Gustav

I think everyone is quite happy that the Gulf Coast came through it's dance with Hurricane Gustav without too much damage. It should be noted that Gustav made landfall as Category Dos (2 for all my non-hispanic readers) hurricane. Katrina was a Category Five (cinco for all my non-english readers. The differences in description between those two storm strengths are "minor house damage" for a Category Two and "widespread destruction" for a Category Five. In fact, I don't know how happy I would be if I was part of the Army Corp of Engineers and my flood walls almost got topped by a Category Two storm (storm surge for a Category Five is 3x that of a Category Two.

I main problem with these types of storms is that provide a false sense of security to the people who evacuated. It sounded like the evacuation of New Orleans was very well executed, and many lessons were learned from Katrina. But if people keep getting evacuated for storms that don't produce a lot of damage, they're going to stop evacuating. Then you have a situation where a major storm (like Katrina) comes through and destroys everything. Everyone cries because they felt like the government wasn't prepared, and we're back at the beginning.