Waiting for Gordon

Tropical storm Gordon

Last night as I was watching LSU’s trouncing of the Miami Hurricanes on television, I received a text message from a friend which included a screenshot of the new tropical storm in the Gulf, Gordon, with the question “Am I the only one who can feel a faster heartbeat and creeping anxiety over a pic like this?”

It’s an ongoing group text thread with some friends and every one of us knew exactly what she meant. I’d been watching that cone of probability all day long as it centered this storm right over New Orleans.

It’s only a tropical storm, it’s not a hurricane, and it’s probably not that big of a deal, but this is what living in Louisiana is like, especially after Katrina which was much in the news the past week with the thirteenth anniversary of that devastating storm.

Add to that last year's flooding along the south Louisiana coast with Harvey and, well, we can be forgiven if we look at tropical storm warnings a little differently than normal.

The New York Times has a story today about Hurricane Harvey and about how many poor neighborhoods in Houston are “slow to recover” :

A survey last month showed that 27 percent of Hispanic Texans whose homes were badly damaged reported that those homes remained unsafe to live in, compared to 20 percent of blacks and 11 percent of whites. There were similar disparities with income: 50 percent of lower-income respondents said they weren’t getting the help they needed, compared to 32 percent of those with higher incomes, according to the survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Episcopal Health Foundation. 

And while Louisiana escaped the brunt of Hurricane Harvey, areas along the coast received up to twenty-two inches of rain which just added insult to injury after the devastating 2016 Louisiana floods.  In August 2016 much of south Louisiana received devastating rain totals as a slow-moving storm drenched the state and left many homes uninhabitable.

 So, yes. Whenever we see those weather graphics with those cones of probability slamming right into our fragile coast, we get a little nervous.

It doesn’t stop us in our tracks, though. We are used to this. It comes with the territory (literally!) and the flooding and storms are part of our routine. We prepare, we wait, we watch, and sometimes the predictions are wrong. Sometimes they are right.

But I do believe that Katrina changed things for us. I’m in northwest Louisiana and so Katrina as a weather event didn’t affect me very much, but Katrina as a human drama certainly did. I’ll never ever forget the haunted eyes of those refugee children in my classrooms.

With this little storm, Gordon, who is making its way over the coast this week and later across the northwest corner of the state, what I worry about most is south Louisiana and our very fragile coastline and vanishing wetlands. I wonder why we have no better answers to protect them and I worry about places like Isle de Jean Charles, for example, that are already so endangered. What must those people be thinking as they look at the weather forecast this week?

In the meantime, we celebrate our LSU Tigers' performance last night, and I think I will go start a pot of gumbo and hope that the storm moves quickly through.

Frivolous Lawsuit of the Day

This has got to be the most ridiculous thing I've read all day (but it's early yet...) :

Victims of Hurricane Katrina are seeking to sue carbon gas-emitting multinationals for helping fuel global warming and boosting the devastating 2005 storm, legal documents showed. The class action suit brought by residents from southern Mississippi, which was ravaged by hurricane-force winds and driving rains, was first filed just weeks after the August 2005 storm hit.

"The plaintiffs allege that defendants' operation of energy, fossil fuels, and chemical industries in the United States caused the emission of greenhouse gasses that contributed to global warming," say the documents seen by AFP. The increase in global surface air and water temperatures "in turn caused a rise in sea levels and added to the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina, which combined to destroy the plaintiffs' private property, as well as public property useful to them."

Shame on the lawyer that takes on this frivolous suit. Initially the district court rejected the case but an appeals court decided that the case could be heard.

No wonder the courts are clogged.

(H/T: The Dead Pelican)

Ray Nagin Visits Cuba to Learn About Disaster Preparedness

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is on a field trip to Cuba, on a State Department sanctioned expedition, in order to learn about disaster preparedness.

One might think that after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Ray Nagin would know just about all there is to know about how to prepare for a hurricane. Trial by fire, as they say. However, it seems as if Mayor Nagin believes he can learn something from Cuba.

Marco Rubio has a response at NRO's The Corner:

"In Cuba, it doesn’t take a hurricane to cause power outages; government rationing of electricity has been doing that for some time. The destruction of the agricultural economy didn't begin when storms destroyed crops; it began when the regime took control of the means of production. The country's infrastructure didn’t start crumbling because of hurricane-strength winds; it’s been deteriorating for decades, along with many aspects of Cuban life, because of a regime obsessed with using its limited resources to maintain power, deprive its people of fundamental liberties and close itself off from the free world.

