Wilma Wind Model: From Bob C., the German-Canadian-Aussie geophysicist also in exile in Houston,

“For the true believers, this modeler has hit the last two on the money (predicted eye shift from west to east of New Orleans for Katrina and TX/LA border when all the other models had Rita going to Galveston). Check tomorrow or Saturday and look for the eye of the hurricane … early days, but if it doesn’t turn, we could get it by Monday.”

NOAA has Wilma making a hard right at the northeastern tip of the Yucatan peninsula after which she will proceed to shear the waters of Lake Okeechobee.

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Lakeview Resident And Her Katrina Website: Introducing Hurricane Release, with pictures of various New Orleans neighborhoods before, during and after the storm. Also home to an up and coming forum known simply as “cutting-edge information and blistering foment.” Susu’s my kind of girl.

A Lot More Category Fives Headed Towards The Gulf Coast: My assumption that most people seek out, absorb and base their opinions on scientific facts is wrong. In fact, many don’t, including scientists, a lot of whom work within a rational framework only when it comes to their own line of study. I can’t believe people who are perplexed by the number of high-intensity storms in the Gulf of Mexico region this year, and remain in ignorance of the fact that there are many more to come in the next decade. That we still live on this coast (be it South Padre, Houston, New Orleans, Ocean Springs, Mobile Bay, Pensacola or the Florida Keys), after a Katrina, with a Wilma on its way and many more to contend with, is equal parts disbelief and pride to me.

Incredulity — What are we doing here?
Chutzpah — We are here! And how.

For example, in another entertaining NO Metroblog post, Jack Ware opines, “In about the last 24 hours Wilma has gone from a Tropical Storm to a Category 5 hurricane. Amazing. She’s rolling past the little arrows on the lane in God“s Bowling Alley …” While Jack extends that metaphor into the post rather nicely, I am in turn stunned by people who are surprised at yet another Big Honking Storm in the Gulf. At first, I thought it was laypeople ignoring science, much less treatises on increasing hurricane activity. However, when I mention it to fellow scientists, they look at me like I’m a Cassandra and, golly, they have never heard of such studies before. Even USA Today did a story on it, for the love of mainstream reporting.

[NOAA’s] official outlook is for 12 to 15 tropical storms, seven to nine of them becoming hurricanes … three to five could be major hurricanes, with winds of at least 111 mph … the trend is likely to continue for another decade or longer because a global climate pattern causes ideal conditions for hurricanes: warmer Atlantic waters, more summer monsoons over western Africa and fewer monsoons in the Amazon basin.

Science, people, science! Yet, do not misconstrue my take on these findings to imply abandoning New Orleans or the Gulf Coast. Just recognize that wherever we live in the Gulf states, we are susceptible to this activity and must be prepared to live with the consequences. If anything, it is a call to cities such as New Orleans to shore up their defenses and to be very realistic during rebuilding. Nor is Houston safe from the wrath of Vayu and Poseidon.

Will Durant was not kidding when he said, “Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.” Add the word climatological to that statement. Any of you feeling especially smug while residents of San Francisco, L.A., Seattle-Tacoma, Hawaii, the Plains states or hilly regions should take some time to think about this, too. Nature happens. And we go on.

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Cellphone Alternatives: Given that my solar plexus still reels from merely peering at my post-Katrina cellphone bills (despite Verizon’s kind credits and refunds), I’ve been exploring alternatives to the daylight robbery that is the American cellphone industry. No more paying for incoming and outgoing calls, while the person on the other end does the same. As internet access returns to New Orleans, I encourage readers to contact friends and family using instant messaging (I’m partial to GoogleTalk myself — less cluttered than other IM software) and my new plaything, Skype. Not intent on boring my readers with the intricacies of Voice over IP, let it suffice to say that you can talk to someone over the computer with a microphone-headphone combo for free. As real, live telephones get involved, so does money.

Would it be encouraging to tell you that my parents (gasp!) managed to install the program, acquired a headset and called me on my laptop last night? Crisp and clear with a decent internet connection, and they’re going to use this technology to call me from their Indian travels. I’m talking about my parents here, winners of Most Insecure Passwords On The Planet five years running. If they can do it, and plan to get through to me from halfway around the world, so can you.

