Caring True Professional Alerted Bush, Others

As the Bush spin machine tried to sow doubts that the Bush administration was made aware of Katrina's deadly potential in a timely fashion, this story published in a Florida newspaper the day after Katrina struck should make clear that at least one caring professional made sure the right people knew. The failure to act on that knowledge is on their heads.

Here are excerpts from that story, which ran under the headline "For forecasting chief, no joy in being right/Max Mayfield strives for accuracy, but worries about complacency."

The story was written by Tamara Lush, Times Staff Writer.

MIAMI - About an hour after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center were running on adrenaline and sugar. Few had slept much in recent days, if at all.

Director Max Mayfield's eyes were puffy, his voice slightly cracked from giving interviews to media outlets around the world.

"I don't even know what day it is," said Mayfield.

Mayfield and the team of forecasters in Miami had just achieved the near-impossible.
At 11 p.m. Friday, more than two days before Katrina reached land, the hurricane specialists said the hurricane would make landfall in the bayous of Louisiana, east of New Orleans. They pinpointed a town called Buras as the most likely place it would strike.

They were off by 18 miles. In the business of hurricane prediction, that's laser-beam accuracy.

"A superb forecast," Mayfield said.

It was not something to celebrate; any happiness gave way to melancholy.

"I hate to be bragging about that when there are people killed," he said.

On Saturday night, Mayfield was so worried about Hurricane Katrina that he called the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi and the mayor of New Orleans. On Sunday, he even talked about the force of Katrina during a video conference call to President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

"I just wanted to be able to go to sleep that night knowing that I did all I could do," Mayfield said.