Katrina Weekend Update, Saturday Edition

Some Katrina victims have made their way to Harlem, New York. One has to wonder just how many of the people displaced from New Orleans will actually want to return to that city. Will they want to go back to a city where the residential areas are quite heavily damaged? Who will take their place? I have a feeling that speculators are going to have a field day once the title and ownership of property is sorted out. The property values will depend heavily on what actions are taken to improve the city's defenses against future storms. Some property may be condemned by eminent domain to make way for new flood control projects, while others may gain new value because they sustained little flooding damage and were on higher ground.

The grim task of locating victims in the receding floodwaters continues.

Kevin Morrissey, a New Jersey State Police civilian rescue specialist, walked up the front sidewalk, past the broken birdbath, and stepped inside. Black slime smothered the floor under a red couch - a wheelchair by the door.

Morrissey peered into the kitchen and saw a body under a green refrigerator.

This is the way death continues to reveal its ugly face in this waterlogged city nearly three weeks after Katrina's devastating invasion. The casualties mount one by one, unceasingly, as police walk block by block, door to door in an attempt to come to grips with the devastation.

On a dusty dead-end street a few blocks from a Little League baseball field and the Food for Thought grocery store, the casualty list grew Friday by four bodies, all discovered by teams led by the New Jersey State Police.

"Devastating," said Morrissey, who lives in Middletown and searched the World Trade Center rubble after the 9/11 attacks. "You look at something like this and see what the water did, and you realize someone's whole life was over so quickly."

Morrissey did not try to lift the body. He saw only an arm and a leg sticking out from under the refrigerator. He made a mental note that the victim seemed to be African-American. But he could not determine the gender or age.

Morrissey turned and left, then called for a team specializing in removing the dead. The team found two more bodies an hour later in a rear bedroom.

One house, three bodies.

An examination of the hurricane predictions for Katrina proved to be quite accurate.

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 Sept. 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.

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.

It's good to know that the science of predicting hurricanes has improved, even if the political and government reaction has not. This predictive capability should mean that when the NWS and NHC issue their warnings, people can judge for themselves whether to leave a particular area on their own, without having to listen to politicians who may not be up to the task - choosing to wait until the last moment to evacuate because of political concerns instead of erring on the side of safety.

Meanwhile, New York struggles to figure out whether its evacuation plans are sufficient. One Staten Island lawmaker suggests that evacuating Staten Island would be a crapshoot. Staten Island has three bridges linking it to the mainland (via New Jersey). All three have heavy volumn on a normal day, but a hurricane evacuation would be gridlock like no one has ever seen before. Even with contraflow, the evacuation would be extremely difficult and need to rely on New Jersey officials to assist because of limited evacuation routes. Now, multiply those problems by three other boroughs with limited access to the mainland, and you see how difficult an evacuation would be.

Celebrity charity events continue to raise money, as this article notes the work of Naomi Campbell and other supermodels use the catwalk to assist victims of Katrina.