John McQuaid

The forecast continues to incrementally improve for New Orleans. The Corps of Engineers’ latest storm surge projections show a lower risk for New Orleans:

The latest prediction of reduced Hurricane Gustav storm surge should be good news for the Industrial Canal and St. Bernard Parish levees, but may still potentially put water over deficient levees on the west bank of Jefferson Parish, the Army Corps of Engineers’ ranking officer said Sunday.

Lt. Gen. Robert Van Antwerp, the corps’ chief of engineers, also suggested that only one of three New Orleans outfall canals still have to be closed against the surge.

St. Bernard Parish lies to the east of New Orleans and would bear the initial brunt of storm surge flooding driven by Gustav’s counterclockwise winds. The Industrial Canal bisects the city, running north-to-south. It breached in several spots during Katrina and repairs and restoration are ongoing. Officials were worried that high water could find remaining weak points, posing danger to adjacent neighborhoods. It also appears that the storm surge heights along the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain won’t be that severe, which is why they may not have to close all three canal floodgates.

There’s a much larger risk to the sprawling west bank suburbs. The storm will pass much closer to them, driving floodwaters into Barataria Bay and northward into communities. The levee system down there is an incomplete patchwork.

Update: Apparently the state’s modeling shows the risk for the west bank suburbs also declining.

Gov. Bobby Jindal said storm surge modeling indicated water levels could be much lower on the West Bank than the weather service announcement predicted, and surge would not be likely to overtop levees in Jefferson Parish.

Fingers crossed that these trends continue.

The juxtaposition of Hurricane Gustav and the Republican Convention has naturally set off lots of idle speculation about the political impact of the storm. It’s the perfect Drudge convergence: disaster and partisan politics. God is on the side of the Democrats! (former DNC chair Don Fowler) There is a God after all! (Michael Moore) It’s an opportunity for Republicans! (the Associated Press).

I am grateful the storm has given the Republican Party and the McCain campaign a chance to show a little restraint for a change. But obviously nobody can predict the political impact of a storm before it happens, because that depends on the real, physical impact. And that’s what we should be worried about. Lives and communities are literally at stake here.

One note, though: if a disaster has a political impact, it’s almost always negative. If things go well – if FEMA doesn’t screw up terribly, if people are rescued in a timely fashion – that’s good. Or great, considering the recent record. But historically, those situations have not been huge political pluses because that’s what is supposed to happen. It’s when things go wrong – when people’s expectations are not met – that you see political impacts. Very negative ones.

This is a paradox of disaster management that the Bush administration learned the hard way. Though it takes a lot of effort to put robust emergency management policies and institutions in place, the political upside is minimal. If the emergency plan works, you won’t get much credit after the storm, at least among the population at large. If things go south, though, the political downside can be huge. That’s why presidents (and governors, and mayors) neglect emergency management at their own peril.

So, it would be nice if everybody speculating about this would just shut up and let FEMA, the National Guard, the Coast Guard and other responders to their jobs. If they do them well (and New Orleans is still intact afterward) this will likely cause few ripples on the national political scene. Which I’m sure is perfectly OK with both McCain and Obama.

A measure of good news: Hurricane Gustav did not strengthen as much as expected over the Loop Current and is expected to remain a Category 3 storm. The forecast track has also shifted slightly to the west, away from the New Orleans area. Of course, this could change in the next 18 hours.

Hurricane Gustav weakened somewhat overnight, but is expected to strengthen rapidly again – thanks to the warm waters of the Gulf’s loop current – before striking the coastline midday Monday. Meanwhile, the forecast track again shifted incrementally eastward. Each increment increases the likelihood of hurricane-force winds and levee-topping storm surges in the New Orleans area, especially in suburbs on the west bank of the Mississippi River (i.e., south of the city proper) which abut marshes and where the levee system is incomplete. This is bad.

What more can be said about Sarah Palin? I think the politics of the selection could go either way. On the negative side, she will likely make gaffes on the campaign trail, and probably not fare well in a debate with Joe Biden (as long as he manages to restrain any impulses to cross the stage and wave a piece of paper in her face). On the plus side, maybe she will be a terrific campaigner, and the selection seen as bold and forward-looking. Though I doubt it.

The problem is not politics, but substance. VP selections don’t matter politically (if Dan Quayle couldn’t sink the top of the ticket, I don’t think Palin will). But they can matter tremendously after the election. And Palin is obviously unqualified to be president. Given McCain’s age, the choice is especially reckless.

McCain appears to have turned his campaign over to a bunch of people half his age – Steve Schmidt and the Karl Rove brain trust – who are fundamentally unserious. They lack the temperament and perspective of those with experience in government, or, for that matter, life. They have lots of experience winning news cycles and “tearing the bark off” Democrats. But they have no sense of how the government works, or the relationship between electoral politics and policies. Hence the McCain campaign is not really a campaign at all – an attempt to persuade voters on the candidate’s abilities and policies, with the aim of implementing those policies – but a series of “bold gambits” that get the media yakking, but later come to naught, or backfire, with no lessons learned. This is not surprising, as it’s a defining characteristic of the Bush administration.

