I’ve been in four hurricanes. Living on boats in the Caribbean, you learn as much as you can about these storms. And I can tell you that much of what you hear about Katrina, it’s being an “unusual” or “unusually destructive” storm is pure claptrap. Katrina is not to blame for what happened to New Orleans. The federal government is to blame.

Let’s start from the beginning:

FACT #1:  North of the equator, all hurricanes spin in a counterclockwise direction. The strongest winds swirl immediately around the eye of the hurricane becoming less as they spread miles from that center. (See Satellite Photo-give time to load)

FACT #2:  Category Three hurricanes have maximum sustained winds from 115 to 134 miles per hour as defined by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Agency, sometimes called the National Weather Center, the only group to fly into hurricanes to gather this information. NOAA is the only source you can trust for essential data on hurricanes. Others tend to exaggerate or are simply misguided, misinformed, or trying to pull your leg.

FACT #3:  Hurricane Katrina was a Category Three hurricane when it came ashore in Mississippi, approximately fifty miles east of the city limits of New Orleans. Hurricanes Rita and Wilma that struck Texas and Florida within a month of Katrina during the same season were also Category Three hurricanes. As hurricanes go, they were not that different from one another.

FACT #4:  Storm surge is a wave generated immediately in front of a hurricane’s eye. The size of this wave will be determined by the “depression” or barometric pressure within the eye (think of it as pushing down on water), the speed of the entire system moving forward, and the depth of water available to build that wave. In a hurricane moving northerly, this wave will be strongest and largest in the northeast quadrant or what’s loosely described as the “hard side” of the hurricane. The wave dissipates rapidly hitting solid ground. To penetrate a mile inland would be rare.

FACT #5:  NOAA reported storm surge in Mississippi as a wave 23 feet high. Normally, a Category Three hurricane generates about a 15 foot wave. This above average height was attributed to Katrina’s rapid forward movement and pressure within the eye, both of which were equal or greater in Rita and Wilma.

FACT #6:  Lake Bourne, which extends some forty miles or more to the east of New Orleans, has an average depth of one to two feet of water. It’s really not a “lake” because it is not surrounded by land and is a large wetland, almost a swamp that is part of the Gulf of Mexico. You could no more build storm surge, tidal surge (whatever that is), or any sizable wave from this shallow water than you could expect a tsunami from a puddle in the street.

FACT #7:  Lake Pontchartrain, immediately to the north of New Orleans, is two feet above sea level. Most of New Orleans is below sea level and was supposedly protected from both Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River by levees. The base of Canal Street is roughly 110 statute miles from the mouth of the Mississippi via the Delta. It’s hard to see how any storm surge could have reached the city of New Orleans.

FACT #8:  Because of their counterclockwise direction, the Katrina winds that hit New Orleans came out of the north. Before President Bush’s unprecedented visit to its headquarters in South Florida, NOOA reported the maximum sustained winds over New Orleans at 95 miles per hour.

FACT #9:  Ninety-five mile per hour winds are nothing to sneeze at, but they are the extreme low end of a Category Two hurricane which is classified as a hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 95 to 114 miles per hour. That makes it just one mph over what would be a Category One hurricane.

FACT #10:  Designed, built, and maintained by the Federal Government’s Army Corps of Engineers, the levees surrounding the Crescent City were supposed to withstand a Category Three hurricane. Most importantly, most avoided, and most obviously, it was lesser winds from the north that made waves battering and breaking these levees as well as taking out a good part of the bridge across the lake.

CONCLUSION:  President Bush lied to us again when he promised to rebuild New Orleans “bigger and better than ever” in “the greatest reconstruction effort the world has ever seen” and then used the excuse of wanting to wait until the locals decided how they wanted to rebuild. We should be accustomed to his broken promises by now.

Levees that failed to live up to expectations and assurances caused the destruction of New Orleans – nothing else. Rebuilding or revamping this dyke system is the responsibility of the federal government – no one else. And the people are being let down again.

Local residents were correct in immediately assuming that they had survived another hurricane when the “soft side” of the Katrina system passed over them at a speed of more than fifteen miles per hour for the entire system – only to find minutes later that waters from the broken levees were rising to bring the entire city to the same water level as Lake Pontchartrain. The last hurricane I was in moved over us at three to four miles per hour and took almost three days to pass. Believe me, unless you are unfortunate enough to find yourself “in the eye” you know when the storm has passed.

When the local city and state Committee to Rebuild New Orleans met in Baton Rouge, the first thing they decided was that the levees needed to be rebuilt to withstand a Category Five hurricane. They estimated costs at $22 billion. Bush promised them six, and this came from the man capable of borrowing $101 billion a month from China, Japan, and other nations still willing to loan us money.

Today Bush is gambling that another hurricane will not hit what’s left of New Orleans particularly with north winds over Lake Pontchartrain. The odds on such an occurrence are in his favor if you take out the reality of “global warming” increasing the frequency and destructive power of these storms.

In fairness to the media, I must say that CNN has finally learned which way the wind blows and recently brought us an excellent analysis of how storm surge from hurricane Dennis flooded a small city on the West Coast of Florida unprotected by barrier islands on its way to a Panhandle landfall earlier in the pre-Katrina hurricane season of last year.

However, they have yet to do a comparative analysis between Katrina and her Category Three sisters Rita and Wilma that hit Texas and Florida in the same season. I suspect there is a federal ban against doing so or that there’s collusion between the network and Bush to curry favors.

Meanwhile, the people of New Orleans have been left pretty much on their own, abandoned by the federal government that has already brought them a series of debacles and no-bid cleanup contracts to Halliburton subsidiaries as well as the trailer fiasco and the Princess Cruise Lines donation. Every American should be paying attention to what has occurred. When it comes to protection and responsibility from your government, emergency management from Homeland Security or FEMA (Failing Everyone Miserably Again) – you’re on your own. You will be treated similarly to the people in Iraq and we’ll be lucky if New Orleans remains anything but a viable port managed by some foreign country.