Hurricane Season Good News

It is being reported in Bloomberg:

El Nino conditions are forming in the Pacific Ocean, which may limit the number of hurricanes that form in the Atlantic this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported today.El Nino is a warming of the eastern Pacific that occurs every two to five years, on average, and lasts about 12 months, the agency said in a statement. Sea surface temperatures in the area were about 1 degree Celsius above average in June, according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Maryland.

While the phenomenon can mean more wintry storms in California, “on the positive side, El Nino can help suppress Atlantic hurricane activity,” said the NOAA statement. “In the U.S., it typically brings beneficial winter precipitation to the arid Southwest, less wintry weather across the North and a reduced risk of Florida wildfires.”

We residents of the Guld Coast will take all the good news we can get during hurricane season.  We have suffered enough from these storms.

Happy….Happy…Joy…Joy

A Wind Pool Death

Mississippi’s Rep. Gene Taylor has had his pet project pulling from his hands by the Obama admin.

His pet project is a new Federal Wind Insurance.

Napolitano’s letter to key House leaders stated the Obama administration position on the issue: Wind insurance is too costly and unnecessary to add to the federal flood insurance program. FEMA chief Craig Fugate also wrote senators in response to questions at his confirmation hearing that he, too, was opposed to the wind plan, which the Senate rejected last year.

Mississippi’s Gov. Barbour said he is looking at “multi-state solutions” with states combining wind pools, and hopes to make more progress by the National Governors Association meeting in Biloxi in July.

Now this is where I start to worry…..these people, state government, who cannot do naything but give business everything, will not run an insurance program any more efficiently.  When the money is not there, they will start taxing the working class to pay for any programs they want.

Look at Mississippi’s Medicaid program…..all the cash from lawsuits and special cig taxes has not made it anymore stable…I would trust a Federal program way more than anything that a state politician would have.

Bad News For New Orleans

Bigger, higher and stronger levees cannot save New Orleans from the worst floods and the city remains vulnerable to a repeat of Hurricane Katrina, the National Academy of Sciences said on Friday.

New Orleans had the flood protection of a 350-mile (563 km) network of levees, I-walls and T-walls ringing the city when Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore on Aug. 29, 2005. The levees broke, flooding 80 percent of the city.

The hurricane killed about 1,500 people along the U.S. Gulf Coast and caused $80 billion in damages, making it the costliest U.S. natural disaster.

As Katrina demonstrated, “the risks of inundation and flooding never can be fully eliminated by protective structures no matter how large or sturdy those structures may be,” said the report by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council.

“Substantial risks” of living in flood-prone areas were never clearly communicated to residents before Katrina, it said, and simply rebuilding New Orleans and its hurricane-protection system back to pre-Katrina levels would leave the city vulnerable to another flooding disaster.

Large portions of New Orleans are below sea level, which makes it vulnerable to floods and storm surges from hurricanes. Located at the mouth of the Mississippi River delta, New Orleans is in close proximity to Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne.

The city’s levee system was tested again in September 2008, when a surge from Hurricane Gustav nearly overtopped a protective T-wall along New Orleans’ Inner Navigation Canal.

Let us pray that Katrina was a once in a lifetime occurance, if the Gulf Coast gets hit again anytime soon, then it will become a third world country.  It will lose the developement appeal.  Why build in an area that can be destroyed in less than a day?

You think times are tough now……another hurricane will show just how bad things can get.

Let us paray!

Some Good Hurricane News

Expect 12 named storms, six of those hurricanes — two with sustained winds of 111 mph or greater, the nation’s best-known seasonal hurricane forecasters said Tuesday.

A weak El Nino should make for an “average” hurricane season, William Gray’s team from Colorado State University predicts.

“If El Nino conditions develop for this year’s hurricane season, it would tend to increase levels of vertical wind shear and decrease levels of Atlantic hurricane activity,” Gray said in a press release.

El Nino — a pulse of warmer-than-usual water near the equatorial Pacific Ocean — tends to create winds that shear tropical systems apart before they can become hurricanes. La Nina, the opposite cycle of cooler water in the equatorial Pacific, tends to allow more hurricanes to form.

“Based on our latest forecast, the probability of a major hurricane making landfall along the U.S. coastline is 54 percent compared with the last-century average of 52 percent,” Phil Klotzbach, lead forecaster of Gray’s team, said in the release. “We are calling for an average hurricane season this year – about as active as the average of the 1950-2000 seasons.”

The team will issue forecast updates on June 2, August 4, September 2 and October 1.

The hurrican season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30 and this is good news for those of us the live in “hurricane alley”.  Any time that we have an “average” season it is good news.  And anytime that El Nino is cooler than normal it is good news, let us hope that the updates stay prety musch the same.

Charges Against The Warrs

In case one is interested in the charges filed against Mr & Mrs Warr here they be:

Charges against Brent and Laura Warr:

Count 1: Conspiracy

Count 2: Fraud

Counts 3-6: False statements

Maximum penalty on each count, counts 1-6: five years in prison, $250,000 fine.

Counts 7-8: Theft of federal funds

Maximum penalty on each count, counts 7 and 8: 10 years in prison, $250,000 fine.

Counts 9-11: Wire fraud

Count 12-16: Mail fraud

Maximum penalty on each count, counts 9-16: 20 years in prison and $250,000 fine.

City Council members expect the work of the city to move forward despite Mayor Brent Warr’s personal problems.Most of the council were in Jackson on Wednesday attending the Mississippi Municipal League conference; however, two returned to Gulfport on Wednesday afternoon after they heard that Warr and his wife, Laura, were indicted in federal court on 16 counts of Hurricane Katrina fraud.

