| Warning of unprecendented storm day earlier Original Source Link: (May no longer be active) http://www.sltrib.com/nationworld/ci_3007095http://www.sltrib.com/nationworld/ci_3007095
Article Last Updated: 09/07/2005 01:42:59 AM
Computer storm alert was eerily prescient By Andrew C. Revkin The New York Times Among a steady string of warnings delivered in recent years to New Orleans that they could be devastated by a great hurricane, one of the last was also one of the most chilling. ''Hurricane Katrina. A most powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength,'' was the headline on the National Weather Service bulletin on Aug. 28, the day before Hurricane Katrina struck. ''Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer,'' the alert went on. ''Power outages will last for weeks,'' it said, adding, ''Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.'' It read like the kind of hastily typed dispatch one might expect from a meteorologist facing the storm of a lifetime and trying to ensure that leaders and citizens heeded warnings and moved to safety before all communications failed. Its language was so potent and prescient that the message has since been posted on innumerable Web sites reflecting every conceivable point of view on the disaster, including some criticizing federal or local officials as having failed to heed warnings and others that simply urged believers to pray for a miracle to divert the storm. Yet it was mostly written years in advance, with just a few last-minute adjustments by the staff at the New Orleans office to reflect specific local conditions, federal weather agency officials said Tuesday. The goal of having the descriptions preprogrammed into computers is to save time for the local meteorologists whose job was both to encourage residents to stay safe and to track evolving conditions, said Walt Zaleski, the Weather Service warning coordination program manager in the regional headquarters. The system is intended to generate the basic report automatically, Zaleski said, and it is then tailored to specific conditions monitored by the local office. Some of the language was lifted from the standard descriptions used to define the top category of the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale of a hurricane's destructive potential, he said. Other phrases came from damage reports compiled after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Camille in 1969, the only two storms in recent times to strike U.S. land at Category 5 strength. This was the first time the boilerplate language made it into a storm alert because no previous hurricane approaching land had gotten fierce enough to trigger the computer to write the worst-case warning, said Keli Tarp, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was on duty as Hurricane Katrina approached and struck. When the warning went out, Tarp said, some commentators in the news media criticized what they called an ''apocalyptic'' alert. ''Some people felt the wording was too harsh,'' she said. ''Now, in hindsight, it's looking pretty accurate.''
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