"One of the earliest and perhaps clearest alarms about Hurricane Katrina's potential threat to New Orleans was sounded not by the Weather Channel or a government agency but by a self-described weather nerd sitting on a couch in Indiana with a laptop computer and a remote control," reports The New York Times's tech blog.
"At the risk of being alarmist, we could be 3-4 days away from an unprecedented cataclysm that could kill as many as 100,000 people in New Orleans," Brendan Loy, who is 23 and has no formal meteorological training, wrote on Aug. 26 in his blog, irishtrojan.com. "If I were in New Orleans, I would seriously consider getting the hell out of Dodge right now, just in case."
Comment: The NYT piece has a correction that might amuse our own readers' editor. It says: An article in Business Day about Brendon Loy, the Notre Dame student who was one of the earliest to sound the alarm about the potential threat to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, misstated the name of Mr Loy's dog. It is Robbie, not Becky (which is his fiancée's name).
Not-so-amusing footnote: Loy's blog account has been suspended, and the page currently puts up a notice that says: "Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible."
