We came across a story from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel today, headlined “Katrina may have been a Category 3 hurricane, not 4, when it struck New Orleans”:
Hurricane Katrina might have battered New Orleans and the Gulf Coast as a considerably weaker system than the Category 4 tempest initially reported.
New, preliminary information compiled by hurricane researchers suggests the system struck southeast Louisiana on Aug. 29 with peak-sustained winds of 115 mph. That would have made it a Category 3 storm, still a major hurricane, but a step down from the enormous destructive force of a Category 4.
Katrina might have further downgraded to a strong Category 1 system with 95 mph winds [over the east end of Lake Pontchartrain] when it punched water through New Orleans’ levees, severely flooding most of the city and killing hundreds. The levees were designed to withstand a Category 3 storm.
That sounded strangely familiar, so we did a little searching. We reread what the New York Times had briefly touched on in a Sept. 21 story examining the New Orleans flood walls’ collapse. In that report the Times concisely punctured the Army Corps of Engineers’ line that New Orleans flooded because Katrina was a Category 4 storm:
But federal meteorologists say that New Orleans did not get the full brunt of the storm, because its strongest winds passed dozens of miles east of the city. While a formal analysis of the storm’s strength and surges will take months, the National Hurricane Center said the sustained winds over Lake Pontchartrain reached only 95 miles per hour, while Category 3 storms are defined by sustained winds of 111 to 130 mph.
In other words, the Times reported the lede of the Sun-Sentinel story — that Katrina was considerably weaker than a Category 4 when it hit New Orleans, with the same 95 mph winds over Lake Pontchartrain — 13 days earlier.
The new wind information “could have chilling ramifications,” the Sun-Sentinel added, noting that “if a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane were to hit the same region, it would be even more catastrophic” — something that the Times‘ audience, reading between the lines, could have figured out nearly two weeks ago.
The Sun-Sentinel piece does provide considerably more detail than the Times‘ two-paragraph blurb did. But presenting its main discovery as fresh news is misleading — something which readers at a smattering of newspapers that have picked up the story (including in the Chicago Tribune and the Biloxi Sun Herald) won’t know.
This is hardly a journalistic sin with a capital “S.” But a little research could have shown the Sun-Sentinel that it was elaborating on an old story, not uncovering a new one.
–Edward B. Colby
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.