Art Bell’s live Coast to Coast AM special on Hurricane Katrina (2005)—a Category 5 storm with 160 mph winds and 910 millibars pressure—focuses on its catastrophic potential for New Orleans, where 30,000–50,000 evacuees remain, including 30,000 trapped in the Superdome. Meteorologist Lynn Whitlick warns of levee breaches, 60-foot waves, and toxic flooding from refineries, citing $71M Army Corps budget cuts and climate denial despite melting permafrost and extreme global weather. Embedded tornadoes and eye wall shifts add unpredictability, while callers describe gridlock, poverty barriers (24% below poverty line), and rising gas prices ($0.50–$3/gallon). Bell underscores the storm’s historic threat—comparable to 9/11 in scale—and the fragility of coastal infrastructure, questioning whether New Orleans’ fate could redefine disaster response and climate policy. [Automatically generated summary]
I've taken you in talk radio, with talk radio, through a number of these kinds of large national impact events.
And make no mistake, this is a national impact.
It feels nice and safe, I guess, to be here in the desert right now, but it will impact all of us.
What happens to a city, one of our major cities in this country, will ultimately impact everybody in the nation, those people a lot more, and we'll talk about some of the ways that it will impact them and some of the ways that it will impact you.
Now, I wonder a lot of times, you know, in talk radio, what do you do when something like this proportion happens?
And I think the answer is your job.
You take calls from people in the affected area.
You talk with people who might have information about this sort of thing.
I realize that in the long run, there's really no way that we can compete with those who have people on the spot, in the eye, as it were.
And they do.
So many networks now, from the Weather Channel to CNN to Fox to, I guess, everybody with concerns in the media in that area has people down there virtually in the eye of the storm.
I was on Matt Drudge a little bit earlier tonight, in the hour prior to this program, and sort of jokingly, but not so jokingly, really, said that, you know, the anchors who are down there holding onto the lampposts and taking short flights off the ground for the camera, I suppose they convey a sense of the amount of danger there is to be in this storm.
But beyond that, it's mostly about ratings.
I mean, really, it's mostly about ratings.
I don't think anybody...
And ratings equal money.
It's a business.
The media is a business.
That's why you have the kind of media that you have today that sends reporters down to the eye of the storm hanging on the lamppost.
So somebody ought to say it.
It's all about the ratings.
I mentioned that on the Matt Rod show.
And a lot more.
I also said something that I want to say to you right now.
And that is that, yes, of course, there's an eerie resemblance to the book that we wrote, Coming Global Superstorm, in the movie The Day After Tomorrow.
There's an eerie kind of chilling moment for myself, and I'm sure for Whitley, who, by the way, will be on later.
You saw in that motion picture in New York inundated by water, and that's what they're talking about with respect to New Orleans.
Latest info on the storm.
It's, of course, still a category five storm-packing winds of 160 miles an hour.
160 miles an hour, my God.
It's moving north-northwest at 10 miles an hour.
It is presently about 160 miles south-southeast of New Orleans itself.
The impacts are already beginning.
It's at 27.8 north and 89.4 west.
Once again, 27.8 north and 89.4 west.
I have been watching the media now, not just today, but for days prior to this event, and I knew, I damn well knew, that when this hurricane got into the Gulf, we were going to have some kind of tragic occurrence.
They're not talking too much about it, and most of the meteorologists scoff at the global warming explanation, but that's what's happening here, folks.
But the globe is getting warmer.
The water is getting warmer.
They're barely mentioning it, though they have certainly.
The temperatures in the Gulf are going into the 90s.
And when you have a situation like that, you have the fuel for a hurricane.
Hurricanes are like big air conditioners for our planet.
And they try to take that energy, and it is energy, and they try and convert it.
They try to do what an air conditioner does and convert it.
So you could think of them as sort of rolling air conditioners for the planet.
And then, of course, you can think of them in many other ways as well.
So we'll do a variety of things this night.
In a moment, we're going to talk if we're able to.
Now, all of this is, you know, particularly with people in the area, it depends on whether we can actually get to them.
Mark Suttiff, I hope that's how we pronounce it, is an interesting gentleman.
In 1995, after graduating from college, Mark Suttiff began his career in hurricane awareness reporting and research.
His work revolves around using field experience and documentation of hurricanes to help the public better understand what they're up against.
Using a combination of remotely operated weather stations, streaming video units, and a mobile command communications vehicle, and by the way, folks, we've got links to all of what we're talking about right now on the website.
Mark and his team of five are able to safely observe, report, and research hurricanes as they affect the U.S. The data, video, and still pictures that Mark and his team collect are used in a wide variety of awareness campaigns, lectures, conferences, worldwide TV, and media outlets, even within the U.S. government, NOAA, for example, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Federal Aviation Administration.
2005 has seen the dawn of a new era for Mark and his team as they broadcast unprecedented video and data from even the worst hurricanes using wireless internet to literally put PC users right into the heart of the storm.
Mark lives in North Carolina with the rest of his team strategically located in Florida, Virginia, And the Carolinas in a moment with a little bit of luck.
All right, as luck would have it, of course, and I told you that it may well go this way.
Mark Sutta's line is busy at the moment, so we'll try to continue to get through to him.
In the meantime, I guess I want to start the program like this.
I want to hear from you.
I want to hear from people who are in the affected area, and oh, gone, it's a big area.
It's really a large area of the southeast U.S. And ultimately, of course, this hurricane will continue and will affect many of you right up to Tennessee and right up the eastern seaboard.
So here's what I propose.
I propose, number one, that all of our phone lines, and I'm going to tell you what some of these phone line numbers are in a moment, will be open only for those of you in the affected area.
And so if you have a cell phone, if you're able to get through, let me give you our telephone numbers here now.
And if you are in the affected area, if you have been evacuated from your home in New Orleans, or you have evacuated, and everybody is concentrating on New Orleans, because, of course, it's headed straight for, appears to be, headed straight for New Orleans, but the area of impact is gigantic.
Here are the numbers to reach me.
First time callers at area code 775-727-1222.
And I'm putting you all on your honor to only use these numbers if you are in an affected area, and if you would like to tell us what's going on.
How you feel.
That's the human side of this story, and it's the one that we can tell, I think, most appropriately with talk radio, by the way.
Again, 775-727-1222.
The wildcard line, area code 775-727-1295.
Area code 775-727-1295.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
That's 1-800-825-5033.
And finally, west of the Rockies, the number is 1-800-618-8255.
1-800-618-8255.
So we'd like to hear from people in the affected area.
I've done a lot of world travel, but I've never been to New Orleans.
I've never been to your area.
Tell me about where you are with respect to the area of New Orleans.
unidentified
Okay, right across, we're actually maybe two miles away from the Huey P. Long Bridge, which is the, as I understand it, the only rail crossing south of Chattanooga, I think, Tennessee, of the Mississippi River.
In a worst-case scenario, I'm thinking, you know, maybe it won't be so bad, but then again, you pray and you keep your powder dry, so we pray and we hope for the best.
You know, we don't want anybody to get fillet by using.
I don't know if you've seen any of the graphics that they've been popping up for us to see about New Orleans, but the way New Orleans is built, it is a bowl that's potentially, under the worst case scenario, going to fill up.
The pumps are not going to be able to handle it.
New Orleans is going to be a river 20 or 30 feet of water.
How does anybody make the decision to stay under those circumstances?
Even pets, I mean, that's almost...
Now, I'm a strange person about animals.
Maybe not so strange.
Maybe there are many others like me.
But to me, they are my children.
To my wife, they are our children.
we really really care about them and well i don't think I don't think I could walk away knowing there is almost a sure chance that my pet is going to die, is going to drown.
I just...
Let me try our guest right now.
I understand his phone may be clear.
We'll see if he's there.
This is Talk Radio on the Run, something we do a lot around here.
They are automated weather stations, and they have the ability to record the wind, the air pressure.
They have cameras to record into VCRs, digital recording as well, so that we can basically replace people with these automated, remotely operated recording units to do like a storm chaser would, except I don't think the storm chaser should be down there during this one.
It has its own weather station on it, its own streaming webcam live right now with audio.
I should say streaming video, not a webcam.
And that's going as we speak.
So it's like a mobile command center, a mobile communication center, a mobile weather station, and it has all of our equipment in here, and we're all soaking wet right now.
So the audience can potentially see what you're seeing right now in Gulfport?
unidentified
Yes, the site, I had to set it up as a subscriber-based site because you can imagine if 100,000 people try to hit streaming video, the bandwidth will be beyond my capability to pay for.
And the site is called HurricaneliveNet.com.
And folks can sign up for the rest of this year and all of next year as we experiment and learn what we're doing.
And hopefully we can learn from the feedback from people that sign up.
But yes, Art, right now, there is a live video transmission.
A good friend of yours named Paul.
He's been watching it out there in Nevada for a while as I've done my testing, in fact.
And he has been interacting with me.
I can talk to Paul through the streaming video because of its audio.
And then Paul can send me text messages to let me know, for example, that you're trying to reach me.
So, Indeed, Paul Bowman runs Air Internet here in town, and that's how I connected with you.
Again, I think the way to cover this tonight is just to talk to all of you, and we're going to do that in addition to some others.
Headline, just breaking news.
I want to thank Ramona, by the way, for keeping me up on all of this.
Headline, oil soars to record as Hurricane Katrina shuts U.S. production.