Jazz Funeral For Katrina: This past Sunday evening in the Quarter saw a jazz funeral for Hurricane Katrina led by a few musicians and many New Orleans residents. For those of you who don’t know what such a funeral entails, it is held in two parts: a solemn procession with the deceased’s casket until it is interred, after which a major party ensues. In this particular case, two dead were sent off – Katrina and Rita.

CNN and NPR covered the ceremony, in which they include the pictures and comments of members of my very own Mardi Gras krewe, the great Krewe De C.R.A.P.S! As my krewe captain, Louise, said in a recent email, “The secondline was totally awesome! The NPR link is cooler, and even has sound & video! Wish you were here this weekend. It was a hoot.”

In fact, Louise made it into a picture on the NPR All Things Considered page on this event. (I’ll let you figure out which one she is.)

Musicians Lead The Procession . Courtesy NPR

[With] two floats, one bearing a fake coffin with an expletive-laden adieu to Katrina [and] following a quartet of musicians playing funeral dirges, a couple of dozen revelers tossed beads to tourists and neighborhood residents.

Dawn Tolley … held a ferret named Disaster while sipping a beer and throwing strings of plastic beads to bystanders who stepped out of bars to greet the parade. “We needed to bid farewell to Hurricane Katrina,” Tolley said, stroking the ferret she rescued from a cage as floodwaters rose. “She needs to be put to rest forever.” The storm devastated parts of the city, but Tolley said the essence of New Orleans — its carefree optimism — remains and must be protected.

Dawn is also a member of C.R.A.P.S. Along with Michael, Louise and a few others in attendance at the jazz funeral, I am so proud of my group’s skills in representation. One of the paraders was wrapped in red tape, referring to himself as Count FEMA. I can’t believe I wasn’t there! More pictures from the procession are on their way to me, so stay tuned.

You see, this is the spirit of our city, evident not only inside New Orleans but also in the faces, words and smiles of evacuees. This is how we deal with devastation, sorrow and loss — not just with parades, but with hope, irreverence and exuberance. Show me another group of Americans that can cope with life’s curveballs in such a fantastic manner and I will stop wanting to go back.

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Krewe Du Vieux / Mardi Gras Update: Krewe Du Vieux, the only big parade that goes through the French Quarter, will roll in 2006 and preparations are underway. Yours truly is now the official webmistress of the C.R.A.P.S. site following the resignation of its former keeper.

Speed up the TV, cher, we gonna have us a good time!

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Fielkow Released From The Saints: For reasons yet unreleased, executive vice-president of administration for the New Orleans Saints, Arnold Fielkow was fired yesterday.

Fielkow led the club’s efforts in landing a $186.5 million inducement package from the state of Louisiana and under his leadership, club records were established in 2003 with season ticket sales as well as total attendance.

Arnie, a University of Wisconsin alumnus, and his lovely family graciously opened up their New Orleans home for a most enjoyable Badger event at the beginning of this year. The displaced New Orleans chapter of the Wisconsin Alumni Association wishes them well during this unsteady time.

Update: New Orleans’ WWL-TV reports, “Fielkow said he was called into {Saints owner] Tom Benson’s office Monday and told that he had five minutes to sign an agreement [to resign] giving up all his rights under contract while vowing confidentiality or be fired.” When Fielkow refused resignation, he was fired. It is surmised that the axe was dropped over Benson“s “desire to move all the Saints games to San Antonio this season” while Fielkow wanted to keep the games in Louisiana and lent support to “the plan later endorsed by the NFL to play four home games in Baton Rouge.”

As I just mentioned to Saheli, who doesn’t like the concept of selling teams, “Yeah. San Antonio. Good luck with the fan base when you can’t even keep it together with the two existing Texas teams.”

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Feeble FEMA: Speaking of red tape and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Washington Post reports on 20 of 80 emails to and from Michael Brown, former FEMA director, immediately following Katrina’s landfall. The findings are not surprising — right after the hurricane, at a time that required action and implementation, it was nothing but bureaucratic ego wars that resulted in miscommunication and chaos. The following are some of the more interesting and frustrating bits.

