Storms 411

New Orleans has Fingers Crossed on Levees

Officials: More rain could overwhelm city's weakened barriers

NEW ORLEANS (CNN) -- Metropolitan New Orleans was included in a tropical storm warning Thursday, as the Army Corps of Engineers fretted over how much rain the city's fragile levees could take.

The National Hurricane Center said that Hurricane Rita, a Category 4 storm, could dump as much as 3 inches of rain on the New Orleans area -- an amount that could overwhelm the levee system, the Army Corps said.

"Right now, it's a wait and see and hope for the best," said Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Mitch Frazier. He added that the latest forecast brought renewed urgency to efforts to shore up levees with sandbags and bring in more portable pumps.

The city has a 50 percent to 60 percent chance of experiencing tropical storm-force winds -- above 39 mph -- and could get 3-foot to 5-foot storm surges, Mayor Ray Nagin said. [Read more - CNN]

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Experts go to Work on Katrina-Damaged Computers, Looking to Save Data

Sawyer Real Estate in Gulfport, Miss. was founded by Lenny Sawyer’s great grandfather in 1901. But when Katrina hit, it seemed most of that legacy would be wiped out. The firm’s office, which had been 200 feet from the beach, was devastated. Wind ripped the structure to pieces, and a storm surge left 6 feet of standing water on everything inside. The firm’s 14 critical computers lay somewhere under a pile of rubble.

Sawyer thought all his company’s critical electronic business records — contracts, tenant records, e-mail — were gone.

"I'm sitting in front of the building, and it looked like a war zone. ... There wasn't a wall left. Everything was in shambles," Sawyer said. "But in the back of my mind, I remembered reading an article about [data recovery], and I said, ‘It's probably worth us digging through the rubble to get to the hard drives.’" [Read more - MSNBC]

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