As I am writing this, Gustav has just made landfall near Cocodrie, LA. It is a category 3 storm. Hurricane strength winds are starting to pummel New Orleans. This storm is different from Katrina. Katrina's eye went east of the city by about 40-50 miles, so the city was spared the worst winds in the Northeast quadrant. Gustav puts that quadrant right over the city.
The levees on the west side of the Industrial Canal (the one that obliterated the Lower Ninth ward) have overtopped, and perhaps breached. Water is flowing into the city in this location like a river. Be prepared to see a flurry of conspiracy theories about this. Those of you who followed by web site after Katrina might remember that I questioned how the feds chose to spend their money in fixing the levees on the Industrial Canal after Katrina. Here's what I had to say in
Update #74 on May 6, 2006:
Maybe it's just me, but since the Lower Ninth was prettty much decimated already, wouldn't it have made more sense to put in some temporary protection over there and shore up the part that protects what wasn't so badly damaged?
Here's the deal: they built this massive flood wall on the east side of the Industrial canal, which protects a largely unpopulated lower ninth ward. While they did some shoring up, the west side of the canal did not receive the same kind of attention as the east side. This is pure physics, people. The east flood wall is stronger and higher and the water needs somewhere to go. It seems obvious to me that the west wall is going to give with any kind of storm surge. Since the storm is literally pushing water against this wall, overtopping or a breach is almost inevitable. Seems like the powers that be are using mother nature for urban renewal.
I understand
Shell Beach, where Coop had his boat before Katrina, is experiencing a 10 foot storm surge right now. Coop pulled his boat up to his house before the storm. CNN is also reporting that the Mississippi River is running in reverse, at least on the surface, at New Orleans. We also know the power is out throughout the city.
Our Trip
We left New Orleans about 3 PM yesterday (Sunday, 8/31/08). Our caravan this time included Janis and myself, Cary and Andrea, Adam, Jarret, and Coop's bartender (and good friend)
Fay Sanchez in our van, and
Juli Green, her boyfriend Mikey Dressler, and
Allan Fickling following us with four cats in Juli's car. Of all the wonderful, generous choices we had for places to go and people with whom to stay, we narrowed it down to two: The Chili House in Meridian, MS (owned by some Coop's out of town regulars), or
Dothan, AL where the mother-in-law of Fernanda Weakly, who used to work for me at MacSpeech. Availability of gas was also a consideration. Although I topped off the tank on Saturday, we had done a lot of running around helping others prepare, so we were down to about 3/4 of a tank, with no more gas available in New Orleans. The plan was to head northeast on I-59 into Mississippi rather than straight east on I-10, which runs along the coast. This would be safer as the outer bands started coming in, and would also provide more choices for gas.
We thought we had it in the bag. There was hardly anyone on I-10. We went 70 miles per hour all the way through the city, across the twin spans, past Slidell, and onto I-59. At the I-10/I-59 split traffic was forced northward onto I-59, so we couldn't have gone east on I-10 if we wanted to. For the first 6 or 7 miles we were able to continue traveling 70 mph. Then we hit the evacuation traffic.
Contraflow started just south of the Louisiana/Mississippi state line. With traffic at pretty much a standstill on the northbound lanes, we cheated and crossed over to the southbound lanes (which were now traveling northbound). We weren't the only ones. We were going 70 mph again for a about 6 miles, then back to a dead standstill. The next 24 miles we averaged 5-6 miles per hour. The exits were blocked. No one could exit if they wanted to. It didn't matter, however, as all the gas stations along this part of I-59 had run out of gas hours before.
Just south of
Poplarville the traffic in the southbound lanes (including us) were shifted back to the northbound lanes. The shift over process took a little over an hour over a two mile distance. Traffic started moving a little faster, but was still slow because everyone else who was running out of gas was exiting at Poplarville, which was also the first exit in Mississippi at which cars were allowed to exit. Thank God (and Steve Jobs) for iPhones! we already knew there was no gas in Poplarville. We had information that there was gas in
Lumberton, so we exited at exit 35. At this point we had less than 40 miles to go until empty, and Juli's car was down to less than a quarter of a tank. The gas station at the exit was closed, so we pulled into a parking lot to stretch, allow those who smoke to do so, and regroup. While we were there, someone driving a Mississippi Department of Transportation truck pulled in and asked if we needed any help. We asked about gas stations and he told us about several within a short distance. We were able to fill up the cars, get some refreshments, and take a badly needed bathroom break. We had been on the road over 6 hours to go a distance that normally would have taken a little over an hour. Along the way, however, we encountered our first casualty: Mikey's cat Nigel died while we were in the evacuation standstill. Nigel was 19 years old. Mikey and July buried him underneath a flag pole in Lumberton.
