but still, such storms can occur more Vibram Five Fingers than a
Vibramdozen times in the course of a season.
By the Discount MBT next day, the storm had become a hurricane, making that day, August 25, the first day of Hurricane Katrina. Technically, "hurricanes" are tropical cvclones in the North Atlantic with wind speeds in excess of 74 miles per hour. They draw their energy from the warmth of the waters below, and as a consequence of the earths own rotation as it moves through space, they take on a strange and often terrifying spin, which in the iNorthern Hemisphere churns counterclockwise. Discount MBT Shoes Hurricanes, of course, arc serious things. Over the past century, we have rarely seen more than half a dozen of them in a single year.
Hurricanes bring with them fierce winds, lashing rains, and, most lethally, punishing storm surges. Unlike a tsunami, which is a wave that suddenly shoots across an otherwise calm sea, a storm surge is more like an abnormally high tide, an enormous rise in the height of the ocean itself, on the top of which the winds build waves, which worsen the destruction as thev crash into the shore. In sum, the storm surge consists of battering waves riding atop a concentrated, terrible mass of water.

Katrina weakened somewhat on its fifth day as a hurricane, dropping ro a Category 3 storm just before making landfall, but it was still sustaining winds of 125 miles per hour and driving a monstrous storm surge. By 6:00 in the morning of August 29, the storm was battering the Mississippi River Delta community of Buras, Louisiana, virtually sweeping it away. Soon afterward, Katrina crossed Breton Sound, to the east of New Orleans, making landfall once again with winds of 120 miles an hour. Within the next few hours, it would become the costliest disaster in American historv, and one of the deadliest.

This was also a critical period in the brief career of MBT Shoes Sale the MBT Shoes Clearance hurricane named Katrina,for it was here that the storm began the extraordinary path of devastation that would carry it across the delta, into New Orleans, and beyond. Further, it was during those early morning

42.The First Days of Katrina 2

hours of August 29 that Katrina crossed the line that separated empty sea from Discount MBT settled land and entered human MBT Shoes Sale history
Vibramwith a vengeance. In a sense, the hurricane arrived 011 the scene and began to Vibram Five Fingers dissipate just as the true history of "Katrina" was about to begin. The storm was bur a preliminary to the main event, even though it provided the name by which the main event will probably always be known. Hurricane Katrina was, indeed, a prologue.
The transition from sea to land,Discount MBT Shoes, we may presume, did not matter to Katrina.The hurricane was as oblivious to what it was doing to the ground below as to what it had done to the surface waters of the Gulf. But as we try to come to terms with what followed, it is important to understand that what we so casually describe as a "natural" disaster is really a collision between some cataclysmic force of nature—a wind, a tide, a quake, a conflagration—and a human habitat loeated in harm s way. It is the character of the habitat being struck rather than the character of the force doing the striking that we study to get the true measure of the disaster. In the case of Katrina, the storm sliced into a complex human landscape, and the calamity that followed will be remembered nor for the velocity of its winds or the size of its storm surges, but for the amount of damage it did to the landscape and to the humans who inhabited it.