2005-08-27 18:53
I’ve started looking for weblog posts by various New Orleans and Louisiana residents to get more of a firsthand perspective on the approaching hurricane. Here’s what I’ve been able to come up with so far.
Electric Mist who is located in Baton Rouge comments:
The traffic coming out of New Orleans is insane. No one can find a hotel between here and Houston, and I’ve been told that it’s also pretty booked as far away as Dallas. There’s a lot of advice being bandied about on TV about it being better to head north or east, but the path of the hurricane is going to be north-east when it hits land. At the best, if you can get far enough away, you’re only going to have heavy rains, but if you’re east, you’ll have that a lot longer than those in the west. Hence, most people head west.
The pictures I saw on cnn showed a virtual traffic jam on the interstate heading out of New Orleans. I read an estimate somewhere that a complete evacuation of New Orleans would require 72 hours so a lot of people are still going to have to ride this one out.
Yaddoshi seems to think that everyone is taking things too far:
My stance is the same as usual — everyone is overreacting as usual, thanks to the news and the human sheep mentality I watch and am forced to interact with on a daily basis… People are putting plywood on the outside of their windows as usual (morons) and a number of businesses are already shut down.
It will be interesting to see if he has the same attitude a few days from now. It seems to me that it’s better to be over prepared than under prepared.
Richard at New Orleans Metroblogs echoes this sentiment:
Dear Evacuation Monkeys: This one is different. You officially have my permission to freak out.
Brendan83 (who might actually be a classmate of my friend Steve’s since he’s also going to medical school in New Orleans) writes:
Katrina will probably be a category 3 or 4 when it hits, but we will be long gone before then. I have spent most of today picking up anything that could potentially blow or float away in the yard, helping my dad load his work machinery onto his trailer, and packing up everything that is valuable to me into a small duffel bag and a box. Everything else, its fate lies with the hurricane.
Michael Homan is going to be sticking it out:
Hurricane Katrina has her eyes set, seemingly, on my fair city of New Orleans. Therese and the kids are either heading to Jacksonville or Purvis Mississippi at 4 AM Sunday morning. Me, the dogs, and various other critters are battin’ down the hatches.
Hopefully he and everyone else staying put will pull through.
Update 8/30/05: Rob Kline has asked that I point people towards katrinahelp.info a collaborative Wiki that has been setup to get people information and assistance in dealing with Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.