Every year, between June to November, we got to cope with the hurricane season. We've had a couple of close calls, some tropical storms hitting the United States, but this weekend there's a big one acomin' with Ida. Here's some more detailed info via Kevin McGill and Janet McConnaghey from the AP Newswire:
Ida intensified rapidly Friday from a tropical storm to a hurricane with top winds of 80 mph (128 kph) as it crossed western Cuba and entered the Gulf of Mexico. The National Hurricane Center predicted Ida would strengthen into an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane, with top winds of 140 mph (225 kph) before making landfall along the U.S. Gulf Coast late Sunday.
“This will be a life-altering storm for those who aren’t prepared,” National Weather Service meteorologist Benjamin Schott said during a Friday news conference with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.
The governor urged residents to quickly prepare, saying: “By nightfall tomorrow night, you need to be where you intend to be to ride out the storm.”
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell ordered a mandatory evacuation for a small area of the city outside the levee system. But with the storm intensifying so much over a short time, she said it wasn’t possible to do so for the entire city. That generally calls for using all lanes of some highways to leave the city...
This is really catching the area at a bad time, not just because of the COVID pandemic overfilling hospitals facing power outages and storm surges.
This is an anniversary of the last big storm that blew threw New Orleans and left the worst damage a hurricane ever did to our nation: Katrina. Just that name alone will summon dread to anyone who lived through those weeks. This article on the ten-year anniversary in 2015 from Letitia Stein for Reuters:
...But recovery has been uneven in the city, which took the brunt of the 2005 storm that killed more than 1,800 people and was the costliest in U.S. history.
Many properties still bear physical scars from the hurricane, particularly in poorer African-American neighborhoods. Social, demographic and political changes still ripple through the city.
In the mostly black Lower Ninth Ward, devastated by the flooding, Charles Brown is still attending services in his pastor’s nearly empty living room, waiting for the day when Mount Nebo Bible Baptist Church is rebuilt.
The black population of the city, long a hub of African-American culture, has plummeted since Aug. 29, 2005, the day Katrina swept in from the Gulf of Mexico and overwhelmed the levees meant to prevent flooding in the low-lying city.
Income gaps between blacks and whites have widened. Many African-American neighborhoods and the businesses supporting them have not fully recovered...
Brown, an emergency responder, stayed behind to search for the missing.
“We should have made so much more progress,” said the 55-year-old Brown in an interview before a series of events the city is planning this month to mark the storm’s 10th anniversary. “I don’t see anything to celebrate...”
I remember visiting New Orleans in 2006 the year after for a library conference, and then taking a cable car ride up into the Ninth Ward area where the post-storm flooding was at its worst. Entire neighborhoods empty. Debris piled up that were never getting picked up for the trash heaps. Houses still showing the watermarks for how high the flooding got. I get the sense from the 2015 article that a lot of the cleanup still hadn't happened, and that not a lot of people came back to rebuild.
And now here comes Ida, possibly as strong as if not stronger than Katrina. Those levees that broke in 2005, were they ever truly repaired or upgraded?
They're about to find out.
The hard way, in the Big Easy.
God help them.
1 comment:
Sixteen years to the day.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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