Hurricane Gustav strengthened very rapidly today into a Category 4 storm, and forecasters believe it may reach Category 5 for a time Sunday, then weaken before it makes landfall, probably on the central Louisiana coast. The current forecast track has changed little over the past three days. Relatively speaking, this is good news for New Orleans. There will be miles of wetlands, suburbs, and the river (and its levees) interposed between the city and the center of the storm. Areas to the south and west of the city would bear the brunt of the storm surge. Most of this is sparsely-populate bayou country, but there is one substantial urban area, Houma-Thibodaux, population 32,000.

The Saffir-Simpson scale is somewhat misleading, especially where Louisiana is concerned, because it’s based on wind speed. What really matters in Louisiana is storm surge. A big storm pushes an incredible amount of water over the coastline’s flat, marshy topography. Channels and decaying marshes offer avenues for water to get further inland, where it can easily engulf levees and inhabited areas.

Gustav looks especially ominous for several reasons. The longer the hurricane remains at Category 4 and 5 before making landfall, the bigger its storm surge will be. This is what made Katrina so devastating – it was a large Category 4 and 5 storm for nearly two days. Wind speeds fell as it came ashore, but the huge wave it generated didn’t dissipate with them. Gustav is also coming in diagonally, which will increase the time it is pushing water inland.

My friend and colleague Mark Schleifstein has some reporting up on this today:

Hurricane Gustav will be at Category 4 strength with winds of 145 mph only 12 hours before it hits the central Louisiana coastline Monday afternoon, according to a 2 p.m. National Hurricane Center forecast.

On that track, a Louisiana State University coastal scientist says, storm surge could reach the top or overtop levees on the West Bank, could raise water to 8 feet — plus waves — along levees on the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, and combined with a water-swollen Tchefuncte River, could push surge into Madisonville on the Northshore.

Water also could rise as high as 8 feet in the Industrial Canal, he said.

In a nutshell: areas around New Orleans will get swamped. The city itself will see some high water, but not high enough to top the levees (of course, this didn’t help last time) but may avoid the worst.

Update: Mayor Nagin has ordered a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans starting Sunday morning. The 11 p.m. forecast has shifted the track slightly eastward, increasing the risk to New Orleans.

A few thoughts on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Republicans are feeling a bit panicked about T.S. Gustav, which is expected to strengthen into a Category 4 storm before it strikes the Gulf coast. (NOAA’s forecast track still has it coming in substantially west of New Orleans, which is good news for the city. Not so good for Acadiana and the delta marshes, which could be badly damaged – something that would, in turn, set back coastal restoration efforts.)

The Republicans ought to worry. The spectacle of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, funny hats and attacks on Barack Obama won’t look good if juxtaposed against another round of Gulf coast suffering and devastation. So if it comes to that, it might make sense to briefly postpone the convention.

There’s a bigger problem here, though. Republicans do have an image problem. But the reason they have it is because they have a problem with substance. And no one’s addressing that. John McCain has visited New Orleans and expressed his regrets for the Katrina debacle. That’s good. But does he have any idea about what needs to be done to rebuild or protect the city and the Gulf coast? (I can’t find anything on his website, though I may not be looking in the right place.) This is not just about spending, it’s about improving the way the government functions. Prepping for global warming. Looking at scientific evidence and mobilizing institutions to address future threats. My sense is that McCain hasn’t thought seriously about any of these things, nor would he know what to do about them should he become president. Which, in an era of rapid change, is tantamount to moving backwards.

Lionsgate has chosen to release its spoof Disaster Movie on Friday, the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. While another hurricane is heading toward the Gulf Coast, freaking everybody out. Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?

There’s a certain gallows humor about hurricanes. We all joke about them. But let’s face it, some people shouldn’t make light of killer storms. And one of those people is Karl Rove:

“The Republicans can’t seem to get a break when it comes to August and when it comes to the weather,” said Rove, a FOX News analyst. “I know this is being thought a lot about in Washington and at the White House and discussed and I suspect they will monitor it carefully and figure out what to do.”

Rove, we should remember, was supposedly put in charge of the post-Katrina rebuilding effort. But it was never clear what, if anything, he did on that front. The historical record is still murky, but from the outside it appears he spent the balance of the Katrina aftermath on political positioning, trying to pin blame for the disastrous response on Democrats, and engaged in a politically overdetermined debate on whether to seize control of the Louisiana National Guard from Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco. He and the president had multiple operational levers of the government at their fingertips, but they chose to focus on politics, not substance. And people suffered terribly for it. Which is the whole problem of the Bush administration in a nutshell.