Crude oil soared to a record above, brace yourself, folks, $70 a barrel in New York after Hurricane Katrina forced companies, including Exxon, Mobile Corporation, Chevron Corporation, and others to shut operations down in the Gulf of Mexico.
Oil had its biggest gain in 29 months as Katrina may become the strongest storm to hit the Gulf Coast since 1969.
So beware out there, and I'm sure with the rise in the price of a barrel of oil to $70, you're going to see it at the pump almost immediately.
We'll be back with Mark in a moment.
By the way, everybody, we're going to do this kind of ad hoc this morning, and I don't know how long I'm going to be with you.
I may stay with you well past the official ending of the program, which means that those affiliates that carry the show into replay will simply be carrying us live instead.
I haven't made up my mind about that yet, but I believe it was a Pik Yoon whose headline down there was simply regarding New Orleans.
It just said in big, bold black letters, ground zero.
And if the worst case scenarios are realized, and my God, CNN just ran a crawl on the bottom that said eye wall waves have been measured now at 60 feet.
Can you tell me about where the hurricane is right now and what is the latest regarding its movement?
A lot of times, as these hurricanes get very close to shore, they sort of take a little jog one way or the other.
And I guess it could be crucial for New Orleans.
Is that true?
unidentified
That's right.
This is the most crucial time coming up from New Orleans, the next several hours as to whether or not this will take a jog more towards New Orleans or more towards the east and impact right over where I am in Gulfport.
As it looks right now, it is still on a heading east of New Orleans where the I itself would not pass directly over New Orleans.
If it continued and stayed on the track it's on right now, what would they expect in New Orleans?
unidentified
They would expect winds in excess of 100 miles per hour sustained for a long time, several hours, driving rain.
They will hear things breaking.
The power will go out.
There will be this enormous power flashes around.
It'll look very much like some of those deadly lasers in the War of the Worlds movie.
And the sound is very similar to that, thankfully, though we're not being attacked by aliens, although people are going to think that it is unearthly because it is an incredible experience to go through the core of a major hurricane, much less a Category 5 hurricane, the worst of them all.
Also, before hitting land, many times hurricanes either do a quick strengthening or a quick weakening.
Sometimes that happens.
Are you seeing any of that?
unidentified
There are some subtle indications that it won't.
Well, let me answer your question directly.
I don't see any indications that it'll do any quick strengthening or quick weakening, but it may do some weakening prior to landfall because as its massive circulation goes over land, it draws in some drier continental air.
And any changes in the dew point of the air, the humidity, can make this very fragile but very powerful force of nature change within just a couple of hours.
And we're actually, as much as I'm fascinated by these natural events, I'm really hoping that it'll weaken actually dramatically so that we do not get this doomsday scenario from Mississippi and Louisiana that's been painted before us.
I've been watching the coverage very carefully, and they explained about eye wall reorganization, that every now and then a hurricane lets its eye wall become ragged or that becomes the case, and then it reorganizes and becomes a very tight eye once again.
What is that process?
When it does that, what's going on?
unidentified
That is a very difficult thing to describe, an eye wall replacement cycle.
I do not know much about that, and neither does the National Hurricane Center or the Hurricane Research Division, believe it or not.
And they will mention that in their discussions, that we don't understand the what's called thermodynamic process of what's going on In the eye wall of a hurricane, that sometimes an outer eye wall will form and contract, choking off the energy to the inner eye wall, weakening the hurricane, and we don't know why.
They just don't know why yet.
There is not somebody yet that I know of who can say it's because of X, Y, and Z. Gotcha.
I'm sorry to have asked that kind of apparently impossible to answer question.
Well, it came because I was watching a discussion of the eye wall replacement, and then also a discussion of what you just talked about, that there can become an outer eye wall that's even bigger.
It's sort of good news and bad news.
The old eye wall is much weaker, but then now there's this new outer eye wall with even winds that extend, hurricane winds that go out much farther.
Is that correct?
unidentified
That's right.
Absolutely.
And these fluctuations can change in a matter of hours.
Let me give you an example.
Hurricane Charlie that I was in last year near Punta Gorda, Florida, in this very vehicle that I'm talking to you from now.
It was a small hurricane, and it sort of developed a dry ring around its core or its eye wall.
They call it a moat.
And it literally dried out in the hurricane's core there.
And a very small, donut-shaped inner eye wall developed.
Only five miles across was the eye.
And just like a skater pulling in her arms, the smaller her radius is there, the conservation of angular momentum, the faster she spins.
And Charlie spun up very quickly to a lethal category 4 and passed right over this Chevy Tahoe that I'm talking to you from right now.
We measured 132 mile per hour wind before the anemometer was pelted by rocks from the highway that we were on and ultimately destroyed.
I'm seeing news that three residents breaking in for just a moment of New Orleans.
A nursing home died during evacuations that are going on.
So it's already begun.
This is going to be a very deadly storm in Florida and now already in Louisiana.
It has the potential.
I mean, just before I talk to you, Mark, I talked to a fellow who is in New Orleans, and he's going to stay.
Now, I can't imagine making that decision knowing what I've seen on television about the structure of New Orleans.
This appears to be the worst case scenario coming true.
Do you see it as worst case or might some miracle still occur?
unidentified
Well, there's always a chance for a miracle to occur.
As long as I'm seeing it more east of New Orleans, that core, that inner core, the radius of maximum winds is the worst part of the hurricane.
It's where the pressure gradient is the tightest.
The air pressure is lowest right in the center.
It's like somebody pulled a plug on the atmosphere and all the air is trying to rush to get out.
And as long as that'll stay enough away from New Orleans to either the east, and I don't think it's going to happen to the west, I mean, it'd have to hit Morgan City to go to the west, and that doesn't look likely at all right now.
So we are really hoping for an eastward shove to spare New Orleans, but what spares New Orleans devastates the Gulfport, those areas, maybe even Mobile Bay.
We're going to know, I think, when the center of this hurricane begins to cross near Venice in the southern end there of Louisiana, on the toe of Louisiana.
But even then, Art, we may not know because we thought we knew a few hours before Charlie was supposed to hit Tampa Bay.
We thought we knew it was going to do that, we being everybody who tracks it.
Right.
And a 15 or so degree change in angle, and it hit Punta Gorda, changing their lives forever.
There's going to be a time between now and 5 o'clock Pacific time, I imagine, when you're going to say, okay, here's where it's hitting.
What time is that likely to be?
If you had to guess.
unidentified
I think by 8 o'clock in the morning Eastern time, we're going to know if it's really going to go over to New Orleans or split between Gulfport and New Orleans.
But it's still going to be bad in New Orleans.
Maybe just not the worst case scenario.
It's that fine of a line.
We're really dancing on a razor's edge here as to what the track, just a few degrees east of north, can save a world of hurt for the Crescent City.
If it becomes the worst case, I take it that you also have seen on television descriptions of what might occur in New Orleans, the 20 or 30 feet of water that New Orleans could be left with.
If that did happen, Mark, and again, I may be asking you a question way out of your field, would that be the end of New Orleans?
I mean, with all this awful mixture that would occur of everything in a city like that, it would be the end of it for a while if the worst case scenario happened.
unidentified
You're going to have, like you said, a terrible mixture, and it would be the end of it for a while.
You're going to have huge economic impact to the United States.
It is very difficult to comprehend what could happen.
There are some in FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers whose job is to try to comprehend with computer models and different types of simulations for storm surge.
So the winds are worse as you go up by quite a measure, correct?
unidentified
Yes, I usually say by one category.
So if it hits as a four, then winds at some of those tall buildings in New Orleans could be easily at a category five strength up above, and that will send glass and debris and air conditioning units down into the streets below.
Would you be comfortable in a high-rise building with something like this headed toward you?
unidentified
No, not at all.
That's why I'm not in New Orleans.
I would not have any place to go except up.
And if I survived the trauma of this terrible event with all the noise that's coming, if indeed, of course, they get the core of this hurricane, then it would just be nightmarish.
And if the water will just not breach it and cause just horrific loss of human life, I don't think they'd put people in the superdome as a refuge of last resort if they thought that it could actually flood enough to kill everybody.
Mark, the temperatures in the Gulf, the water in the 90s that's feeding this godforsaken storm, how unusual is it for the Gulf waters to be at 85 and then well into even the 90-degree mark and better?
That seems awfully hot, isn't it?
unidentified
Yes, it's very unusual.
We typically see waters in the mid-80s in the Gulf of Mexico.
Even off the coast of North Carolina where I live, the water temperature is 30 degrees Celsius.
They're getting very close to 86, 87 degrees Fahrenheit.
And that is well above normal.
Most of the Atlantic basin is very much above normal right now, temperature-wise on the sea surface.
And also, the deeper that water is warm, the more upper oceanic heat content is available for these lethal hurricanes.
And the Gulf of Mexico has areas of very high upper oceanic heat content.
But it's also a product of a very well-set up environment that the hurricane itself extends up to 200 millibars in the atmosphere above 30,000 feet or so.
Cyclonic circulation up to around 30,000 feet, maybe more.
And then at the top of that is a large, warm, anti-cyclonic flow of air spreading all of the heat sucked in at the surface out into the stratosphere with just completely unimaginable energy.
And in addition, rolling that video live on the internet, that is a subscription service, but he's got another free website, and we've got a Link on the Coast to Coast AM website right now for that.
