More Storms Loom As Media Questions Evacuations

Will people heed evacuation notices in the future after the dire predictions about Hurricane Gustav didn't materialize? Well, that's what the AP headlines and ledes with.

I'm thankful that the storm wasn't nearly as dangerous as I and many others thought it could have been. It is still plenty bad.

Some evacuees, particularly in Texas, on the far fringes of the storm's path, suggested authorities overreacted in demanding they leave their homes.

"Next time, it's going to be bad because people who evacuated like us aren't going to evacuate," Catherine Jones, 53, of Silsbee, Texas, who spent three days on a cot at a church shelter with her disabled son. "They jumped the gun."

Emergency officials strongly defended the decision to evacuate coastal areas, saying that with something as unpredictable as a hurricane, it is better to be safe than sorry — a lesson driven home by Katrina, which killed 1,600 people in the U.S. in 2005, compared with nine deaths attributed to Gustav.

Officials noted that, yes, New Orleans' levees held, and Gustav struck only a glancing blow. But when trees fell on homes, power lines went down and roads were washed out in parts of south Louisiana, there was no one around to get hurt. And there was significant damage: Early insurance industry estimates put the expected damage to covered properties at anywhere from $2 billion to $10 billion. That's high, but well short of Katrina's $41 billion.

Homes along the coast have been washed away and they are picking up the pieces from Alabama through to Texas. The storm surge again posed one of the biggest threats, and Mississippi again took it on the chin. Biloxi's casinos, which rebuilt after Katrina took some damage, but far less because they were built onshore and with higher elevation requirements.

You can't tell me that it wasn't a wise decision to evacuate low lying and coastal areas after seeing photos of ships tossed about in the Industrial Canal or washed ashore in Mississippi. In fact, there are questions about how and why barges were allowed to remain moored in the canal, when there was good reason to worry about them breaking free during the storm. One such barge did break away, and damaged one of the levees. Still some people don't have any regrets about sticking out the storm.

I do have concerns that people will not take warnings as seriously as they should for the next storm. In other words, there are people out there who think that evacuations are an overreaction unless the storm leaves a Katrina-like path of destruction.

The NHC did a good job of predicting the path of the storm, but forecasters models were consistently suggesting the storm would stay at a high level 3 or low level 4 storm, which would have brought still more devastation. Gustav was unable to sustain those levels because of conditions aloft, which was a saving grace to the coastal communities in Louisiana which were still picking up the pieces from Katrina. Predictions aren't an exact science, and not issuing warnings could result in tremendous loss of life just as surely as failing to issue evacuation notices.

The NHC has more storms to track and model, including Hanna, Ike, and Josephine.

If that sounds like a bunch of storms, you're right. We're heading into the heart of hurricane season in the Atlantic basin, so we're right on schedule with an uptick in the number of storms churning up the Atlantic.