"Turn it on, turn up the volume, and someone is talking to you."

Wonderful article about radio during Katrina's aftermath.

Great read. Speaks for itself so I'll be brief.

Before all this, I laughed at hurricanes. Last year, all these storms sliced at me like some kind of screaming puppy, all bark, no bite. I spent one playing trivia with a group of friend in a stranger's nice house, another holed up in a tiny apartment with my mom and my girlfriend watching endless news coverage, and this last one up to ankles in flooding.

But Katrina was different. Katrina was angry. Katrina slapped the shit out of South Florida as a one or a two. The day after it made its first landfall, I went up to Broward county and saw post-war images. Buildings with broken roofs, fields of trees askew or ripped. Debris everywhere.

As a category 2 storm, Katrina seemed to this amateur meteorologist like a cat 2 storm with a vegengence, wind speeds up on the higher end of the spectrum with more pressure or whatever. that is a climate change/global warming right there! a dangerous extreme. the scale is too conservative and I think even when Katrina hit New Orleans it was stronger than their reporting. There's no doubt: This is the biggest natural disaster in US history.

So. When we criticize Bush and FEMA, we should keep that in mind.