It will tell you more about it in a moment.
Latest 1 a.m. advisory, that Central Time Advisory, places this horrid monster, Katrina, 135 miles south-southeast of New Orleans.
Winds remain at 160 miles per hour.
Now, again, this is the latest advisory, still at 160, moving north-northwest at 10 miles per hour.
That puts it at 28.1 west and 89.6 north, west and north, I guess that's right, right?
28.1 and 89.6.
Pressure is 910 millibars.
That's up a little bit.
Now, they're saying the I is going to come ashore between Venice and Grand Isle should it continue as it is right now.
The I wall is presently about 90 miles now south-southwest of the mouth of the Mississippi.
I won't take up much more of your time at all, Mark, but those are the latest figures.
They're talking about it coming ashore, the eye, between Venice and Grand Isle, should it continue as it is at the moment.
What does that mean?
What's that going to mean for New Orleans?
I mean, if it comes in between Venice and Grand Isle.
unidentified
If it moves due north from there without any east trajectory, it could bring that core right over Lake Poncertrain where they will have north to northwest winds over 100 miles per hour.
The good news, though, real quick, though, is it is down to 160.
We need every little bit we can get, and we'll take it.
But if it does continue the way it is, I mean, I'm looking at a radar shot live right now.
It's only seven minutes old, so it's relatively live from the National Weather Service, and I can just see the eye wall, and it is due south.
The eye wall appears to be due south of Grand Isle and the toe of Louisiana.
So if it moves straight north and did not have any east component at all.
What I want to do, Mark, if I can, is to have you on again, perhaps later in the show.
I know you're not going anywhere, right?
unidentified
I am going to stay here in the Gulfport, set up these next two units, and I'm going to stay in the hotel and hunker down when that core gets here well away from the water so we can eliminate that Mark is going to drown because that's not going to happen.
Now I have to hide from the wind, place my Tahoe in a safe location, most likely on the leeward side of a building, and then just wait it out when the sun comes up.
And all of this will hopefully stream from our Tahoe right here as it happens.
I believe we've got a link up on coasttacoastaem.com right now.
So you've got a free site up there, correct?
unidentified
Yes, I've been working with two great companies, if I may mention them, Lowe's Home Improvement Stores and Sprint, to sponsor my hurricane awareness and public information work, which is mostly through hurricanetrack.com, just like it sounds, hurricane T-R-A-C-K.com.
And over the last five years, I have helped, through the support from Lowe's Home Improvement Stores and Sprint, hundreds of thousands of people through the internet with my work telling people why hurricanes are as bad as they are because I go through them, not just in North Carolina where I live, but in Florida and Texas and now Louisiana.
Who better to talk about how to run their own radio show than Art Bell, right?
Who better to talk about hurricanes than Mark Sutteth, at least in terms of what to expect?
We were talking on the phone earlier when I asked you to be on with me about the temperatures in the Gulf.
You know, it's sort of in passing mentioned in some of the television coverage.
But there are astounding temperatures in the Gulf.
The water is the engine that drives and builds these monsters.
To what degree is that true, Lynn?
unidentified
Well, this is because, see, hurricane doesn't run off of water.
It runs off of water vapor.
And the warmer the water temperature, the more readily the water evaporates into the atmosphere.
And it's the water vapor that provides the energy to the hurricane.
And once, as an example, you get a hurricane such as this, this massive storm we have now, to pass over the water, it'll get upwelled quite a bit and the water temperature will drop considerably.
Then if we have additional hurricanes over that same area later on this season, they will probably not be anything like what we're experiencing out there right now.
When the people at the National Weather Service or NOAA are asked whether any part of this can be attributed to global warming, forget the argument now about whether man's hand or a natural cycle of nature is upon us, whatever it is.
It does seem as though everything's getting warmer.
water, the air, we're getting all these new records all the time, and the Gulf is...
unidentified
Well, water temperature here off the south Louisiana coast off of Cameron here has been running 90, 91 degrees recently.
And I don't remember that ever happening since I've lived here in about 30 years now.
Generally speaking, we peak out in the mid-80s during the summertime.
And 87, 88 would be considered very unusual.
And I do not ever remember, and it may have happened, and I just didn't see it, but I don't ever remember seeing 90-degree water temperatures before.
So then, is it really fair that somebody from NOAA, for example, would laugh and shake their head no way when asked whether global warming might be a factor in what's going on here?
unidentified
Well, I don't know.
I'm kind of neutral on that subject.
All I can tell you is what we see happening, you know, that there's certainly a cycle which is going on right now.
That's certainly part of it.
It could be contributed by, I guess, a combination of the two, really.
I know many people in Lake Charles know you very well, and they depend on you, Lynn, for, I don't know, good reporting, I guess, of the weather.
It can get really rough down there in situations like this.
So they probably depend on you to tell them what's happening with this hurricane, right?
unidentified
Yes.
We've been following this along since actually it was Tropical Depression No. 10 to begin with, if you remember.
And that failed, and then it reclosed off, and they renamed it Tropical Depression No. 11 before it became Katrina, which, of course, tracked across Miami.
And then do you notice how people reacted when this thing went through Miami?
They thought, oh, my goodness, this was only supposed to be a one.
And everybody had this tremendous reaction to this storm.
But just pretend, just imagine what would have happened if Hurricane Andrew, a category 5 storm, had tracked just a little further north because it tracked just south of Miami.
Didn't this tropical depression, it was so weird as it went across Florida, everybody thought it would immediately poop out, but either it maintained its strength as it crossed Florida, southern Florida, or it even built up a little bit over the marshy lands.
unidentified
Well, that's part of the deal there.
I mean, for all practical purposes, the Everglades is water, you know, and that's where it tracks across.
And I don't know what the water temperature is on the Everglades, but because of its shallow nature, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the water temperature is 95 to 100 degrees out there.
So that's one reason it didn't lose any more strength than it did.
It did, for a short time, for several hours, drop down into tropical storm strength.
And then, of course, immediately upon emerging out on the southwestern side of the peninsula, began to regain strength again.
Once the cycle was complete and that eye cleared up, when you begin to see that well-defined hole from the satellite picture, that's when it suddenly increased.
See if it's done it yet, because like I say, everything's been so much focused on, let's see, okay.
An area of low pressure associated with tropical wave gradually becoming better, organized about 275 miles southeast of the Cape Verde Island system, has the potential to become a tropical depression over the next day or so.
That's one of them.
Another one, an ill-defined area of low pressure is located about 590 miles northeast of the northern Leeward Islands.
Shower activity associated with this system is poorly organized, and upper-level winds are not favorable for tropical cyclone formation.
So we've got one out there in the infamous Cape Verde area that might be our next friend.
Are these years of hurricanes going to be more and more violent?
Is that what you're going to do?
unidentified
Well, they tend to go in cycles of, you know, like 20 to 30 years.
And we have been in one of these cycles since about 1995 when there seems to be more, greater number of hurricanes developing on the average every year.
There are some off years when you have an El Niño or El Niño, rather, you have strong westerly winds aloft across the tropics, which tends to shear off these tropical systems, many of them, before they can develop.
But mostly, when we're in this cycle we're in now, we'll tend to see more on the average every year hurricanes, which has been the case for about the last 10 years.
So maybe another 20 years, we can look for a break.
In the meantime, I'm watching the track right now on CNN, and even I can see at this point that if it were to continue on its current track, it would virtually, it seems to me, that's just me talking now, but it would pass virtually right over New Orleans.
unidentified
Yeah, they have it like in line to go right over Lake Poncentrain if it works out the way it is now.
But again, it's a little jog this way, a little jog that way at the last minute could change that, you know.
But it's still going, no matter how you cut it, I mean, if you're dealing with winds, what will probably be 120, 130 miles an hour by the time it gets that far inland, you're talking about a disaster, you know.
When you study the weather, you really studied the weather very closely.
Are there any serious experiments being done anywhere in the world that you know of to alter the course of hurricanes, to affect hurricanes in any way at all?
unidentified
I haven't heard anything since those old silver iodide experiments they did back, wait, what was it, the 50s, you know, seeing the clouds and all this.
You would think going on somewhere, considering the amount of monetary damage and lost lives and all the rest of it, that would be some kind of high priority.
And since those old days of, you know, dropping stuff in the clouds, there'd be something new.
But you say no.
unidentified
Well, that doesn't mean there's nothing going on that I've heard of.
I take it that really, large as it is, this hurricane is not going to affect you at all, or will there be minor effects where you are or what?
unidentified
There'll be minor effects.
I can step outside right now, and normally at this time of night, it's perfectly calm.
There's a definite northeasterly breeze blowing about 5-10 miles an hour.
And we've got this high cirrus shield over us with occasional middle clouds from rained-out spiral bands coming out of the system, trying to move into our area.
But see on this side, we've got this dry flow coming down from the north.
And as the spiral rain bands approach us, they tend to diminish.
And it makes it a little tricky trying to forecast the probability of rain for tomorrow.
So I've stuck a 50-50 chance in some of the rain bands will reach us.
But we shouldn't see any significant weather this far west, anything more than some gusty winds and maybe some showers.
They're saying this is about a one in 500-year event.
unidentified
Yeah, but the minute you say that, the minute you say that, next year there'll be another one just like it somewhere, you know?
It's just happenstance.
This particular storm happened to move into this particular area.
