Univ. of South Al Katrina Press Release

[stormspotter]

Sorry if this is repeated information.... Coastal Weather Research Center

[MSRobi911]

I hadn't seen that stormspotter and I just forwarded to my Attorney!! That is a fantastic article and does help explain all the damage in Pascagoula and refute the structural engineers report that at most if we had any wind damage to our home it would have been the loss of a few shingles that we had only top winds of 70 to 80 mph...go figure. The people that stayed in Pascagoula through Katrina knew how bad the winds were before the water came, we just couldn't prove it to anyone. The wind gauges they quote in their report are some 20 to 30 miles inland or even further inland or further east. I know at the EOC where we were before the water came we had top gusts of 128 and sustained at 100 + a few mphs before the dang thing blew down and broke with the next higher winds, but of course they were not an "official" site. Oh, by the way, if you didn't know, all I had left when I went "home" was a slab with a whole bunch of debri that didn't belong to me sitting on top of it!

Again, thanks for the article! It will be a very useful tool in court!

Mary

[stormspotter]

Glad it will help. Glad to hear I actually may have contributed to help others.

[MSRobi911]

"Downbursts may have accounted for extensive blow-down of forests in southern Mississippi. The director of the
Jackson County Emergency Operations Center in Pascagoula witnessed the winds gusting near 135 mph while the
roof was blowing off during Katrina. Heavy rain blowing horizontally in these downbursts may have added to the
wind’s destructive power as it impacted structures, particularly near the waterfront, a topic for wind engineers to
assess."

This from that report on the bottom if you go to that web page:

http://www.southalabama.edu/publicrelat ... hpaper.pdf

We were in the courthouse directly across from the EOC as mentioned above and saw the roof flying off! This was way before the Water.

Mary

[Category 5]

Great stuff thanks for posting.

[timNms]

I'm in Seminary which is about 100 miles north of Gulfport. I don't know the exact windspeeds here, but I do know we lost electric power before noon, at least 2 hours before the eyewall arrived. Power loss was due to trees down on powerlines. To put it mildly, it was quite windy here I read somewhere that there was an unofficial wind gust of 130mph in Laurel (20 miles NE of me).

[wobblehead]

Ever wonder why people who have a cat2 or 3 hurricane pass over them swear it was a cat4 or 5? What they experienced may indeed have been stronger than the official classification. Take hurricane Ivan as an example. Today a local hurricane researcher showed me a dopplar radar image of Ivan at landfall. A cross sectional image looking east from Mobile. The coast on the left and GOM on the right. Upper right corner displayed a moisture mass in the upper levels. The next image displayed this same moisture mass down at the surface. As explained to me this was a huge mass of moisture that becomes so heavy it plummets downward hitting the strongest wind levels below it and pushes these winds down to the surface creating a huge and powerfull wind blast. For some reason this event is more common with exposed eyewall systems.
Also I learned that Katrina hit Ms with 2 eyewalls as proven in microwave imaging of the storm shortly before landfall. As the new eyewall forms outside the original eyewall the energy in the space now taken by the new eyewall must go somewhere so naturally it displaces outward (can't go back to lp center) thus increasing the overall size of the system ie Katrina.
You all may find this boring but I found it to be fascinating so I share it. Knowledge

I posted this May 12 which relates to this topic.

[Dr. Jonah Rainwater]

I say anything that helps the case of everybody who was victimized twice in Louisiana and Mississippi- once by Katrina and once by their insurance companies- is good science. Even if it might not be so much...after all, if there hadn't been a giant wind, there wouldn't have been that giant wave.