Do we have Chiffers in the hurricane area?

[Flyingcursor]

<b>Missy</b> Did you get some rain from Katrina?

[missy]

Yeah - Flydood - I haven't heard the totals, but it rained all day yesterday. No flooding, thank goodness (at least so far) but they are checking to see if there might have been a funnel touchdown out near Caesar Creek. No one hurt, but some building damage.

We were over 6" below for rain, so we really needed the water - just not all in one day!

[Cynth]

......a sort of relief that things are not as bad as they could have been in New Orleans, although I believe worse than expected in other places.

I can't believe I said something so stupid. It does look like the worst case scenario they were talking about. I can't imagine where they are going to take all these people who have no homes now. I read somewhere something about trailers being in the emergency plan but where they would put them and how many they have I don't know.

I was there on a short visit about a year ago and I remember going on that Highway 10 to Slidell to go on a swamp tour. Now the highway is broken up (I believe, or maybe it is water on top of it) and Slidell has had terrible damage too. I think of some of the people we met and wonder how they made out and what they are going to do for a living

[izzarina]

Yeah - Flydood - I haven't heard the totals, but it rained all day yesterday.

We're getting the last of it today. Apparently Katrina shifted northish, and so Steubenville wasn't in the direct path as it had been (thankfully....last September was horrible after Ivan. There was tremendous flooding and no one here wants to relive that). I'm not sure if there will be flooding yet or not, but at least it seems to not be as bad as they had predicted. Our rain is supposed to stop sometime this afternoon.

[OnTheMoor]

We're experiencing Katrina as I type, a pleasant and much needed rainfall and a nice cooling breeze. Funny hm?

The scariest thing, as Blackwood pointed out, is at this time of year, there will, no doubt, be, atleast, more rain.

[Tyler]

Some folks here say Katrina even seems to have effected the weather here a bit...it's amazing how far reaching the effects of a storm, even of that size, can be. Monday we had tempertature up into the high ninties, and yesterday it suddenly dropped to about seventy very quickly, and was very cold all night. I had my air conditioner off for the first time all summer.

[Charlene]

The news just reported that the people in the Superdome are going to be bussed to Houston to the Astrodome.

It's about 347 miles between New Orleans and Houston. (For some reason I was thinking it was a lot further.) Don't know if I would feel all that safe in Houston, as it's close to Galveston, so it is possible that a hurricane could hit there before the season is over.

[Wombat]

The news just reported that the people in the Superdome are going to be bussed to Houston to the Astrodome.

It's about 347 miles between New Orleans and Houston. (For some reason I was thinking it was a lot further.) Don't know if I would feel all that safe in Houston, as it's close to Galveston, so it is possible that a hurricane could hit there before the season is over.

Houston wouldn't be inundated with water I would think.

I don't think that particular spots on the coast are any more vulnerable than others in that a storm is more likely to hit them. What makes some places more vulnerable like NO is poor protection in case a hurricane hits or comes close. I imagine it would only have taken a slight change of direction for Cajun country to have been wiped out rather than Biloxi. Come to think of it, how are they doing down that way? I haven't heard any reports. Baton Rouge OK?

[Tommy]

I did live in Galveston and we moved to the mainland after hurricane Alicia. Houston is inland from Galveston about fifty miles. In Galveston and Houston the hotels are full of pepole from Louisiana, and when they can not afford to stay any more I don't know what they will do. Houston is subject to flooding from heavy rain more so than Galveston. Houston has subsided into a bowl from pumping fresh water from the ground. On some overpasses there are water depth gauges to let cars know how deep the water is before driving under. Galveston was built up with dredge of the Gulf of Mexico after the 1900 storm, and a sixteen foot seawall is in front of most of it.

[Wombat]

I did live in Galveston and we moved to the mainland after hurricane Alicia. Houston is inland from Galveston about fifty miles. In Galveston and Houston the hotels are full of pepole from Louisiana, and when they can not afford to stay any more I don't know what they will do. Houston is subject to flooding from heavy rain more so than Galveston. Houston has subsided into a bowl from pumping fresh water from the ground. On some overpasses there are water depth gauges to let cars know how deep the water is before driving under. Galveston was built up with dredge of the Gulf of Mexico after the 1900 storm, and a sixteen foot seawall is in front of most of it.

Thanks for clarifying that Tommy. By inundation I had in mind direct swamping from the ocean but obviously Houston would simply not be a safe place to be. If you are drowning it doesn't much matter where the water is coming from. It seems odd that it takes a place to be destroyed before people build adequate sea walls when the danger is just the same 50 or 100 miles down the coast but maybe it's human nature.

[Musical_Midnight]

I live in Denham Springs, LA, which is about 80 or so miles north of New Orleans. I would have posted earlier, but we are still out of power in our area. I'm writing this from my parents' house in baton rouge.

There is a bit of damage here, but neither of our homes (my parents and my own) suffered any damage. Lots of tree limbs and leaves littering our yards, possibly a few shingles are missing from my parents' roof, but that's the worst we have at home. Other parts aren't so lucky.

One gas station down the street from our home in Denham is shredded, the roof torn off. Our neighbors had trees down, one would have hit our house had it not fallen the other way. Power is still out in Denham, as is most of my parents' neighborhood. Theirs is one of two streets who have power in the subdivision.

Many traffic lights still don't work, and crews are working as hard as they can to get the power back up. The streets have a lot more traffic because of all the evacuees. It's just a matter now of coping and being patient as we figure what to do here.

Some of my neighbors in Denham have generators, some have been nice enough to offer those who don't, cups of hot coffee in the morning. Some are trying to help their surrounding neighbors clear out all the debris that the trees discarded. Once our yard is clear, my husband and I are probably going to help our elderly neighbor put her front porch area together again. Her bench swing was destroyed and potted plants were scattered around, but no damage to her home that we could see.

[fearfaoin]

My point though was this: given what happened in Galveston which I assume is not below sea level and given that that happened before global warming and so on, shouldn't authorities have been aware of just how much more vulnerable New Orleans is?

The experts (as we've been hearing over the last week) have been predicting a Cat5 hurricane eventually wiping out New Orleans for the last several years. But no one has done anything about it. I think people just get used to hearing these dire warnings, and then year after year nothing disasterous happens, so they start to ignore the warnings. Also, people who have lived in New Orleans have told me that flooding is really a way of life there. Like snow in Michigan... you just learn to deal with it. So, perhaps people don't really think they can reach the level of God-awfulness that we now see.

[Lambchop]

I imagine it would only have taken a slight change of direction for Cajun country to have been wiped out rather than Biloxi. Come to think of it, how are they doing down that way? I haven't heard any reports. Baton Rouge OK?

Baton Rouge is substantially north and a bit west of NO.

St. Bernard Parish, however, is "gone." The whole area between NO and the mouth of the Mississippi is pretty much wiped out, I've read, but without news reporting it since there has been a complete failure of the communications net.

[OnTheMoor]

I just heard on the NBC news that "tensions between rival gangs were beginning to rise" in the Superdome. As though the hurricane was not quite enough hm?

[Tommy]

The six pm local news here ran the story about bussing the pepole from the Superdome to Houston's astrodome. They are only letting the pepole from the superdome on busses in. The news did show them turning pepole away that drove their cars there. No word on why.