I mean, it could be another, like I say, if Andrew, if Andrew would have come inland just a little bit north of where it did back in 1992, you would have been talking about another catastrophe.
And it's obviously as strong as it ever was during the days that you and I risked our lives chasing tornadoes, but obviously your passion is as great as it ever was.
So maybe this question is good for you.
Shouldn't we know more by now with modern science and modern everything, Lynn?
unidentified
Well, they are, you know, they're working as fast as they can.
You've got research scientists working, you know, every aspect of the weather, you know.
But you can only know what you can know.
I mean, you can only discover what you discover, and it just takes time.
Well, for the whole thing, for tornadoes or the storm surge, because you're on the right side of the counterclockwise revolving wind field, so that pushes the water on up.
If you actually get on the other side of it, a water sometimes will drop down, actually, a little bit.
And then, of course, there's the, like I say, the danger of tornadoes embedded in the rain bands, mostly the outer rain bands, and they're under tornado watch right now throughout that whole area to add insult to injury.
It's just how the system or the system is built that ends up like that.
If you're going to get hit by a hurricane, it's best to be out to the west of it than it is an equal distance to the east of it.
I remember leaving that barracks-built radio station on many a day to chase some kind of eye wall or another with Lynn here, hoping for footage, hoping to see a tornado.
That's a very, very old friend of mine, Lynn Whitlake, and I thought he ought to have a comment on this, as I'm going to let Whitley Streeber do shortly.
In the meantime, I want to stress again, we're going to take calls as this show progresses, and we're going to take more and more calls from the audience.
And I would like all of you, if you would, to exercise a little bit of discipline because we want to hear from people in the affected area only, people who have evacuated only.
That kind of thing is what we want to have on the air.
And that's about what I think talk radio can effectively do is exactly that.
I'm in Lake Charles also, and I was wanting to get some information about the Louisiana Offshore Oil Court, which is one of the biggest offshore oil ports in the world, just south of New Orleans.
And again, I suppose from that point of view, it is hitting us at an absolutely awful time, isn't it?
Just when we're beginning to bend, not perhaps yet broken with regard to oil and gas prices, something like this comes along.
Actually, the least of our worries, though, right now, a city, a city, a very important city to the U.S., New Orleans, its fate is literally in the air.
Its fate at this hour is literally in the air.
We could lose an old landmark city.
I've never been there.
The people who have love New Orleans, and to actually lose a city is unthinkable.
To have a Situation where 20 or 30 feet of water could be covering one of our major cities where a million 200,000 people or a million people at least have left and will have nothing to come back to.
Well, you know, I'm really, I'm not quite sure because we're getting a little bit of rain, and we've been told that it really shouldn't affect us that badly here.
I mean, New Orleans is a bull, and it's a lot closer to the coast.
So, I mean, we think we're okay here.
So we've decided to stay, and I still have friends that have decided to stay in New Orleans, actually.
So the number that you gave at 100,000 to 250, I would say the max, really, because I just have, I mean, I have a lot of friends that have evacuated, but I still have a couple of things.
I mean, what is their reasoning to stay knowing it's that bold?
unidentified
A lot of people have ridden out hurricanes for years and years.
And, you know, a little damage or a lot, but still nothing devastating.
And I think people just stick to that even as bad as it gets.
Some people actually know the danger and say, yeah, we'll probably lose the roof of our house.
Like, why are you staying?
Honestly, I don't know.
I, in the past, have, with Ivan and Lily and Isidore, I stayed because if, which I know it's silly, but I mean, if they say it might hit or it might get to a three, you know, then for whatever reason, it's just such a hassle to pack up and move the traffic.
And of course it's all worth it.
Of course it is.
But, you know, it costs so much money, these trips, to take quote-unquote vacations, you know, but then, I mean, and it's miserable.
And you're in the car for hours and you spend so much extra money and, you know, you come back and nothing happened.
You know, a lot of people after, I don't know which one, a couple years ago, nothing happened, really.
I understand, thank you, the psychology of what you're talking about, that you've been very scared before.
The authorities have said, you've got to get out of here, you've got to evacuate, and people have done so.
Category 4, the top of the scale is 155 miles an hour, and that's where we are right now.
The hurricane is at 155 miles an hour.
That puts it at the very top of Cat 4, one mile per hour more, and it's back to a category 5.
So while it sounds good, it's not quite as good as it sounds, in that it's still every bit as powerful.
So I guess if you want to be optimistic, and I would like to be, because this truly is the worst case scenario approaching New Orleans, everybody's nightmare, at least it's a movement in a favorable direction, if not really meaningful in terms of less damage.
It certainly is movement in a slightly favorable direction, and that's a wonderful thing.
Pressure is 910 millibars.
It's located at 28.2 north, 89.6 west.
And it still would appear as though New Orleans will take the brunt of the storm.
If it continues as is right now, New Orleans is just dead in the sites.
Now, the levees, the water, the size of this storm surge, all of that remaining incredibly dangerous and probably going to breach several of the protections that New Orleans has.
Nevertheless, at this hour, able to report to you an obvious slight improvement and sort of a little bit of a hopeful sign, dropping to the very top of the cat four or category four on the Sepphorse-Simpson scale for hurricanes.
Right back, and when we do get back, it's an obvious duh.
Whitley Streeber is a very good and old friend of mine.
Together, we wrote a book called The Coming Global Superstorm, as I know you're aware, which became the movie the day after tomorrow.
So seeing what we're seeing manifest right now in the Gulf of Mexico is, believe me, for the both of us, a very eerie feeling.
So appropriately, in a moment, Whitley Strieber.
The End Again, one more person to sort of officially chat with here, Whitley Strieber, in a moment.
Then we're going to begin taking calls.
And when we do, it's only going to be from people either with incredibly important information or people in the affected areas.
Those remaining in New Orleans, those evacuating from New Orleans, and that would be many, many of you out there.
And I think that's what talk radio can do.
Just one quick note.
Victor from San Diego says Global Consciousness Project Art is going nuts.
Sounds like a Geiger counter on steroids with frequent whistles thrown in.
For those of you who have been monitoring that, I have two things to say.
One, I'm certainly not surprised that it's going berserk.
But two, and this should stop the questions that are inevitably going to come.
No, I would never in a million years consider doing any sort of consciousness experiment in the middle of a situation of this sort.
I just, it's the the worst case scenario in my mind for toying with that power.
And very bad timing.
So I'm simply not going to do it.
Don't ask.
You know, I made this decision actually now, years ago, a couple of years ago, and I'm not going to toy with it any further.
I recognize it's real.
I recognize its power.
And I am not going to toy with something of this magnitude.
That said, here comes Whitley Striber, author of The Coming Global Superstorm, co-author with myself, and, of course, many, many other books.
And Whitley and I have talked about this sort of thing since we got together.
Whitley, welcome to the program.
unidentified
Well, it's good to be here, Ert.
And there is one thing that we can do, which is pray.
So, Whitley, you and I have written a lot about climate, climate change, rapid climate change.
unidentified
And this is part of it.
It is exactly the sort of thing that I was afraid and you were afraid would start to happen.
And it is happening.
And the National Weather Service is saying this is only the beginning for this year, that there are going to likely be even stronger storms or more storms between now and the end of the season, which probably won't come until mid or late October.
So we could be back on the air in a few weeks with another storm.
Hopefully we won't be.
Unfortunately, in New Orleans, the situation there is almost unimaginable if this does not drop back to the point where the storm surge is under 15 feet.
And if the levees are breached, right now, they are looking at estimates predicting 60 to 80 percent of the city's houses destroyed by the wind.
And with flood damage, in addition to that, homeless American city, a million people without homes.
The houses in New Orleans are, I don't know how long it's been since you've been there, but it's...
Oh, well, I love New Orleans.
I've been going there since I was a boy, and I must admit that I don't have much memory of the times I went there in college because I tended to go there during Mardi Gras.
Anyone who's done that will understand what I'm talking about.
I had heard Whitley that in New Orleans a lot of people were actually buried above ground.
Is that true?
unidentified
That's correct.
Yeah.
You're going to have, in addition to the fact that there is a big chemical industry, a gasoline fractioning industry around New Orleans.
So this water, if a massive flood occurs, is going to be toxic and filled with corpses.
I mean, it's just not a, it's unimaginable.
I mean, you talk about a disaster of biblical proportions.
This has been something that planners in the Army Corps of Engineers have been worrying about and concerned about through the past two administrations.
The result, next year, the Corps of Engineers budget for New Orleans is going to be slashed by $71 million and planning or study to figure out how to plan for the storm that's happening tonight is being shelved.
I wonder if the city of New Orleans is threatening with being shelved itself.
I mean, if there was, for example, 30 feet of water, if that horrible thing occurred and there was 30 feet of water covering everything, you're right.
It would be this toxic, absolute toxic soup that I suppose potentially could make New Orleans, not to mention getting the water out, but even if you did, uninhabitable for I don't know how long.
unidentified
Well, for a very long time, and maybe permanently.
The problem being that if what's left behind after it's pumped out is too toxic, it might become impossible to live there anymore.
And that could happen.
If this stays the way it is, going in there with 150-plus mile-an-hour winds, you're going to see a storm surge that will substantially breach the levee system.
And this scenario in some form, Hopefully, not the worst one we're talking about right now, will unfold.
It will happen.
