HURRICANE RITA GRAB BAG

I'm trying to get this post up in a hurry. We've got some heavy winds and rain here in Baton Rouge: Becky and I just heard a transformer blow, and the houses on the block behind us seem to be dark; fortunately, we've still got power, but who knows for how long? I just heard on television that the biggest problems here from wind and rain are supposed to be right now, from 8:00 to 10:00. Here's what WAFB TV posted yesterday about the potential for Rita riff raff here:

What Can Baton Rouge Expect from Rita?

Jay Grymes in the Channel 9 Weather Center wants residents of Baton Rouge and the surrounding areas to know what impacts we can expect locally from Hurricane Rita.

The metro area will experience wind gusts on the lower end of the tropical storm force scale, so expect up to 18 hours of winds reaching around 20 mph.

Rainfall expectations are between 3-5 inches, with localized pockets receiving between 6-8 inches depending on the severity of thunderstorms.

Jay says Baton Rouge will experience the worst of it beginning Friday afternoon until about mid-morning Saturday.

That's pretty much the whole story, but if you want to see it in context, click here.

I really should have posted earlier. What am I going to do without the internet? Read a book? Who does that anymore? Okay, I do still read books, but doing so by candlelight is no fun. At least I've got a roof over my head.

The Houston Chronicle is now saying that Rita is inching ever closer in our direction. It is now currently slated to make landfall just east of Port Arthur, Texas, very close to the Louisiana state line. Indeed, Katrina-ravaged New Orleans is being hurt by the storm surge and outer bands of rain--apparently the weakened levees have been breached again.

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

New Orleans' Ninth Ward under water again

Hurricane Rita's steady rains sent water pouring through breaches in a patched levee Friday, cascading into one of the city's lowest-lying neighborhoods in a devastating repeat of New Orleans' flooding nightmare. But levees on other canals were holding their own.

Dozens of blocks in the Ninth Ward were under water as a waterfall at least 100 feet wide poured over and through a dike that had been used to patch breaks in the Industrial Canal levee.

"Our worst fears came true," said Maj. Barry Guidry of the Georgia National Guard.

"We have three significant breaches in the levee and the water is rising rapidly," he said. "At daybreak I found substantial breaks and they've grown larger."

The levee on the other side of the Industrial Canal, which protected other sections of the city proper, were holding.

Click here for the rest.


The levee breaks. Again.

Guess what? As I write this, I've just discovered that we've lost our cable service, and therefore our internet access. I'm going to have to save this post, move it to my laptop, and use Becky's dial-up AOL service in order to get it up. I'd better hurry up with this. Woo-hoo. But then, given how things aren't so bad, I really ought not to complain.

I was going to move a couple of comments made by friends of mine on the post below up to the main page, but I'll just have to refer you down to them. My buddy Kevin, who lives in my and Becky's old place along I-10, not far from Baytown, which is in the mandatory evacuation area, has gone up to Kingwood to shelter with an old high school buddy, and left some interesting info in his comment. Mike Switzer, of This is not a compliment, left a good comment about staying in Houston, and people who tried to leave town, but had to turn around and come back due to the traffic chaos. Check 'em out, in the comment section beneath the post.

Actually, Mike's blogging this thing as long as he has power and internet access:

well...

we still don't know what exactly is going to happen here...
the "official" pronouncement is that Rita'll hit closer to the LA/TX border,
but Dr. Neil is still talking about a possible
direct hit to Galveston.

We should start seeing rain and tropical storm level winds in the next few hours...

Click here for the rest.

I think the Galveston scenario is definitely not going to happen now, but it seems like Houston's still going to get some heavy weather, probably much worse than what we get here in Baton Rouge. My friend Adam, who writes the Shattered Soapbox blog who currently attends the high school where I used to teach in Baytown is also staying, and he, too, is blogging about it:

Came back

We left at 6:30 am for Big Spring, Texas.

By about 2:20 pm we were in Liberty, and the storm had turned a lot more east, so we just came back. Took us like 20 minutes.

I really don't agree with being back here, mostly because we're planning on leaving again if we find out that the storm turns back this direction.

Click here for the rest.

Well, I guess that's all for now. I'm going to try to keep up with what's happening in Houston via dreaded dial-up internet access. Of course, you can go directly to my Houston news source yourself, the Houston Chronicle, if you like. Also, there's Houston television news; all three local news divisions are streaming their stuff live over the internet. Here's a link to KTRK's feed. If you're interested in Louisiana TV news, here's a link to the live feed from the combined resources of New Orleans' WGNO and Baton Rouge's WBRZ.

I'm really, really, really starting to get sick of this shit.

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