A Second Hand Conjecture

You know, I’m a little tired of all of the snide comparisons of Ike and Katrina, in particular the comparisons of New Orleanians to Houstonians. Why is there almost no news coverage of Ike’s aftermath vs. that of Katrina? For the same reason there’s no coverage of the aftermath of Gustav in New Orleans: in terms of the relative strengths of the storms at US landfall, the size of their relative storm surges and scope of the damage done, Ike and Gustav just don’t compare to Katrina.

Following Katrina, at this point New Orleans had been maybe 50% dewatered. We were at about 1200 dead, even though a far higher percentage had evacuated for Katrina, a monster category 5 storm that was so powerful it damaged pipelines laying on the the freaking bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Ike made landfall barely rated a Category three, and was even weaker by the time it got to Houston, while Katrina made landfall a Category five with New Orleans experiencing sustained Category three winds. But of course the big destroyer in a hurricane is the water, and while in 2005 New Orleans drowned, two weeks ago Houston, and even Galveston, did not.

Although I am a native of New Orleans, I’ve been in Texas so long that I consider myself a Texan, and a proud one at that. Houston is doing a great job dealing with the aftermath of Ike, as is the state. Texas learned an enormous amount from Rita. But the main reason southeast Texans are responding better to Ike than New Orleanians did to Katrina is because we didn’t go through anything remotely like New Orleanians suffered through, and still suffers; not even close.

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