Hopefully, if it drops down to a category three and you start to look at 130 mile-an-hour winds, 140 mile-an-hour winds, perhaps not with the thing beginning to break up, maybe it won't happen that way.
Well, it would sure have to start breaking up quickly.
You know, I'm watching, as I'm sure everybody is, some television.
I've got CNN, and the pictures that they're still showing, the radar photographs they're showing of the storm, show the eye wall extremely still well-defined.
unidentified
Well-defined and big.
The other thing is that along with the slight decrease in storm intensity came a decrease in storm speed.
And that means only one thing, that it may increase again in intensity, especially as dawn comes.
The reason the storm is like this, and we started on Unknown Country a couple of days ago, three days ago, four days ago, warning that this was likely to be a very serious storm because we could see the way it was tracking in the Atlantic.
It was almost certainly going to cross Florida and come intact into the Gulf of Mexico.
From now on, any time a tropical storm comes into the Gulf of Mexico intact in the absence of a powerful high moving down from the north in the continental United States, there's tremendous danger for a simple reason.
Right now, as we speak, the Gulf waters are this is the second warmest season on record for Gulf water.
And it is like a pressure cooker, that Gulf, because the water is very warm.
There is a tremendous problem of sea life decline, of precipitate decline of sea life in the Gulf.
The Gulf is becoming a time bomb, and not a time bomb, and it's blowing off right now.
And we're going to see this again and again and again.
Let me stop you and ask you if you, going back to what you were saying, with this eye wall reforming and all the rest of it, it went through that in the early hours, not too far from dawn central time, I believe.
Yesterday, I always thought that a hurricane would intensify when the sun was out and there was even more heat and more energy being poured into it.
But no, this hurricane chose the mid, you know, the very early morning hours to do its intensifying.
unidentified
Well, that's usually when they do intensify.
Why?
Well, the reason is that the cooler air in the upper atmosphere drops lower.
And when that happens, the warm air billowing up from below.
And that happens during the early hours of the morning.
And unfortunately, because the carbon dioxide and methane that's now in Earth's atmosphere in large quantities holds heat closer to the ground, heat isn't radiating into the stratosphere the way it used to.
And this is, as a result of which, the upper atmosphere is much colder than it used to be.
And this is why when this storm started, we were warning that it was going to happen very quickly.
And in fact, it went from a category 3 to a category 5 to a category 4 to a category 5 very quickly.
Yeah, and we've got another depression out in the Atlantic in the same area that Katrina started.
And we can have another situation that if weather conditions don't change, and I don't know that they will, where we're looking at another one of these things coming up somewhere.
I mean, it's totally impossible to tell where right now.
Is there any location in the entire along, we have a lot of coastline in the U.S. Thousands and thousands and thousands of miles of coastline.
Is there any single place along all those thousands of miles of coastline that it would be more serious for a hurricane to hit than exactly where this one is hitting?
unidentified
No, because this city is below sea level.
It's the only coastal city in this country that's below sea level.
So it's the worst possible place that it could be.
unidentified
It's the worst scenario, and this is why experts have been urging that there be planning to understand what to do to prevent New Orleans from being destroyed by a category five.
That planning should have been going on five, six years ago.
Well, there was a man, you know, they did some interviews on CNN and elsewhere, and he's been repeating this nightmare scenario.
He's one of the planners of something or another in the city, some official guy, and he was saying, yeah, I've been screaming my lungs out about this possibility, and now here it is.
unidentified
And it's a little line item deep in the budget, and they just slashed it.
This is, I mean, $71 million is going to gut the program That exists.
And you'll hear them declaring an emergency and talking on the TV and the radio about how sorry they are for the poor people in New Orleans and everything else.
No one will be talking about the fact that they slashed the budget and never did the planning that should have started years ago to save this city from this very scenario that's coming down on it like a out of curiosity, Whitley.
Well, the major thing that needs to be done there is to understand what kind of water pressures the levee system can take, especially down at the mouth of the Mississippi,
and what sort of maximum storm surges can be expected and where to put that water when it appears.
Because it doesn't have to go across the levee and into the city.
I mean, we're intelligent.
We can figure out ways to get it to go other places safer.
And that would be what it would be all about, is revision of the levee system, essentially.
It would have to be, I guess, from what I'm hearing, one gigantic, very expensive revision of the levee system, because I'm hearing that this could be so bad, the water will just...
unidentified
That's right.
That's correct.
And yes, it would be expensive.
But what do we, we have to make some choices here.
We are going to see, we are in the middle of a climate change situation.
Sudden climate change is occurring.
It's taking place right now.
Methane is outgassing in massive quantities in Siberia because the tundra in Siberia is melting much faster because it goes farther south than the tundra in Alaska.
The permafrost is melting.
We see that the great columns of cold water that used to drop down south of Greenland that were driving the Gulf Stream, there were 12 of them.
Now there are only three and they're not moving very strongly.
We see the Greenland glaciers are turning into torrents of water.
We see less ice cover in the North Polar region than at any time in history.
I'm Art Bell, and we're watching Katrina as it bears down on New Orleans.
Paul from Calgary, Alberta says, hey, Art, referring to an earlier fast blaster, he's not kidding.
The Princeton eggs are absolutely going berserk.
Well, I'm not surprised at all by that, nor shocked in any way.
I would imagine it to be so.
That power is real.
That power, I think, is established in my mind beyond any shadow of a doubt.
But I reiterate, I don't understand this power, and therefore I'm not going to use it except to ask you to pray for a situation, a favorable outcome there.
I think that's about as close as we can get, and it's virtually kind of the same thing, but not quite.
Traditional prayer will be just fine.
At any rate, Whitley, welcome back.
unidentified
Well, it's good to be back, Art.
I wish it was under happier circumstances.
I'm just receiving a report that Bui 4240, which is 50 miles east of the mouth of the Mississippi River, is recording waves with heights of 40 feet and more right now.
And that could be the kind of wave that would severely overtop the levees.
And if that storm surge is that strong, if it's above 20 feet, in fact, and significantly above 20 feet for any length of time, it's going to flood New Orleans.
You've just finished documenting a lot of changes going on in the world right now that are going to produce increasingly large storms from your point of view.
Is that a fair statement?
unidentified
Well, that is a fair statement.
And I think that areas that are marginal, like New Orleans, are just at risk.
And yes, I think the question of whether or not we should absorb that population into the country or try to rebuild the city if it was an economically feasible thing to do in an engineering project that could be accomplished.
Well, that's a decision that will have to be made If this happens, if it's that bad.
And you know, I have to tell you, I'm such an incorrigible optimist, and I just can't believe it's going to be that bad.
Yeah, I certainly hope I'm right, but I have to say that the reality of it is that this darn thing is already still way stronger than it needs to be to cause this to happen.
And there is a good possibility that toward dawn it will strengthen again.
But Woodley, if by some miracle, in God's will, New Orleans survives to be habitable and it's all okay somehow, isn't this enough of a shock and a wake-up call that after this, assuming they survive, they have to do something, you know, change the system of protection there.
In other words, isn't this such a shock and wake-up call that they're going to have to move to change it?
unidentified
Well, the problem is this.
Other cities, Galveston, Houston, Miami, cities along the Atlantic coast, other cities on the Gulf Coast, are all going to be clamoring for help, all of them.
And how is a decision to be made as to which ones get it and which don't?
Already, the administration has made a decision with regard to New Orleans, which is essentially to ignore the problem and to abandon it.
I guess, though, I was asking, might this not be a big enough shock to cause them to rethink that?
unidentified
I think at least that they would say they will.
But then, you know, also knowing that it's not too likely to happen again and not forgetting the fact, I guess, or they will forget the fact that I believe it was last year that Florida got hit by four hurricanes in a row.
They won't want to spend the money.
They won't want to spend the money.
And, you know, there are other cities.
I'll tell you a city that is in dire need of real planning and significant work on its seaward facings is New York City.
You seem to be suggesting that you believe there could be a strengthening.
God, how could that happen?
unidentified
Yeah, I do because I just see those very warm Gulf waters, and the only thing that's preventing us, that would prevent a strengthening is if the hurricane invested the land sufficiently overnight to where it couldn't draw enough energy to strengthen.
Isn't it more normal for a hurricane, as it begins to actually touch land, to speed up and traditionally up into the northeast part of the U.S.?
unidentified
Well, it's really variable.
It depends on how it's coming ashore as to whether or not it's going to exactly what's going to happen.
They will stop sometimes and churn for a while as they make landfall because the friction of the land surface is greater than the friction of the water against the air, the moving air, and it does tend to slow it down.
But then what will happen is that the hurricane will literally kind of roll up the front of a high-pressure system, and they can get to going pretty fast when they do that, even over land.
Well, really, is this country, with the global changes that you talked about, is America going to have to rethink how they're building cities, where they're building, where they're farming, where they're doing just about everything?
unidentified
Well, unfortunately, there's no way to predict yes is the answer.
The problem is there's no way to predict how.
I can assure you, if you live in Atlantic coastal areas or on the Gulf Coast, you need to think very carefully because your future may be limited in those areas.
As far as the rest of the country is concerned, Art, there's just no way to tell.
The main problem is going to be things like Europe is experiencing right now, just the past few days, is a phenomenal drought in southern, in Spain and Portugal, and flooding in Central and Eastern Europe almost beyond, in fact, so far outside of the records, it's never really happened like that there before.
