Good morning, Whitewater.
We’ll have showers this morning with a daytime high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 6:16 and sunset is 7:34, for 3h 17m 09s of daytime. We’ve a full moon today.
Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) image from NASA’s Terra satellite at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time, 8.28.05. The massive storm covers much of the Gulf of Mexico, spanning from the U.S. coast to the Yucatan Peninsula. Via Wikipedia
It’s the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s second, and far more destructive, landfall along southeast Louisiana:
Hurricane Katrina was the eleventh named storm and fifth hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliesthurricanes, in the history of the United States. The storm is currently ranked as the third most intense United States landfalling tropical cyclone, behind only the 1935 Labor Day hurricane and Hurricane Camille in 1969. Overall, at least 1,245 people died in the hurricane and subsequent floods, making it the deadliest United States hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane. Total property damage was estimated at $108 billion (2005 USD),[1] roughly four times the damage wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.[3] Later, Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused more damage than Hurricane Andrew, but both were far less destructive than Katrina.
Katrina originated over the Bahamas on August 23 from the interaction between a tropical wave and the remnants of Tropical Depression Ten. Early the following day, the new depression intensified into Tropical Storm Katrina. The cyclone headed generally westward toward Florida and strengthened into a hurricane only two hours before making landfall Hallandale Beach andAventura on August 25. After very briefly weakening to a tropical storm, Katrina emerged into the Gulf of Mexico on August 26 and began to rapidly deepen. The storm strengthened to aCategory 5 hurricane over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, but weakened before making its second landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on August 29 in southeast Louisiana.
Embedded below, from Alexandra Garcia, Margaret Cheatham Williams, and Andrew Blackwell, is a documentary describing New Orleans ten years on:
On this day in 1991, the Soviet Parliament, following a coup attempt, suspends the Communist Party:
Moscow, Aug. 29 — After three hours of anguished debate, the Soviet Parliament voted today to suspend all activities of the Communist Party pending an investigation of its role in the coup. It was an action that confirmed the demise of the old regime even as the search quickened for new forms of association and order.
The fate of the party was already sealed before Parliament’s vote. Individual republics had closed its offices and seized its vast properties and funds and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had quit as its General Secretary and had called on the leadership to step down.
But Parliament was the only national institution with the formal powers to act against the entire organization, and its decision served to confirm the indictment already passed by the people.