Weather Channel, God
celebrating Katrinaversary
with wild re-enactments

Hurricanes actually made-for-TV

By ChaCha Pitoulas

The Levee divine hurricanes writer

Three years after Hurricane Katrina savaged the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts and exposed the deficient federal levee system protecting New Orleans, Mother Nature and the Weather Channel are celebrating the anniversary with a series of elaborate re-enactments.

The gripping docudramas, currently in production and being shot all over the Gulf South, retell the 2005 story of what happens when a Category 3 hurricane threatens a vulnerable city.

“We just thought this Weather Channel-Mother Nature partnership would be a really topical and appropriate way to celebrate the three-year anniversary of Katrina,” said Weather Channel storm chaser Jim Cantore.

(Story continues below graphic.)

A recent National Hurricane Center tracking map for Hurricane Ike shows the latest graphical representation of the "cone of error" - a dome-shaped swath of confusion and uncertainty that precedes a hurricane's projected path and, increasingly, continues for years afterward.

“Mother Nature has just been so great to work with,” Cantore said while lashed to a telephone pole and being buffeted by 120 mph wind gusts. “She has really nailed a lot of the little details.”

According to producers, the original plan called for only one re-enactment, played by a little-known Caribbean actor named Gustav. However, the plan was so successful that crews have begun pre-production on a sequel starring African native, Ike.

“When I started on this project, I was just a kid from Haiti with sustained winds of 30 miles per hour,” Gustav said during a recent interview in Jamaica with The Levee. “It really took a lot of time in the gym – not to mention limited wind shear and favorable high pressure system over Florida – to build myself up to portray a legend like Katrina. It’s the role of a lifetime for me.”

Despite the excitement building around the Ike sequel, some film critics have given the Gustav re-enactment mixed reviews, calling the project an “artistic success” but questioning some of the liberties that directors took with Katrina’s aftermath.

“The Gustav re-enactment certainly captured the zeitgeist of a frightened and psychologically vulnerable populace fleeing with only their dearest possessions,” movie critic Roger Ebert said. “But I found Gov. Bobby Jindal’s performance unrealistically competent and confidence-inspiring. Four-million gallons of bottled water and an army of first responders just waiting to descend upon the state? Give me a break.”

Ebert did, however, laud Mayor Ray Nagin for his reprise role as a profane and unbalanced loose cannon, calling the performance Oscar-worthy.

“The way he just flipped out and called a male Category 3 storm ‘the storm of the century’ and ‘the mother of all storms’ ... You can’t teach that,” Ebert raved.

New Orleans residents had planned a more subdued memorial celebration, hoping to commemorate the third year since Katrina struck with a series of speeches and a symbolic burial of the unidentified dead, capped by a raucous, four-day celebration of gay culture.

“Before the Gustav and Ike projects, Southern Decadence was the cornerstone of our Katrina memorial,” Councilwoman Arnie Fielkow said.

Instead, leaders opted for a living tribute, which most agree has been incredibly successful.

“We’re really happy with the realism of Gustav, even if his performance weakened a bit at the end of the film,” Mother Nature said. “We would like to see a bit more hand-wringing and flooding to truly capture the essence of Katrina, but it’s unreasonable to demand perfection.

“Don’t worry though, I am not done.”

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