Hidden Storm

The good news is that street by street searches as showing fewer corpses than the hysterical mayor had predicted. Like 9/11, the worst case estimate had ranged as high a 10,000 dead.

It appears it will be something less than that, thank God, or whoever giveth and taketh away in the aftermath of the disaster.

Mike Brown got the axe yesterday. How the mighty fall; poor Mr. Brown served as the lightning rod for criticism of the handling of the disaster. He was a victim of the hidden bureaucratic storm, having done the worst thing you can do in Washington . He made his bosses look bad.

The press opportunity featured the Secretary, looking lean and dark, and he was flanked at the podium by Mr. Brown, looking imperturbable, and Thad Allen, the burly Coast Guard Vice Admiral with the bulldog face and the take-charge attitude.

I met Admiral Allen earlier this year when he was dragooned to address a luncheon group of Concerned Citizens in Expensive Suits. The Admiral was forthright and honest about his role as the Chief Operating Officer of the Coast Guard.

I liked him immediately. The son of a WWII Coast Guard Chief Damage Controlman, the Admiral was blunt about the problems in the Department of Homeland Security. He explained why some things appeared dysfunctional.

Portions of the Department, like the Coast Guard, came into the new organization as mature and functioning organizations. Others did not, created out of whole cloth or cobbled together out of multiple organizations, many of which have long-standing grievances with one another.

Allen used Professor Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” as a model to understand which portions of DHS were having the difficulty in establishing themselves. He considered the Coast Guard to operating high up on the pyramid, although they had periodic excursions to the survival part of the diagram. Admiral Allen will be a welcome relief to Mr. Brown’s amateur hour on the Gulf.

I have been starting to see some of the things that went well in the disaster. Part of the problem was communications. There seemed to be something lacking in the immediately aftermath. There were problems with police radios, and cell phones failed because the towers were down.

We did not hear that the Navy’s helicopter assault ship Iwo Jima was pier side at New Orleans on the day after the storm passed. The skipper reported that 400 FEMA folks had arrived before the storm hit and rode it out. They were already at work as Iwo began providing command and control support, and the Admirals and Generals and the high civil officials began to flock to the only place where a hot shower was available.

Communications were a problem, but it turned out there was even more going on than we heard about on the weather channel. More about that in a minute.

Back in the capital, it took a while for Karl Rove to analyze the polling results and make the recommendation to ease Brown out. The President is known for his fierce loyalty to his subordinates. Karl himself is still on the job after the flap involving the leak of a CIA covert operative’s name.

They couldn’t prove Mr. Rove had a smoking gun in his pocket, and thus, he is still working the Administration agenda.

I would imagine that his hand is on the removal of Mr. Brown. The thing came to a head last Thursday when Brown briefed Mike Chertoff, who in turn briefed the President on how things were going. Everyone looked ridiculous, based on Brown’s assessment of the situation.

He could not tell the difference between the Superdome and the Convention Center. It is good that he is gone, though this is a gentle removal. He still is Chief of FEMA, back in Washington this morning, ready to prepare the Department for other disasters yet to come.

That gives me pause, but what the hell. He is still on the shelf where he can be fired again if necessary.

What we didn’t know was that Katrina was a storm with an inter-planetary connection. Back in late august, the sun had a couple major events. They call them Coronal Mass Ejections, or CME’s in the astronomical business. Some can involve expulsion of mass weighing up to 10 billion tons of matter, or the equivalent mass of 100,000 battleships. 

Not all of them come at earth, of course, but when they do, they can have spectacular consequences.

NOAA was watching the sun with a satellite that is trained on the solar surface to detect such things.

CME’s can have profound impact on earth. They can cause power outages and all manner of mischief with terrestrial communications. That is nothing compared to what they can do to satellites or astronauts in orbit.

Back in 1997, a CME killed AT&T’s Telstar 401 satellite. It was worth 200 million dollars.  I have been in meetings when the effects of CME’s were balanced against the survival of national technical sensors. The usual practice was to command the satellites on orbit to fold themselves up, turn their backs to the fierce solar wind, and hope for the best.

When the CME impacts Earth with the solar storm-surge, it can cause electric currents that affect electric power lines and trans-ocean cables. The geomagnetic storm kicked up will severely change ionosphere conditions. Radio communications can be disrupted and commercial airline flights sometimes have to be directed. Aircraft over the artic can lose communications, and have to fly lower to avoid radiation. 

The military relies on radio communications, and their assets are very sensitive to disruptions.  In lower latitudes, the Global Positioning System signals can be severely disrupted by these ionosphere.

Guess when the solar storm arrived?

Sometimes everything comes together, earth wind and solar fire. If I was Mike Brown, I would blame the whole thing on a CME.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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