Most of the council said they were surprised at the number of counts.

Still Without A Clue

Oh My God!

In his last press conference as commander-in-chief, President Bush on Monday forcefully defended his response to Hurricane Katrina, saying that the federal rescue of 30,000 people from rooftops was a tribute to the Coast Guard, but critics countered that FEMA was the president’s failure.

“I’ve thought long and hard about Katrina — you know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge,” said Bush. “The problem with that … is that law enforcement would have been pulled away from the mission.”

“People said, well, the federal response was slow. Don’t tell me the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed,” said Bush, his voice rising as he tapped his finger for emphasis on the lectern. “Thirty thousand people were pulled off roofs right after the storm moved through. It’s a pretty quick response.”

His plan was to make the Democrats in Louisiana look bad and in doing so crapped in his own chili. But revisionist that he is, he sees it differently.  As a first responder, I can say and mean, the whole Katrina thing was a cluster f*ck.  If it had not been for local officials staying calm and collected, it would have been a lot worse.

AL: Flood Insurance Plan Doomed?

The federal flood insurance program, which covers tens of thousands of Alabama properties, is set to expire next week and it’s not clear what Congress is going to do about it.

As new claims pour in from Hur ricanes Gustav and Ike, the program remains in a deep financial hole stemming largely from payouts after Hurricane Katrina three years ago. Lawmakers, meanwhile, remain at odds over how to remake it in an era of more destructive – and more costly – storms.

Under a bill introduced last week by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., Congress would simply punt the problem into next spring. Instead of expiring Sept. 30, the program would stay in business unchanged until the end of April.

But while stopping short of outright opposition to that proposal, a spokeswoman for Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., said via e-mail that the flood insurance program “should be reformed, not merely extended” so that policyholders can be sure of its ability to pay off claims.

Like many federal endeavors, the flood program has to be periodically reviewed and updated by Congress. If lawmakers did allow it to lapse ? as happened briefly in the early 1990s ? existing policies could not be renewed and new policies could not be written, said Butch Kinerney, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees the program. The agency would continue to accept and pay claims on policies already in effect, he said.

LA: Tribal Cheif Says Tme To Go

Chief Albert Naquin is tired. Tired of seeing his community flooded. Tired of begging for help.

More than a week after Hurricane Gustav pushed water over the ring levee protecting the island in south Terrebonne Parish, where descendants of several American Indian communities still live, Naquin, chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians, declared: “This is my last one. I’m not going to keep doing this.”

Naquin says it is time for the island’s remaining residents to move farther inland, surrendering their way of life to the twin threats of storm surge and coastal erosion.

People on the island do not give up easily. For generations, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians have lived on the low-lying ridge, which they jokingly call “the bathtub.” Their community has flooded in so many hurricanes that some residents regard hurricane season as an annual test, an ordeal they endure so they can remain connected to the land.

But storm surges are not the only enemy. The island is slowly eroding into the Gulf of Mexico. Most residents do not have the money to continually rebuild, and the community already knows it will never get stronger levee protection.

So, Naquin and tribal leaders once again will try to rally the community of 150 to 175 people to move to higher ground. This time, he hopes tribal leaders will be successful.

Even in nearby southern Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, Ike flooded some Pointe-aux-Chenes Indians’ homes. But Pointe-aux-Chenes is on higher ground, so the damage was less severe than on the island.

Tribal leaders and tribal attorneys say the recent storms again sound the alarm that Louisiana’s coastal communities need stronger flood protection and more emphasis on coastal and wetlands restoration to reduce surge. They also acknowledge that homes need to be built to withstand storm surge and hurricane-force winds if these bayou enclaves are to survive.

FL: Gouging Investigations

With gas priced at $4.19 a gallon Tuesday afternoon, pumps at the BP gas station at Pace Boulevard and Garden Street went largely unused.

The Garden Street BP is among 14 Escambia and four Santa Rosa gas stations under investigation by the state Attorney General’s Office after it received 26 complaints of alleged price gouging at area gas stations. The state did not provide exact locations for all stations being investigated due to incomplete information provided in the complaints.

Statewide, more than 5,500 complaints were filed as of Tuesday afternoon. Of those, 1,841 complaints are being investigated by the state’s Economic Crimes Division.

Consumers filed complaints with the Attorney General’s Office by calling a statewide hot line; however, many of the complaints contained incomplete information about the location of the suspected gouging or the price paid for the fuel.

Attorney General’s Office spokeswoman Sandi Copes said it is illegal after declaration of a state emergency to charge excessive prices for essential items like gasoline unless the increase is attributable to additional costs for supplying the items. But she said there is no specific increase that determines if a gas station is price gouging.

MS: AG Gets Lots Of Gouging Complaints

The attorney general’s office says it has received more than 500 complaints of alleged gasoline price gouging since last week.

Meanwhile, Joe McCaskill, owner of Mac’s Gas in Jackson, says he didn’t gouge anybody when he posted a price of $5.17 a gallon last Friday.

McCaskill says he paid $4.77 a gallon for 8,000 gallons from a fuel distributor. With tax and freight costs added, McCaskill claims he was selling his gasoline at cost.

McCaskill says corporate gas stations like Shell, Exxon and others receive better deals from their distributors.

On Monday, McCaskill was charging $3.67 a gallon.

The attorney general’s office says investigators are looking into every complaint. No citations have been issued.

Think what the price would have been if the Hurricane had come this way.