At the same time, A few weeks ago in Bombay, Mumbai, in India, they had 37 inches of rain in a day.
Now, that's so much rain that cattle drowned where they stood.
I think it's absolutely undeniable, and I think most people would join us in observing that because it's happening before our very eyes.
You can't very well deny it.
But on the other hand, Whitley, you see the CNN anchors talking to the people at NOAA, and the people at NOAA, when asked about global warming, just laugh.
John McCain and Hillary Clinton, a Republican and Democrat, just recently, a couple of days ago, together went to Alaska and essentially came back with the news that the place is melting.
I mean, you can politically say anything you want.
Sorry, this is not happening.
I mean, it's like, I don't know, it's like having your wife come home, find you in bed with another woman, and just telling her, you don't see this, hon. You're not seeing this.
You would be making decisions under the radar of the country, and that a region as vulnerable as this should have the budgets in the areas that might help protect it cut, slashed even, is simply incredible.
I mean, it's like throwing matches at gasoline.
It's utterly irresponsible, and I'm sorry to see it.
As you know, I am not a particularly political person.
I'm an old-fashioned middle-of-the-road American.
I'm not a Republican.
I'm not a Democrat.
I'm not a Liberal.
I'm not a conservative.
But I am practical.
I'm real practical.
And practical says we need to work on this because we've got a lot of people in this country who have beautiful lives in a beautiful country.
We want to keep it that way.
That means we have to pay attention because in nature, no matter what you may say politically, maybe what you want to believe or don't want to believe or what somebody, some idiot's telling you on the radio, and this doesn't happen to be one of them, I do know what I'm talking about.
Two and two in nature is always four.
It's never going to be three and three-quarters or four and an eighth, no matter what they say.
We're going to ride out the next several hours and see what happens.
But either way, you brought to light sort of a, I don't know, an angering aspect of all of this that there was a study just slashed that would have looked at how this is.
unidentified
Or at least looked at how to save New Orleans from a category five.
Perhaps the thinking is there is really nothing that can be done.
Could that be...
That's not fair, huh?
unidentified
No, no, it's not true.
The first thing, you need to see, you need to figure out which, for example, we don't even know for sure which levees are at jeopardy right now because that sort of study has not been done.
Depending on the angle at which the hurricane approaches a city like New Orleans, or approaches this city, approaches New Orleans, certain levees, some levees will be in jeopardy of being flooded over, others will not.
But if you had planning and you understood what the situation was, you might be able to strengthen or have strengthened already by raising their height the levees that are most likely to be breached.
We seem to operate by, I don't know, the emergency of the moment, and then we act.
But we don't plan long-term.
People are only here on Earth so long, and I guess that has a little to do with their thinking, Whitley.
In other words, I'm going to be here so long, and after that, hey, we can't think like that anymore.
unidentified
You know, when the British began working on the mouth of the Thames to protect London from inundations, from ocean-going inundations from the ocean, back in the 60s.
Back in the 60s.
Now, if there is an enormous storm surge in that area, London will probably not be flooded because of the work that they did and have been doing.
This is work that we should have started on.
The planning should have started in the 70s And the work should have been completed in the 80s.
Instead, we sit here tonight, just ready, having to pray, hoping we won't lose a major American city.
And incidentally, a city through which one-third of the energy fuel products that we consume in this country passes.
That was my next question, and there's the answer.
Next week, you'll see them going berserk.
unidentified
The futures are going to be probably uplimit all five days, which would my guess, unless it's not as bad as it looks like it will be now.
And if that's the case, then it won't, obviously it won't get that bad.
But right now, it just looks terrible.
Is there any report yet, Whitley, that you're aware of about how the oil I guess no one knows how the oil platforms right now are faring right in all likelihood they're fine the platforms are shut down and evacuated there may be some damage but they are mostly modern oil platforms are engineered to take 200 mile an hour sustained winds what about the refining infrastructure not no no it's
Because getting oil is one thing, but you have to refine it to get gasoline.
Without that, of course, prices go absolutely up and out of sight.
You think that'll happen just because of the futures anyway?
unidentified
Well, it'll happen.
It'll happen because of the fact that these refineries and so forth, the oil platforms need to be shut down for an indefinite period of time.
if New Orleans is flooded in the the area becomes unviable then then there's going to be a substantial amount of production of gasoline storage and production infrastructure that's going to stop working for an unknown amount of time.
I ended up taking a back road, an old highway, airline highway outside of New Orleans, and I took I-90.
And I'm about 220 miles outside of New Orleans now.
And there's still a steady, there's a caravan, let's put it that way, of cars that are still constantly moving, looking for accommodation, and people aren't finding any all the way to Dallas, really.
Well, you know, in my mind, when I hear mandatory evacuation, I think, well, okay, the National Guard is going to swarm in.
People are going to be going, you know, National Guard going door to door, making people leave.
But there probably wasn't time for that kind of thing, was there?
unidentified
No, there wasn't.
At 3 o'clock, when I actually had the ability to leave the city, it was I got right on the interstate, and I sat there and a parked car for an hour before there was any flow of traffic.
It was very difficult leaving, and some people, I think, really just thought this was going to be a very strong storm, but did not realize that there is an enormous amount of water that could breach the levee, mainly from the lake.
And it's becoming more and more frightening.
I've tried to get in touch with friends in New Orleans and tell them this for hours.
I'm hearing mainly through, luckily through talk radio, that this really could be something frightening with the money.
He mentioned that buildings and vehicles could be commandeered.
unidentified
Yeah, it was, I do have to give the city of New Orleans and other parishes and police officers a lot of credit because they certainly did do as much as they can, and they worked very well with each other, moving from parish to parish.
State troopers and government officials worked very well, and a lot of people just really woke up, and that's when the evacuation really began for, I think, a significant number of New Orleans.
I've got to scoot along, but a whole lot of things struck me.
One of the things that struck me right between the eyes was the fact that in New Orleans right now, they'll take the cameras around.
You'll be able to see there aren't sandbags.
Some people, I suppose, have boarded up, but there have been no heroic efforts to sandbag.
Pretty much people have taken what they can, their valuables, things they cannot replace in any way at all, and they've gotten in automobiles and simply left with what little they can carry.
Sort of an attitude of, if it's going to happen, there are no sandbags.
There's no little heroic efforts that can save this.
It's going to be a lost city.
And I kind of agree with the person, Jeff, who sent this, not Jeff, Dean in San Diego.
It's a question that I would like to throw out for all of you.
How would it affect us just psychologically to lose, actually lose an American city?
I wonder how many of these poor people are still there, weren't able to get out, didn't have any bus come by with National Guard people to pull them out.
unidentified
You've got a lot of them, and I guarantee you that, and I'm guaranteeing they're on their knees praying right now.
Maybe some of them don't even realize what's happening.
But look at Whitney hit on something about the energy crisis, if this was to hit New Orleans proper.
Actually, south of New Orleans is Homa.
You've got Morgan City.
You've got pretty much, I know you have two refineries there.
You may have three now.
They may have closed one down in the past.
But a lot of folks don't realize that when refineries, your gas trucks that come to your local gas stations, they don't go to the refineries to pick their oil up.
That's not the price of gas, I guess, but the price of oil futures.
But $3.
unidentified
Well, what I was trying to say is that all the gasoline, after it's refined, is put in pipelines and sent to regional centers.
And if anything happens with that pipeline or the refinery shuts down for even a day, maybe three days, your gas is going to go up half dollar a gallon.
The news was breaking all over the place about this.
It was in the middle of that strengthening when, for a time, it went to 175 miles an hour, and it went to cat-five just like that, and I was glued to the coverage.
I'm a total news junkie.
unidentified
We know Thursday when this thing came in, you know, and everybody thought this thing was going to come in between North Miami and Palm Beach.
And this little crazy storm, a category one hurricane, took a jog south and tore up some friend of mine's places down in Homestead, Florida.
Dumped 16 inches of rain.
Then this thing did something they had never thought it was going to do, come across the Everglades, go south again and tear up Marathon, Florida in the Keys and get down into Kia West.
Then it was headed slapped to Panama City, which I'm in Columbus, Georgia.
And when Opal came up, which is a category five before it made landfall, hit Panama City and was category three, then it came up our area about 220 miles.
And we had 60 mile-an-hour winds here in Columbus.
And it was just terrible here.
And these people here in Nashville, Tuesday in Nashville, and in Birmingham, they're going to probably have 75, 80 mile-an-hour winds out of this thing.
And you have what's inside called a micro-weather system inside the dome itself.
Right.
So assuming that the dome withstands the storm surge and the wind, and just, you know, these people survive that, when the power goes out, it's going to start raining inside the dome.
And one anchor standing in front of one of those green screens, you know, with the hurricane plot behind him and everything, was trying to explain something about the hurricane.
And the other anchor kept interrupting him, and he went berserk.
unidentified
He threw his papers down and said, if you'd let me talk.
And so that shows you how high the tension is beginning to get in these news reporting organizations.
You'd almost never see anything like that on camera, but he got pretty angry.
And so obviously we're all under a lot of tension right now, and I would ask you to consider that also as you decide what you're going to say on the air, because it is your turn coming right up.
Yeah, I'm sure you are, and I'm sure just you've probably, although you've been driving, so you probably haven't seen much of anything, are you now in a place where you can stop and watch the media?
unidentified
Well, I'm fortunate that my wife works for a company that owns a bunch of apartment complexes, and we were able to stop at one of them that had an opening, open residence, and we were able to take it over.
