PBS Special

The PBS documentary program Frontline will be airing an episode about Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday, November 22, 2005, at 9 pm. From the PBS press release on this episode:


In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, FRONTLINE investigates the chain of decisions that slowed federal response to the devastation in New Orleans. The film exposes how and why federal and local officials failed to protect thousands of Americans from a broadly predicted natural disaster and examines the state of America's disaster-response system, restructured in the wake of 9/11, on The Storm, airing Tuesday, November 22, 2005, at 9 P.M. EST on PBS (check local listings).

FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith (Private Warriors) interviews a comprehensive lineup of key participants from New Orleans to Washington, including former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown in his first televised interview since he resigned. Other interviewees include Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Deputy Secretary James Loy.


Also at 8 pm EST the same night, PBS is airing a NOVA episode on the science of Hurricane Katrina. The show is called Katrina: Storm That Drowned a City. From the press release:


In less than 12 hours on August 29, Hurricane Katrina transformed a city into an uninhabitable swamp. NOVA investigates a shaken New Orleans in the storm's aftermath, providing a penetrating analysis of what science got right, what went wrong, and what can be done in the future, punctuated with moving eyewitness testimony and exclusive expert interviews.


Both Frontline and NOVA have a history of producing excellent shows, and both of these programs should be far more worthy of watching than last Sunday's awful "Category 7: End of the World"! I can't really believe this, but my co-worker's daughter is going to watch this movie in her middle school science class. The educational value of this movie was less than zero. It falls in the realm of bad science fiction, like the 2004 disaster epic, The Day After Tomorrow. FYI, the basic premise of Category 7: End of the World--that two huge storms can collide and combine, producing one awesome monster storm--is wrong. When two storms of approximately equal strength approach each other, they tend to rotate around a common center, then go their separate ways, in a process called the Fujiwara Effect. In rare cases they may merge into one storm, but the resulting storm will not be stronger than either of the original two storms, since wind shear from each storm will affect the other. More commonly, when two storms interact, one will destroy the other with its wind shear. This is what Hurricane Wilma did to Tropical Storm Alpha this year.

Jeff Masters