But perhaps the worst part about the regime’s hurricane-mitigation program is its routine, cruel, and inhumane rejection of American aid."

Port of New Orleans president and CEO Larry LeGrange is all for the Nagin trip, however, and says that Nagin is exploring future trade opportunities with Cuba. He says when the trade embargo with Cuba is ended, Nagin's efforts can only help New Orleans.

Some NOLA residents are getting a little testy over Nagin's little jaunts, however. Earlier this summer, Nagin, his wife, and other city officials went to Shanghai and to Sydney which cost the taxpayers over $28,000. Nagin had promised a "sponsor" for that trip that never materialized. Part of the problem there is the possibility that someone with business ties to the city was footing the bill, which of course, would be unethical.

Nagin is not the first mayor to travel to Cuba for disaster preparedness; the mayor of Galveston, TX traveled to Cuba earlier this year.

Not everyone is impressed with Cuba's hurricane preparedness skills. Besides Rubio, another dissenting voice is George Fowler, a Cuban-American who is also the Vice President of the Cuban American National Foundation.

Fowler said, "we have very little to learn from Castro. It is a country that is embargoed by our own policies because it's been run by a dictator for 50 years. It is also one of four countries that our state department has declared to be a state sponsor of terrorism." While various news articles tout Cuba's success in hurricane preparedness, Fowler said it's communist propaganda, and he doesn't buy the delegation's explanation that New Orleans can learn valuable lessons in disaster readiness from Cuba.

At any rate, Nagin and company are in Cuba. At the very least, maybe Nagin can learn that when a hurricane hits your city, you don't barricade yourself in a luxury hotel "awaiting the federal cavalry." When he came out, he declared that New Orleans would once again be a "chocolate city."

Yes, maybe the Cuba trip isn't such a bad idea, after all!

An Icy Washington Response to Kentucky Ice

I've been swamped at school lately so blogging has been light; progress reports go in on Friday and we've had several important visitors to our school, so between the two, I've been snowed under. On top of that, The Teenager has been under the weather and I've been back and forth to the doctor's office and pharmacy. We're on the downhill side of it all now though, so life is good!

Speaking of weather, or weather analogies anyway, the Washington reaction to the Kentucky ice storm has me just about outraged. Not just the federal response but mostly, WHERE is the press criticism of the lack of response!?

The Anchoress has written in a most excellent fashion on this here and here and I can't add anything more eloquent than what she has written. But I have to say that the national press was ALL OVER Bush for not rushing down to New Orleans as soon as the storm clouds of Katrina lifted. There were so many oddball factors in that situation that made the Bush-attacks so misguided.

Gov. Blanco and Ray Nagin were running a circus down there and absolutely must take the blame for what happened, starting with their decision not to make a forced evacuation. I knew when Ray Nagin came on the television and told people to go to the Superdome and to "bring your own food and water" that we were going to have problems!

Then you had Blanco who would not allow Bush to send aid in until it was far too late.

Once the storm was over, here came the media: we had Shepard Smith and Geraldo, we had Anderson Cooper, the whole mess of 'em. Looters on TV, taking potshots at helicopters, mass insanity. This was not George Bush's fault. This is not to say FEMA handled everything perfectly - they didn't. But Bush could not come in immediately and get in the way of first responders. Folks were trying to rescue people off roofs and get them out of the Superdome and the Convention Center (and WHO told them to even go there?!)

When things settled down and he could go in without being a distraction, he did.

But I don't want to re-hash the Katrina debacle. Over a week ago Kentucky was hit with a horrible ice storm. As of today, about 256,000 people are still without power. The only thing Obama has done is sign the emergency delcaration. No pleas for Red Cross donations. No flyover in a helicopter to survey the damage. No words of support to the residents. No visits to shelters.

And to be fair, he has other things on his plate right now, like talking up the Porkulus bill - the massive governmental SPENDING bill. He's got to deal with the tax cheats that got through the vetting process and the lobbyists working in positions where he vowed no lobbyists would be. He had a SuperBowl party to host and a cocktail party a day or two before that. He's busy serving $100 lb. Waygu steak dinners and cranking up the White House thermostat.

Bush took a lot of criticism, mostly undeserved, for the Katrina response. But he learned from that. When Iowa flooded this summer, he was there. Oh I know, Obama went down there for a photo op and filled some sandbags. But now the campaign is over. He "won" as he reminded us recently. Now is the time he should give an appropriate response to the people in Kentucky.

One email I received said, "He knows we didn't vote for him, so he doesn't care." Somebody please call FEMA and tell them that the people in Kentucky need some help. Thanks.