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It's Katrina plus three weeks and we're still picking up the pieces around here. In "The Friendly City" we lost power for 23 hours and 42 minutes, and yes I was counting! At least I didn't have to go to work -- I couldn't have made it in anyway. Too many trees. By the time Katrina made it up here she was down to weak Cat. 2 storm and became a Cat. 1 over top of us. The center did pass over my place, but by that time the eye had closed so all we knew of the center's passage was a sudden shift in wind direction. We lost power, but no trees. TONS of branches, and leaves but we faired quite well at our place -- by the standards of looking at the coast.
However Katrina didn't spare me any grief -- Mobile Bay (where I kept my boat) suffered a 28 feet storm surge! The marina where I kept my boat is flat gone! When the state finally opened the roads to allow us to go down to Mobile, (on Labor Day) I went down to find my boat. I downloaded the NOAA pictures taken of damage from the air to find where my boat MIGHT BE -- and it still took over an hour of walking to find her. She was pretty badly beaten up. So much so that she will be scrapped. What hurts is had I been aboard her when the storm surge took her, I would have survived. Her outer hull and everything on deck is cut, gouged, twisted and broken. Everything inside her was just fine! NOTHING inside the boat was damaged. But everything outside and everything connected to everything outside is either destroyed or gone.
HEY OPRAH! I'M A VICTIM OF KATRINA TOO! HOW ABOUT PAYING TO FIX MY BOAT?! I'LL EVEN CRY ON CAMERA FOR YOU!
I guess when you look at the faces of despair from the coast and New Orleans the loss of a boat isn't even on the radar compared to what those folks are going through. However, I still have one question for the people in New Orleans that I haven't had answered yet -- YOU HAD FIVE DAYS WARNING! TWO DAYS AFTER IT WAS CONFIRMED THAT KATRINA WAS HEADING YOUR WAY! WHY THE HELL DIDN'T YOU LEAVE? Geez, it's a freaking Cat. 5 Hurricane! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? I'm sorry, that's not PC, but I drove 468 miles in one day to get down to Mobile to prepare the boat for the winds and a 12 foot storm surge. The winds in Mobile weren't as bad as Ivan, but the storm surge is what got her -- but I digress -- why didn't you (if you didn't have a car) get on to your Mayor and say "Hey dude -- see all those buses there, take them to the poor neighborhoods and load us on them!" If a 16 year old boy can steal a school bus, load up 60 strangers and drive them to Houston, then why couldn't the city of New Orleans take the initiative?
Those that got out are returning to find utter devastation. This is going to take a while to fix, and maybe we'll never be the same after this. But at least in Mississippi, after a couple of looters were shot, there wasn't the pure animalistic orgy of violence you saw (and maybe heard about) that you saw in NO. Folks shot looters and left them on the side of the street with their ill gotten booty in their hands. The message got through pretty darn quick.
NOW we have another Hurricane (Rita) heading into the Gulf. Once there, she'll hit all that warm Gulf water that blew Katrina into a monster! Rita will explode too! Where is she going? In a few days we'll have the answer! Hopefully she'll miss us and go straight into an uninhabited part of the mountains of Mexico. Now if she hits NO, then we'll know that the only thing left to do is flood the city and make it into an underwater park!
One other thing, screw all those "good Christians" who prayed for NO to be destroyed by their god. If that's the god they pray to, then they haven't been studying their New Testament close enough. But then again, isn't that the function of religion? To give folks another reason to look down on others and feel good about it?
BLOG OUT!
posted by Eric at 2:59 PM
