Look How They Massacred My Boy

I took a paternal interest in Hurricane Gustav from the very beginning. I knew him when he was just a lonely tropical depression out there in the Caribbean, trying to make his way in the world of big time weather, trying to attract the kind of attention from Coriolis-bent inrushing winds (sort of like campaign contributions) that build a nascent hurricane into a full-fledged monster storm. I could follow him on the NOAA website of the National Hurricane Center, the Public Advisories he generated, the 3- and 5-day cones of the path ahead. He waxed and waned, ol' Gus did, sometimes a Tropical Storm, sometimes a Hurricane, Cat-1.

He started getting it together after he roughed up Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He knew, of course, that destroying "buildings" on Hispaniola is not the real deal, because construction codes are pretty lax there. Maybe it made him a New Haven star, but Haiti is just not Broadway. After Hispaniola, Gus lost it. His confidence, his mojo, I don't know. He dropped back into Tropical Storm territory as he made the turn and headed north toward Cuba, the extreme western end of the island and the Isla de Juventud. It was there that Gus gave us a preview of coming attractions. Reaching deep into his eye and holding his breath (it's difficult to get these pathetic fallacies spot on when dealing with a hurricane), he lowered his central pressure into the 940 millibar range and the winds screamed as they topped 145 mph. Cat-4, baby, and he pummeled the Isle of Youth like there was no tomorrow. I began to suspect at that point that Gustav was an anti-Castro Republican, but politics seemed out of place when talking about a tropical cyclone of this power.

I'd been following Gustav for about 4 days before he made landfall at CNN and the hyper-excitable Chad Myers, their resident hurricane "expert." As Hurricane Hanna approaches North Florida, you can run the following experiment yourself: just go to the National Hurricane Center website, check the "Public Advisory" updates on the storm, and see if EVERYTHING Chad says, at great length and with a worked-up frenzy, isn't anticipated in the NOAA assessment. Now, there's a reason for this: Chad, or CNN generally, just doesn't have any way of knowing what's going on in the eye of a hurricane without those fearless pilots who fly out over the monster and drop their instruments into the storm to measure air pressure and wind speed. The hurricane tracks which NOAA generates are uncannily accurate; while Gus was still over Cuba, the 5-day cone's central track took it exactly over his point of ultimate landfall. It's hilarious, however, to watch Chad Myers breathlessly "update" us on the hurricane's progress as he reads the NHC's latest advisory on his teleprompter, then turns to his big screen loaded with NOAA satellite pictures (also available on the website) and spells it all out.

Of course, CNN also features reporters who stand in the wind and rain and report that...it's windy and rainy. Everyone's favorite is Anderson Cooper, stationed again in New Orleans. I won't speculate why Anderson likes spending so much time in New Orleans; this one isn't that kind of blog entry. He has perfect Hurricane Hair, and I think that's how he got the job. His thick, brushy gray hair acts as a kind of weathervane of the cyclone's progress. It doesn't swirl around, which would be distracting; it just gets pushed into a mound on one side of his head or the other. If you know that cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere spin counter-clockwise, you can make a first approximation of the hurricane's position by looking at Anderson's hair. If he's facing south on Bourbon Street and the hair has piled up on the right side of his head, then Gustav is just making landfall. The somewhat stupid part of stationing Anderson in New Orleans was that there were no hurricane force winds in NOLA this time around. It was too far away from Gus's center (Cat-1 force winds extended out about 70 miles, something which Chad Myers knew from reading the NOAA website). So what, exactly, was Cooper reporting?

Oh well. Gustav never got back to his Cuban glory, even out in the middle of the "bath tub," as the weather guys call the deep, warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Don't ask me why. He eased up to a Cat-2 when he came ashore. I think he pulled his punches, frankly. The thing is, he and his sibling hurricanes know their records are tainted at this point. Hurricanes Betsy, Donna, even Andrew, operated under the old regime of the "dead ball," before global warming really kicked in. Gus, Hanna, eventually Ike (you'll start hearing about him soon), work with the juice of higher ocean temperatures, and they know they'll never get full respect. If Betsy was a Babe Ruth among classic hurricanes, Gus was Barry Bonds. He's just a Tropical Depression at this point, dropping the rest of the water he picked up over the Gulf, blowing himself out.

The thing is, despite all the false expectations created for him by CNN, by their secret wish he would hit New Orleans head-on as a Category 5 and drown the city, I just want him to know I'm still proud of him. He did the best he could.