Tons, pounds -- only 3.5 orders of magnitude difference. Perhaps they should go to work for NASA (NASA screwed up at least twice in their distance conversions -- once on the shuttle, and once on a Mars mission). 177 million tons should be the weight of a small comet or a decent size meteor (see www.meteorcrater.com/eventsfun/exptheimp.htm). I'm not sure that whether the meteor was iron or water would make much difference in the resulting crater. At 09:30 AM 9/20/2005, dasimov@earthlink.net, math-fun wrote:

Victor writes:

<< The Times has printed a correction:

A front-page article on Saturday about mistakes by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Hurricane Katrina referred incorrectly to the area being overseen by the agency's federal coordinating officer, William Lokey. It also misstated the amount of ice that had been delivered to the region by Friday. Mr. Lokey oversees Louisiana, not the three-state region. Relief workers delivered 177.6 million pounds, not tons.

...

...

Yes, and not a second too soon. (3 1/3 days after I reported this error to both corrections@nytimes.com and to nytnews@nytimes.com around midnight Fri/Sat.)

--Dan