Katrina and the Waves

I was reading a rather alarmist story entitled "Katrina may be 'our Asian Tsunami'" on cnn.com and noticed they extensively quoted my advisor, Rick Luettich!

Rick Luettich, a professor at the University of North Carolina's Institute of Marine Sciences, compared Katrina's expected impact on areas far up the Mississippi to "grabbing the end of the bed cover and giving it a hard snap."

That snap will push "probably in excess of 10 feet" of floodwater up the river, he predicted. "It will propagate up the river like a wave," past Baton Rouge, more than 70 miles away, he said.

For 15 years, Luettich has been developing a hydrodynamic circulation model -- called AdCirc -- that he said the Federal Emergency Management Agency has endorsed to help emergency managers predict storm damage.

Apologizing for the possibility that his comment could be interpreted as somewhat ghoulish, he said, "This is, in some ways, a little bit exciting for us, because it's a real opportunity to test this technology we've developed and see how well it works."

Lets see. This will probably be the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history by an enormous margin, and could kill hundreds or even thousands of people. Nah, I can't see why calling it "exciting" would seem ghoulish.

Speaking of ghoulish, note that the url for the story ends in "/katrina.doomsday/index.html."