But the main thing is, is what you're saying about New Orleans is I think it will never be a dead city, is what you're saying.
Mario, if it was essentially destroyed, if this horrible mixture of stuff made it uninhabitable for a very long period of time, do you think the people of New Orleans would want to rebuild where it is now, or would they rebuild New Orleans in a new place?
unidentified
Just like they would in every Gulf Coast city along the Gulf Coast.
Of course they would.
It's a great city.
It's a city of history and great faith and everything.
And we're all looking for this storm that passes by.
I mean, I've cried like three times today just thinking about what could happen to my own home.
I'm sorry, I'm nervous and everything, but just alone, just my home and my other friends' homes and businesses that I know that home there, I'm afraid of what's going to happen to everybody there.
It took us a long time to get here, but I think the reason why it took us a long time to get here is because there were quite a few rude people taking the emergency lane roads and covering those up when they shouldn't have been covered up and doing a whole lot of things that shouldn't have been done.
Okay, Mario, thank you very, very much for the call.
There is an evacuee, somebody who left everything at home and just left.
And I guess took, as you said, The deed to the house, that sort of thing.
Hope the deed means something.
We're watching very carefully.
It's a category 4 storm now.
Winds remaining, though, unfortunately, at 155 miles an hour, but downgraded to a category 4 with about 115 millibars right now.
I think 115 millibars is correct, or 915 millibars, excuse me.
And that is remarkably low.
And that little fight they had on CNN that I was telling you about, he was trying to explain at the time how really low that was and what that would mean if you were actually looking at your barometer.
But basically, I haven't been able to listen to the show.
I've been on the phone with friends, and my friends are just flipping out, and it's starting to just sink in because we're not really accepting, because we're all from New Orleans, and it's not really sinking in completely.
And we just go to extremes.
We're like, oh, my God, the city's going to be gone.
And then the next thing is, oh, maybe it'll be okay.
And I have friends in Houston and friends in New Orleans still and friends just all over the place, Tennessee, Florida.
Gosh, I mean, people are just leaving.
But every, I mean, I have one friend who is just, his whole family is there, you know, not staying there, but, you know, he just has, they have several homes there and just so much.
They all grew up there, and he's just really, really worried.
And a lot of fun just going to the school.
I go to the university down there where, you know, what if our school disappears?
You know, it's such, I mean, it's such a cultural mecca.
Well, then maybe our friend in San Diego has a good question for you, and that is that if we actually lost an American city, if we actually lost New Orleans, something horrible to contemplate, how would it affect America?
We've never lost a city.
unidentified
No, I know.
And honestly, I have this, the thought of it, I think, is really what's making people break down and what's making people freak out because just to contemplate it when we don't want to.
And I don't know, I wanted to call in to say with all of this mayhem and what you said with the anchor and everything freaking out on CNN, just for everyone, please, please to just take a moment.
People under severe stress sometimes break down a little bit.
I mean, it just happens.
It's human.
And that tells you how dire this whole situation is.
People trying to explain it.
People trying to come up with words to convey what's happening or what might happen.
These people are under enormous stress.
This is one of those moments in history.
And we've had others, haven't we?
9-11, things that sort of tweaked the national consciousness.
Well, this is one of those things.
And so again, I'm not surprised that the Princeton eggs are jumping up and down like Mexican jumping beans right now.
The consciousness of America, in fact, the world, I understand this story is really hitting hard in Great Britain, for example, and being followed very carefully around the world.
They understand how vulnerable New Orleans is.
They understand how strong this storm is.
And so this story has taken immediate and almost total worldwide attention.
And I'm sure over the course of the conversations that you were privileged to have with Father Malachi Martin over the years, he discussed with you the aspect of temporal consequence for sin.
There are eternal consequences for sin, ultimately, but there are also temporal consequences.
That is, those consequences we suffer here on Earth in time.
And one of those is the natural phenomena, the natural effects of the various actions we perform on Earth, some being good and some being deleterious.
And we don't seem to think about this until it hits us square in the face, as it were.
And people tend to look at themselves and look at the people around them when something bad happens, when something on a huge scale happens, and ask, is it me?
What did I do?
Did I cause this?
Well, the answer is not necessarily directly, but we all play a part in our surroundings and the effects we have on each other and on ourselves.
And I would like to take this opportunity to say, first of all, that I'm praying for New Orleans and everyone affected by the impending storm.
There are many people that are going to be affected across thousands of miles.
unidentified
Of course.
But I am a Catholic, and the main reason I say this is that I am convinced that the Catholic faith is true, and I know that many, many people find that outrageous and incredible.
Sir, I'm going to agree with you that there's none that walks without sin, not on the globe right now.
But I'm not going to cozy up to the concept of this is because of our sin, that this hurricane, this terrible tragedy may be about to hit New Orleans and whatever other damage and death it produces because of something we did.
Not in that way, anyhow.
On the other hand, I also don't rule out what you're saying.
I'm not a person of great faith.
I'm sort of a Christian.
I know.
I'll get a million emails.
You can't be a sort of a Christian.
But I still have difficulty with the concept that this is very directly a result of any sin.
But you think about all those people in the superdome.
And I really feel bad for any of those people that might be listening to us now.
But when they say if you go to the top of a two-story building, you could not possibly be safe with the surges that are coming in, 20-foot surges or so forth in that superdome below sea level.
And nobody can tell me that it's sin that has caused these children sitting in the superdome sleeping right now to even have to face that kind of a threat.
I would have taken everybody I could have out of there.
However, the powers that be waited to the very last second, I feel, to have announced this type of emergency because he was criticized so badly last time for saying, get out.
And it's so late, and it was so late that I could get out.
Obligations at work, but they released me of that obligation.
But these people in Louisiana, there's only one way in, one way out.
And this fellow, because he was criticized so badly, he waited until there was not a chance for a lot of people to get out.
And so many people, there were just a couple people in the car, and they were saying, take a neighbor, help somebody.
And all these one and two people in a car, they could have taken so many people out, but everybody was just frantic by the time that announcement was made.
This is Coast to Coast AM, doing what we do in the middle of the night.
I will continue now, after the break, into the fifth hour.
Good morning, everybody.
I'm Mark Bell.
We're in our fifth hour of coverage, talking now with you on the telephone.
And I'm asking that the first three lines, first time caller line, the wildcard line, and the east of the Rockies, be reserved for only people in the affected areas.
And I mean the areas that are virtually in peril right now.
People who have evacuated, that sort of thing.
The other lines, you're free to call for any other associated reason.
Here are the numbers.
Please listen very carefully.
unidentified
To talk with Art Bell.
Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It's a dreadful nightmare in progress right now, as this horrible hurricane, a packing wind still of 150 miles an hour at this hour, moves toward New Orleans, Louisiana, and the associated coastline north at 15 miles an hour.
It's absolutely a bit faster.
It's sped up a little bit.
The pressure at 917 millibars, which is damn low.
28.8 north, 89.6 west.
The exact I know a lot of you plot on a map.
And it's beginning to happen.
The winds they expected are beginning to occur now in the area.
So we'll just watch it.
Obviously, it's coming ashore a little faster than they thought it would.
Let's see, 150, make that 90 miles rather, south-southeast of New Orleans and 15 miles an hour, and you can do the math.
But major portions of the storm are beginning to hit now.
The network anchors I've been listening to are expressing fears that the levees in New Orleans will not hold.
Of course, that was a fear all along.
And I guess it's an appropriate time to say, pray, because there's nothing else to say, is there?
As you know, on this program, we deal with a very great number of people who make predictions, whether it would be through remote viewing or whatever other extra sort of sensory method of perceiving events.
We have a lot of those kind of guests, many of them.
And there's only one that I know that essentially called this.
And you're welcome to go review the tapes for yourself.
But Evelyn Paglini, I think, called it right down the line in terms of what was coming and what now is happening.
I assume a lot of you are with us in the overnight hours, watching the coverage, listening to us, kind of hopping and skipping around the media generally.
That's certainly what I do.
I'm a news junkie.
And so I kind of hop and skip around the media to find out what I can find out.
I'm sure you're doing the same.
And if you're hopping and skipping over us at the moment, welcome.
We're talking to people in the area, people who have been affected or will be by this massive hurricane.
First time, call our line, you're on the air hike.
Several days ago, if you listen to people talk, and I don't know what the talk was like in New Orleans.
You were there.
Maybe you can tell me.
But the people I talked to seemed convinced from the beginning, and I'm going back several days now, that New Orleans was flat going to get hit.
And damned if that isn't what's happening.
unidentified
Yeah, well, to be honest with you, on Friday, I went to work, came home, I knew about the storm being down there, but the last I heard it was going to hit the handhandle of Florida.
And I went to sleep Friday night, and I got up Saturday, did my little business around the house, turned on the TV, and category five, heading right to New Orleans.
Vacations get shorter and closer or not at All yeah, that's like saying get ready for a new lifestyle because we're on the edge of that right now.
unidentified
You know, my uncle, whenever she was saying that, we got to talking about it.
And, you know, he was cussing the oil companies.
And I said, well, you know, there's one reason that the American oil companies could be letting the prices go up when they've always protected us before.
You know, it'll help us explore new energy sources because now they're feasible.
