 mph during Katrina, solidifying it as a Category 3 storm at landfall, not Category 5.

Had Katrina maintained its Category 5 intensity and slapped New Orleans with winds exceeding 155 mph, a far different scenario would have developed.

There would have been no rooftops for flood victims to escape to, as most of the city's houses would have been leveled or at least had roofs and walls removed. Rather than slow flooding over a few days as water burst through levees, massive surges overtopping levees would have inundated almost all of New Orleans in hours, if not minutes.

Considering how many people were still in New Orleans when Katrina hit, I have little doubt that tens of thousands of people would have died in the ultimate Category 5 scenario. Thank God that didn't happen. It was bad enough as it was.

That Katrina was actually less of a hurricane than was feared even a day before it hit is of no consolation to the hundreds of thousands of people still bearing its scars.

So much of the media spotlight focused on New Orleans that residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast are almost an afterthought, even though it was their homes that bore the brunt of a crushing storm surge that, at up to 28 feet, even topped some high-water marks reached by Camille in 1969.

Though Katrina was not a Category 5 storm like Camille at landfall, it had been hours before, and much of the wave momentum generated by 175-mph winds had not been dispersed before it came ashore as a weaker storm. Also, Katrina was an unusually wide storm, more akin to some of the western Pacific typhoons rather than the usually more compact Atlantic hurricanes. Its sheer size propelled more water forward than a stronger but smaller Camille had.

One of the cruelest ironies in the aftermath of Katrina is that many Mississippi homeowners cannot collect insurance money because their damages were ruled to have been flood damage to their homes rather than wind damage. How would you feel if a tornado lifted an 18-wheeler into your house, but you couldn't collect insurance money because the damage to your house is ruled to be from a traffic accident rather than from the winds of the tornado? A hurricane's storm surge is entirely derived from and propelled by a hurricane's winds.

And here it is a year later, with lots of second-guessing of government and private entities about preparation and recovery, frustrated homeowners paying mortgages on empty foundations unsure if they can or should build back, and a nation waiting to see if the 2006 hurricane season can produce some kind of macabre encore to the deadly march of destruction it has endured the past two years.

The hope is that we'll learn all the necessary lessons before a hurricane even worse than Katrina comes calling.