While we were in Lumberton a police officer told us a tornado had touched down in the French Quarter. As you can imagine, this scared us. We were able to get through to
Coop at Coop's Place, who told us a tornado in fact had NOT touched down. It turned out that funnel clouds were sighted and there was a tornado warning, but no touch down. Back on the road.
The plan was to drive to Laurel, MS and then decide whether we were going to keep going northeast or cut to the east to head to Dothan. While on the road we heard from Coop's regulars Kevin and Bob, who were at a standstill over 20 miles south of Meridian. As we continued north (we were now traveling at about 60 mph), we listened to WWL radio out of New Orleans and learned the backup near Meridian was getting worse. One person called in to report the backup was now just north of Laurel, which is 60 miles southwest of Meridian. No one had the stomach for sitting in bumper to bumper traffic again, so we decided to cut east just south of
Hattiesburg, MS on US 98. At this point, we were 300 miles from Dothan, AL — about the same distance as if we had left directly from New Orleans. We had no choice. The only place to get gas was north, not east.
The rest of the trip was smooth sailing. We took US 98 to north of Mobile, AL, where we stopped to get a bite to eat at a Waffle House. The stress was running pretty high at this point, so I sat down with a couple of people and talked them down a bit. It was only a minor issue, but I didn't want it escalating as we still had 3 hours to go. At this point it was after midnight, and around 1AM when we finally got on the road again. We took I-65 northeast to US 84, where we gassed up, and then headed pretty much due east to Dothan. There was hardly any traffic on these roads from the time we left I-59 near Hattiesburg - something for which I was very thankful. When we did pass a car, it almost always had Louisiana plates. While listening to WWL radio we found out it took someone 5 hours to get from Hattiesburg to Meridian. The problem was apparently people who got tired of gridlock on I-55 and took US 98, US 84, and I-20 east to I-59. It turns out that although we had to go a further distance, we arrived in Dothan about the same time we would have arrived in Meridian. We pulled in at around 4AM - 13 hours after we left. This trip would normally have taken about 6 hours (and New Orleans to Meridian is only about 2.5 hours!).
People
I don't have too much information on people yet, but here is what I do know:
- Fay Sanchez, Allan Fickling, Juli Green, and Mikey Dressler are with us, of course, as are our kids and Andrea.
- Kevin and Bob made it past Meridian, although I don't know where they ended up.
- Kattai and Kathleen left on Friday. I can't remember where (Fay knows), but they are safe.
- Jaclyn McCabe is staying at a friend's house in Memphis.
- Steve Edwards and his family made it to Blytheville, AK. They left about 5 AM and pulled into Blytheville around 8:30 PM. Steve said it took over 4 hours to get from his home to the I-10/I-55 split.
- Coop, Laura Roe, Barry Franklin, and Jason Palmer chose to ride out the storm at Coop's Place.
- Mike and Nichole Moses left early and made it to Gatlinburg, TN.
What's Next
Well, it is certainly too early to make any decisions about what we are going to do. The storm has to completely pass from the New Orleans area and the local authorities need to assess the damage. We will hunker down here until at least Thursday, unless they say we can come back sooner. Katrina taught us how to be nomads, if necessary, so we will try not to be too much of a burden on any one of our friends for too long. Hopefully it won't come to that.
But for the immediate future, well, it is Labor Day and what better thing to do than BBQ? Both Allan and Mikey work at
The Joint, which has some of the best BBQ ribs anywhere. They brought a bunch of ribs and some other goodies. Janis and I also brought fixins' for Chicken and Sausage Gumbo. We can't offer much, but we do make sure our hosts eat well.
Get Faster Updates
Do you know about Twitter? This is a neat little thing that allows its users to "micro-blog" what they are doing. There is a limit of 140 characters and there are a variety of programs for the iPhone that allow you to add pictures, GPS location, etc. Last night, I posted to Twitter as we were traveling (don't worry, I didn't text and drive - we were either stopped or someone typed for me). You can sign up for a free account at
http://twitter.com/home. Once you have done that you can follow my posts at
http://twitter.com/thechuck. You can also follow my Twitter posts on my
Facebook page.
I'll try to update what I find out about people tonight, as well as anything else I find out that you may not be able to hear about on the news networks or weather channel.
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