That wasn't much comfort for him, but I think that may be part of it.
But on the other hand, if you're talking about transportation, for example, driving, there's not much infrastructure to get you anywhere on propane right now, is there?
Nor any other alternative fuel.
We haven't moved that far yet.
And I've been screaming in just bloody murder about the fact that we haven't, in America, begun to move toward these alternative sources.
I don't know if this will do it.
I don't know what will ultimately do it.
I know that something will come along to cause it.
And there's some pretty interesting paragraphs in there that talk about the DOD sampled lightning and hurricane manipulation studies in Project Skyfire and Project Storm Fury.
And there's another little paragraph in here.
It's an editorial 1977 in Saturday Review, and it warned about weather warfare and called it a moral issue, saying if the world is in for a long spell of crippling weather, then we are fools and monsters if we don't get together for the purpose of monitoring a response as though our life depended on it, as indeed it does.
I think that there's research, for example, going into the possibility of something like HARP or something HARP-like affecting the weather.
And I don't deny that I'm imagining that this experimentation is going on.
That said, though, I don't for one second think that we're perpetrating this tragedy upon ourselves, as so many have thought with the 9-11 occurrence.
I mean, a lot of people think that now.
So I'm unwilling to accept that we in some way manipulated the storm to head directly toward New Orleans.
That will be said to be naive by some, but I think that we cannot, we can barely predict, although one has to say they've done a wonderful job in predicting where this hurricane is going to go right along.
They've had the center of the cone be the exact place.
So, you know, kudos to the people who do that.
Somebody else might say, sure, that's because they're controlling it.
I'm not one of them.
International Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, I just wanted to mention that you have lost one city in history.
One question, though, that I'm sure would be asked by a lot of people, sir, is the difference between Chicago and New Orleans is that New Orleans is below sea level.
And so to rebuild, you know, below sea level, intentionally rebuild there, it might be a pretty strong argument to move it.
unidentified
Yeah, I'm not an engineer, so I don't know.
I mean, it's survived for many, many years prior to this.
So one could say, well, once every couple hundred years, we'll take this gamble and let these people live their lives where they've always lived their lives, and their generations before them have lived their lives.
And I think there's going to be a lot of strong sediment to rebuild there.
Perhaps you wouldn't want to at a dire moment like this.
Maybe you don't want to answer a question like that, but it's an obvious one.
If something did happen to New Orleans, how strong would the argument be to not rebuild in a place that begins below sea level, knowing the kind of fight you would have that inevitably you would have again?
And she had to wait four hours to get a rental car.
And when she finally got the rental car, she got in the rental car and she drove to Jackson, Mississippi, where she got the plane to Atlanta and the Air France to Paris.
Brown is the name or I had one question I wanted to ask and I wanted to hang up and I want to see who's going to answer it.
I'm the only person in the airway spill well, Spillway that was built above New Orleans to take care of the Mississippi River in case it ever did get up like that.
they could break it and let it run into the Lake Pontchartrain.
All right, look, what we can Do is toss your question out to the greater audience, which you have just done, and see if anybody out there has that answer.
I detected a little bit of anger in his voice, and I'm sure there's going to be a great deal of that.
There's a very great deal of stress.
I understand that for a lot of people with what's going on right now.
And the best thing that everybody can do, easy to say from here in the desert, is remain calm.
At this point, the way it's bearing down, if you've not left, if you're there, all you can do is pray and try and remain calm because you'll make better decisions.
That's kind of what we're doing right now as we're discussing it, not sorry, in a panel way, but with all of you.
It's your turn on the lines.
We're here in the fifth hour, and we're just sort of moving along, watching, praying, and Katrina, it's happening.
From the High Desert, I'm Mark Bell.
And remember, folks, I'm reserving three of these lines away for people in the affected area only.
First-time caller at 775-727-1222.
The wildcard line, 775-727-1295.
And east of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
Now, if you're calling on any other line, you're welcome, and we'll certainly take your comments.
But for obvious reasons, we're trying to keep it to those in the particular affected area and get an idea as best we can from you what's going on, what it is like right now, what you're experiencing.
We're getting to that point in the program.
Fifth hour of the show underway.
All right, back again in our fifth hour of talk, and the talk, of course, is about Katrina.
And this is kind of an interesting fast blast.
It's from Jeff in Seattle, Washington, who says, a question about rebuilding.
It may not be if they want to rebuild, but more like whether they're allowed to rebuild.
Insurance companies may not want to insure below sea level again, and FEMA may also have something to say about it.
So I suppose that's worth contemplating with the worst case scenario.
It's just a combination of certain things along with it all in a day, a 24-hour period where it went from a relaxed thing to doing it and didn't have the wherewithal to do it.
But I've called you before, and I'm confident that this won't be the last time I call you.
And my little cocoon will, you know, like I say, if the roof doesn't come off and the creek don't rise, you know, over the second floor, I think I'm going to be calling you again.
First, I want to say you're definitely the best host of this program ever.
And what I wanted to say briefly was, I don't know if you remember, I don't remember his name, but last month you had a guest on your program that said that between August 29th and 30th there would be an evacuation of thousands of people.
He predicted that.
And I don't remember his name, but he was obviously 100% accurate.
So at any rate, if somebody obviously said that, they're right on the money.
Personally, from the interviews that I have done, I'm recalling what Evelyn Paglini said.
And I think if you review that, as in reviewing some kind of playback of the last time, or perhaps the time prior to that, that Evelyn, yeah, it would be the time prior to that, that Evelyn Paglini was on the program.
So you're getting a pretty brisk breeze right now.
unidentified
Yeah, and they say it's going to get worse.
And I had a couple of comments.
We've been through two tropical storms and two hurricanes since September of last year.
Someone called earlier, and they were talking about Ivan, and this city was devastating.
And it was a category three, a high three.
But, you know, I can only imagine what New Orleans is going through.
And as bad as it is right now, those people, my house is still damaged.
I mean, it's been a year and my house is still damaged from either.
So those people, this is just beginning for them.
And the caller who made the comment about this is because of sin and I just, I can think of nothing that I did in my life that would have caused me to have spent the last year living, and not me, but my child having to live in the situation that we're living in.
We're here as talk radio to allow people to express those kind of beliefs, but I don't buy into it, and obviously you don't either.
unidentified
Oh, no.
And the guilt.
There may be people who do, but I can't make myself believe that there's anything that any woman in any city has done to cause this.
And the other comment that I had, and it's nothing against that call, but someone had sort of criticized the mayor of New Orleans, I believe it was the mayor earlier, about not getting the word out fast enough to be able to.
I'm calling from Athens, Georgia, but they're saying that we will have outer feeder bands and the possibility of isolated tornadoes here in North Georgia.
And I would like to say one quick thing that we hope and be prepared in the future for the people and also the little souls, the four-legged souls and the thin souls, the animals and the dogs that will need help after this disaster.
And the best of luck to everybody.
And I just wanted to call and say that the effects are going to be quite large.
And we've had floods from several of the storms that we've, this deluge of rough storms we've experienced, flooding here and tornadoes and a lot of damage here in Georgia as well.
But our hearts and prayers go out to these people down in the Gulf because they all need it.
I'm Ted here in Butte LaRose, Louisiana, on the Chappalaya River, which is the old Mississippi floodway where they built the dam.
I wanted to answer that caller's question.
He's comparing earlier, he was comparing apples and oranges.
What's happening now has no bearing on whether or not there's a spillway above New Orleans, which there is.
There's quite an extensive flood control program, but that's for in the spring whenever all the snow melts up north and comes down the Mississippi.
And when you buy property here in Louisiana, one of the first things that you have to go in front of a lawyer, for one thing.
And one of the first things they look right at you and they say, now you understand that before we let New Orleans flood, we will flood the entire rest of the state.
And so you shake your head in agreement, obviously, if you want to live here and you want to own something.
And so what's going to happen to New Orleans, it looks like I'm sitting here watching it now, is that they're going to get the backflow, they're going to get the backhand of this, thank goodness.
And it's actually going to push water out of Lake Poncetrain over into New Orleans.
If people could understand if you took a saucer or took a bowl and filled your bathtub up to the edge of that bowl and then put, you know, then tried to live in that bowl.
But anyway, yeah, there is a spillway and there's an extensive flood control program, but that's not what's going on this morning.
I just looked outside and the banana leaves are just now starting to sway a little bit, but I imagine within the next two or three hours, we're only about 70 miles west of New Orleans.
And I imagine here in the next few hours, things are going to get pretty interesting.
I've spent a lot of time in New Orleans, and you stand there and you look up at those massive levees that they've built and those massive gates and everything, and you think, how could the water possibly get that high?
But then when you sit and you look at the force that's getting ready to come down on their head in just an hour and a half or two hours from now, then you start to question, you know, maybe you start second-guessing yourself.
I just don't really have any kind of educated opinion of whether it's going to hold or not.
It's going to be by the skin or their teeth if it does.
We are now probably an hour, hour and a half, two hours at the most from the largest part of all this occurring.
So I want to thank everybody involved tonight for doing what we do best, I think, on Talk Radio, and that is sort of, I don't know, I guess just let it open and let you talk about what's really happening.
And what is really happening right now is Katrina.
So God save those who have remained from the high desert.
I'm Mark Bell.
As always, it's been an honor to be here.
See you in a couple of weeks on a Sunday every now and then.