From Katrina To Rita

I haven’t blogged for a while. At present it just seems that my fight with prostate cancer is so small as I look at what’s going on with Hurricane Rita. While Hurricane Rita has been downgraded from Category 5 to Category 3 this morning, it still has the potential to be a nasty storm for the Gulf Coast. Many of the cities in Texas and Louisiana in that area have been evacuated and look much like ghost towns. It looks like Rita won’t make a direct hit on Houston and Galveston as predicted earlier. But it’s such a large system, about 400 miles wide, that much of western Louisiana and eastern Texas will be affected by flooding.

Forecasters project that Rita will make landfall early Saturday morning somewhere near Beaumont, Port Arthur and Lake Charles. My concern about the levees breaking has come true. The levee along the industrial canal in New Orleans already has three breaks and all the rain is not yet on the ground. What I am fearful of now is that the flooding from these breaks will put New Orleans under water again. It’s going to get worst before it gets better.

I just finished reading this story from MSNBC News:

NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Rita’s steady rains sent water during over a patched levee Friday, cascading into one of the city’s lowest-lying neighborhoods in a devastating repeat of New Orleans’ flooding nightmare.

“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.”

Dozens of blocks in the Ninth Ward were under water as a waterfall at least 30 feet wide poured over and through a dike that had been used to patch breaks in the Industrial Canal levee. On the street that runs parallel to the canal, the water ran waist-deep and was rising fast. Guidry said water was rising about three inches a minute.

Water also poured out from under the canal's western barrier, which faces the historic French Quarter roughly three miles away.

An official with the New Orleans Fire Department said flooding reached a mile inland west of the canal. It also reached as far north as Interstate 10, which divides the city.
The impoverished Ninth Ward was one of the areas of the city hit hardest by Katrina’s floodwaters and finally had been pumped dry before Hurricane Rita struck.
Throughout Friday morning, water began rising again onto buckled homes, piles of rubble and mud-caked cars that Katrina had covered with up to 20 feet of water.


I have a sister living in Houston and Barb has a sister living there also. Barb’s sister’s family all evacuated to Fort Worth on Thursday. My sister decided that she was going to stick and it out. I hope she made a good decision. Even if she had decided to leave on Thursday she would have been stuck in traffic. Thousands of people are in their cars trying to escape the hurricane. Gas stations along the evacuation routes are out of gas causing cars to be abandoned in traffic. Some people are and have been waiting at gas stations for hours for gas. The biggest concern now is for the people out on the roads.

A bus carrying elderly evacuees from the Houston area caught on fire on Interstate 45. As many as 24 people died. The accident forced the interstate to be shut down, creating a 17-mile traffic back up.

My prayers and heartfelt sympathy goes out to all the people who are and who will be affected by Hurricane Rita. Especially to all of the people who evacuated to Houston from New Orleans because they are being evacuated again.