00:00We thought we were the most prepared people on the earth.
00:05We went out, we got sandbags, we got extra food, we got cash out of the bank,
00:12we got gas in gas cans, we had a generator.
00:15We thought we had everything we needed.
00:22I learned a long time ago that it's not all about the forecast.
00:27You could issue the perfect forecast.
00:29Katrina was almost an example at the time of a near perfect forecast
00:34and thousands of people can still die.
00:36You know how when drug companies tell you that if you take a medicine you could have these side effects?
00:41Well, you don't think that means you.
00:45You need to be scared to death.
00:47You need to come to the realization that this is not a fire drill.
00:50This is not a movie.
00:51I have never seen a storm like this with my eyes
00:54because this is the strongest storm that's happened in my lifetime.
00:59It was hard not to compare this event to what I went through in 1969.
01:14We had a great operation.
01:17We just prepared for the wrong hurricane.
01:19The devastation, I've often said it looked like the hand of God had wiped away the coast.
01:26Like an atomic weapon had gone off out in the sand.
01:30It's not something that you can out-swim, it's not something you can out-run.
01:33You're seeing this water come in while you're hanging in this tree and you can see next thing you know it's part of a building passing you by.
01:40You think it's going to be the people there sitting right on the water.
01:44You just don't think it's going to be you.
01:46What you're looking at there is the Bay St. Louis bridge.
01:50There's no bridge there. Look carefully.
01:52We were getting messages like we're flooding and I'm trapped in my attic and I can't get out.
01:59If the structure will just hold, we can wait this out.
02:03Since Katrina, the last 20 years, but in particular the last 10 years, we have made tremendous improvements in forecasting the intensity of hurricanes.
02:14And that's come with better data.
02:16It's come with better models that we didn't have 20 years ago.
02:23Because of the budget cuts, we have fewer weather balloons going up.
02:27We could have some degradations in forecasts and blown forecasts because of missed balloon launches.
02:33That's something we could see this year.
02:35The Trump administration is calling not for a cut to NOAA's research arm, but full elimination of it.
02:43If you eliminate NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, you're eliminating most of the tools in our arsenal.
02:53The concept of a hurricane season is outdated because we are starting to see storms in almost every month of the year.
03:00You can tear something down in five months, but you can't build it back up in five months and you probably can't build it back up in five years.
03:09I think it is a generational loss.
03:13This is no longer a hypothetical.
03:16Anything done to diminish that forecast and the capability to communicate that forecast is not a good idea.
Sé la primera persona en añadir un comentario