My friends mom, the one I encouraged to leave New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina was approaching, is fine though her home is not.
From a Mississippi State classmate who just started a job forecasting the weather as Hurricane Katrina approached:
I talked to friends watching from other places and CNN
and Fox were saying it was a glancing blow. Just
because there were buildings blown over it wasn’t
that bad. Now that more and more of the flooding
video is being seen I think people are changing their
minds. This will go down as the worst storm in
history.
Mike
There is no New Orleans Times-Picayune I can find. Their website hasn’t been updated since Monday’s edition. Their Tuesday front page link leads to last Tuesday’s.
Tuesday, 9:40 a.m.
The Times-Picayune is evacuating it’s New Orleans building.
Water continues to rise around our building, as it is throughout the region. We want to evacuate our employees and families while we are still able to safely leave our building.
Our plan is to head across the Mississippi River on the Pontchartrain Expressway to the west bank of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish. From there, we’ll try to head to Houma.
Our plan, obviously, is to resume providing news to our readers ASAP. Please refer back to this site for continuing information as soon as we are able to provide it.
I’ve heard stories of the Brazilian rain forest. If a jungle area is clear cut and then allowed to grow back, it comes back differently. The rain forest is what it is because of how it evolved over time.
There’s a truth in that last paragraph for New Orleans. This city will come back (if it is actually able to come back) different than it was a few days ago. You can’t rebuild tradition and charm. You can’t plan to regain what was there by serendipity.
I’m still not sure we know everything.