* As Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans … Michael Brown appeared confused over whether Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had put him in charge.

* A misunderstanding of national disaster plan roles, communications failures, delayed decision-making and absent voices of leadership mark the documents …

* Brown has said the [Homeland Security] department caused “the emaciation of FEMA” by cutting funds, staff and denying spending on a New Orleans hurricane preparedness plan.

* As late as Sept. 1, the head of the military’s Hurricane Katrina Task Force, Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, was unable to reach Brown and asked FEMA officials to track down his satellite phone. “He [Honore] wants to speak with Mike very badly,” FEMA aides wrote at 1 p.m. Three hours later, the reply came from a Brown aide: “Not here in [Mississippi.] Is in [Louisiana], as far as I know.”

* The first FEMA request to the Defense Department was not reported in Brown’s e-mails until … Sept. 2 — nearly three days later — seeking “full logistical support to the Katrina disaster in all [emergency] declared states.”

Homeland security, my eye. With government like this, who needs enemies?

Cause Of Levee Failure?: nola.com reports on why the floodwalls of the 17th Street and London canals failed. While these barriers were not topped, i.e. water didn’t flow over them, they were broken and the soil under these walls has been named as the culprit. It appears that “a soft, spongy layer of swamp peat underneath the 17th Street Canal floodwall was the weak point that caused soil to move and the wall to breach … the same peat layer also runs under the London Avenue Canal breaches and probably was instrumental in those collapses as well.”

Even a cursory examination of an Orleans Parish soil map shows that almost all of the flooded area sits on “poorly-drained swamp land” that consists of “organic … clayey surface underlain by a clay subsoil interspersed with organic strata” and “3 feet of loamy materials over clayey and organic swamp lands.” Again, according to the map, the material directly under the 17th Street Canal is “70% organic … more than several feet thick that is underlain by a slightly-firm gray clay.” In other words, swamp peat. This raises the question: If almost all of the parish sits on this stuff, why did the canals fail right where they did? Why right there?

Blaming levee failure on swamp peat is a lot like saying that someone died of cardiac arrest (technically, everyone dies of cardiac arrest; what brought it on would be the true cause of death). Perhaps it was a combination of factors, including highly-directed water flow, increased force on a particular portion of the floodwall, poor structural integrity on the part of the floodwall itself and underlying swamp peat that caused the failure. Besides, what is the Corps of Engineers going to do — replace the pervasive swamp peat with some other material or, dare I say, dig deeper? This Kansas City Star article barely touches on a multi-headed demon of a problem that faces New Orleans.

That the organic-rich soil caused the floodwalls to give seems too uncomplicated, especially given the lack of money allocated towards building up our admittedly-imperfect levee system prior to Katrina. Funding issues and priorities, anyone?

Case in point – Now that New Orleans is almost entirely dry, the Corps plans to rebuild the levees back to previous condition by June 1, 2006. According to the Washington Post, “For now, there are no plans to rebuild the levees stronger than before. The Corps would have to get Congress’ approval for such work.” Do you think such approval will be in hand before the work is already underway?

*sigh*

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More From The Lower Garden District and Tulane: Reports on cleanup efforts in my neighborhood and the reopening of the school. All of this is great news indeed!

You would not believe the intensity of cleanup efforts going on here now. The house on the corner of Euterpe and Magazine (the one that completely collapsed) is nearly gone now — a crew has been here all day working on it. There is still a lot of trash and debris around the city but there is a very noticable improvement in the past few days. In addition to workers, residents are increasingly visible, cleaning up their property. The Rue on the 3500 block of Magazine is open now as well, as is Surrey’s. We patronized both establishments today! Our roof was inspected on Friday and we have some minor damage, mostly missing and cracked slates, flashing around the chimneys that needs to be replaced, and a few other things. The roofer says the water spots on your ceiling resulted from hurricane force winds blowing water under the slates rather than more generalized leaks.

Tulane will be open in the Spring, with classes slated to begin on January 17. Many of the repairs to the campus have been completed. Meanwhile, J is … now becoming involved in some clinics in N.O.