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A structural engineer, Saffir was interested in the effect of high winds on structures. As a county engineer in Florida, he helped rewrite building codes to help homes and other buildings withstand hurricane winds. He realized that the existing system to classify hurricanes (simply "major" or "minor") was woefully inadequate, so in 1969 he created a five-category system which helped to predict what sort of damage could be expected from approaching storms. Robert Simpson, then the director of the National Hurricane Center, adopted the scale, and expanded it to add information on damage done by storm surges. The result is the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, which is still used today. "We needed that type of thing desperately at the time," said Simpson, now 95. "I couldn't tell the Salvation Army, for example, how much and what materials they should be shipping. The scale gave them a much better handle on that." Saffir continued his work in the field at least through Hurricane Katrina -- at Category 5, the most intense storm: he traveled to the affected area to report on structural damage there. He died November 21 of complications from surgery. He was 90. From This is True for 18 November 2007 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: Julia Reed List Price: $23.95 Amazon Price: $16.29 Editorial Review: Julia Reed went to New Orleans in 1991 to cover the reelection of former (and currently incarcerated) governor Edwin Edwards. Seduced by the city's sauntering pace, its rich flavors and exotic atmosphere, she was never entirely able to leave again. After almost fifteen years of living like a vagabond on her reporter's schedule, she got married and bought a house in the historic Garden District. Four weeks after she moved in, Hurricane Katrina struck. With her house as the center of her own personal storm as well as the ever-evolving stage set for her new life as an upstanding citizen, Reed traces the fates of all who enter to wine, dine (at her table for twenty-four), tear down walls, install fixtures, throw fits and generally leave their mark on the house on First Street. There's Antoine, Reed's beloved homeless handyman with an unfortunate habit of landing in jail; JoAnn Clevenger, the Auntie Mame—like restaurateur who got her start mixing drinks for Dizzy Gillespie and selling flowers from a cart; Eddie, the supremely laid-back contractor with Hollywood ambitions; and, with the arrival of Katrina, the boys from the Oklahoma National Guard, fleets of door-kicking animal rescuers and the self-appointed (and occasionally naked) neighborhood watchman. Finally, there's the literally clueless detective who investigates the robbery in which the first draft of this book was stolen. Through it all, Reed discovers there really is no place like home. Rich with sumptuous details and with the author's trademark humor well in the fore, The House on First Street is the chronicle of a remarkable and often hilarious homecoming, as well as a thoroughly original tribute to our country's most original city.  By: Chris Rose List Price: $15.00 Amazon Price: $10.20 Editorial Review: Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor -- in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland. They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair. And stories about refrigerators. Dead in Attic freeze-frames New Orleans, caught between an old era and a new, during its most desperate time, as it struggles out of the floodwaters and wills itself back to life.  By: James Lee Burke List Price: $17.99 Amazon Price: $7.99 Editorial Review: In the waning days of summer, 2005, a storm with greater impact than the bomb that struck Hiroshima peels the face off southern Louisiana. This is the gruesome reality Iberia Parish Sheriff's Detective Dave Robicheaux discovers as he is deployed to New Orleans. As James Lee Burke's new novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, begins, Hurricane Katrina has left the commercial district and residential neighborhoods awash with looters and predators of every stripe. The power grid of the city has been destroyed, New Orleans reduced to the level of a medieval society. There is no law, no order, no sanctuary for the infirm, the helpless, and the innocent. Bodies float in the streets and lie impaled on the branches of flooded trees. In the midst of an apocalyptical nightmare, Robicheaux must find two serial rapists, a morphine-addicted priest, and a vigilante who may be more dangerous than the criminals looting the city. In a singular style that defies genre, James Lee Burke has created a hauntingly bleak picture of life in New Orleans after Katrina. Filled with complex characters and depictions of people at both their best and worst, The Tin Roof Blowdown is not only an action-packed crime thriller, but a poignant story of courage and sacrifice that critics are already calling Burke's best work.  By: Cathy Scott List Price: $19.99 Amazon Price: $13.59 Editorial Review: Pawprints of Katrina includes nearly 200 heroic rescues, heartwarming reunions, and stories of selfless efforts of strangers brought together by a disaster to save animals at the Best Friends Animal Society triage center because their owners were unable to. The stories and photos included in this book will bring the experience of pet victims to life for the reader, from the first moments when the animals are rescued, to when they’re examined, treated, and cared for by volunteers, until the day they are reunited with their families or placed in new homes. The reader will also meet the volunteers who made the rescue efforts possible. Author Cathy Scott worked beside them, not only writing about the animals, but also helping to rescue and reunite them. While in the Gulf on assignment for Best Friends magazine, she visited temporary shelters, including Mutt Shack across from Lake Pontchartrain; Winn-Dixie in Gentilly; Animal Rescue New Orleans near Carrollton; the Humane Society of Louisiana, which relocated from New Orleans to Tylertown next door to Best Friends’ relief center; and the Humane Society of South Mississippi in Gulfport. The resulting stories are straight from the rubble-strewn streets. She provides a rare, historic look behind the scenes of the massive animal rescue efforts. Scott’s unique approach comes from being both on the ground and in boats, witnessing firsthand the rescues and the resulting reunions between human refugees and their pets. She presents not only the most dramatic and challenging cases, but also describes many other tales of large groups of pets left to fend for themselves, then plucked to safety. Scott’s narrative yet straightforward style is laced with sensitivity and inspiration as she traces the animals’ steps. From her front-row seat, she pieces together stories using Best Friends’ expansive database, paperwork from the field, interviews with Louisiana officials, law enforcement officers and military personnel, rescue groups, individual rescuers, veterinarians, and volunteers from all walks of life, as well as her personal knowledge as a first responder and rescuer in the field.  By: Douglas Brinkley List Price: $29.95 Amazon Price: $7.99 Editorial Review: Bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley, a professor at Tulane University, lived through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina with his fellow New Orleans residents, and now in The Great Deluge he has written one of the first complete accounts of that harrowing week, which sorts out the bewildering events of the storm and its aftermath, telling the stories of unsung heroes and incompetent officials alike. Get a sample of his story--and clarify your own memories--by looking through the detailed timeline he has put together of the preparation, the hurricane, and the response to one of the worst disasters in American history. In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. Yet those wind-torn hours represented only the first stage of the relentless triple tragedy that Katrina brought to the entire Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama. First came the hurricane, one of the three strongest ever to make landfall in the United States -- 150-mile- per-hour winds, with gusts measuring more than 180 miles per hour ripping buildings to pieces. Second, the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half million homes, creating the largest domestic refugee crisis since the Civil War. Eighty percent of New Orleans was under water, as debris and sewage coursed through the streets, and whole towns in south-eastern Louisiana ceased to exist. And third, the human tragedy of government mis-management, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, implemented an evacuation plan that favored the rich and healthy. Kathleen Blanco, governor of Louisiana, dithered in the most important aspect of her job: providing leadership in a time of fear and confusion. Michael C. Brown, the FEMA director, seemed more concerned with his sartorial splendor than the specter of death and horror that was taking New Orleans into its grip. In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley, a New Orleans resident and professor of history at Tulane University, rips the story of Katrina apart and relates what the Category 3 hurricane was like from every point of view. The book finds the true heroes -- such as Coast Guard officer Jimmy Duckworth and hurricane jock Tony Zumbado. Throughout the book, Brinkley lets the Katrina survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina. The Great Deluge investigates the failure of government at every level and breaks important new stories. Packed with interviews and original research, it traces the character flaws, inexperience, and ulterior motives that allowed the Katrina disaster to devastate the Gulf Coast. |
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