The Seven Year *itch

Seven years ago we all remember where we were when the attacks on America began. It was a defining moment in our republic, a focal point from where we knew we were no longer safe in this world. This was the day that global terrorism became domestic. We had watched from afar for many years and witnessed how others in far off lands had struggled with the threat of terrorism as part of their everyday fabric. We had labored under a false sense of security. After that black Tuesday morning, we could no longer look at terror in the same way as we had on September 10, 2001. In a plan designed to frighten our citizenry and shake the foundation of our nation, the enemy used our own advanced technology against us, felling the noble Twin Towers in New York, the symbol of our financial prowess, and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the seat of our military power. Seven years ago today we shook our heads in disbelief, mourned our victims and, in a series of specific measures, set about redefining what liberties we would have to do without in order to safeguard our national security. It seems pretty clear to me that the future of our nation depends on our ability to protect ourselves. With brave men and women stationed in far away lands to safeguard its liberty, America finds itself on the brink of one of its most important national elections. It is important we remember the lessons of 9/11 and keep them close at heart when we cast our ballots in less than eight weeks.

Breathing a sigh of relief

Sometime yesterday I went from major hurricane mode and consideration of having to evacuate a second time to being able to breathe a sigh of relief and relax for the first time in a week. Frankly, the prospect of being able to enjoy the weather for the first time since Gustav came roaring into town, is much appreciated. I began to think about Hurricane Betsy, the 43rd anniversary of which was this past week. Hurricane Betsy was the first storm that taught me the magnitude of what a hurricane could do and it gave me insight into how dangerous these storms could be. My mom and dad flew over the hurricane as they journeyed to Guatemala and the Yucatan Peninsula for a two-week vacation. They literally flew over Betsy and came back just after essential services had been restored. My housekeeper Victoria was in charge of taking care of my sister and me and we had no electricity for most of that fortnight. Many storms have come and gone in the intervening decades, but I always respected them after Betsy, even when they were just at tropical storm strength. Now that Ike has made a more westerly track towards Texas or Mexico and lost most of its power, I am ready to think about more important things like the presidential campaign or the recovery effort going on in Houma or maybe about the onset of fall. In any event I am now ready to keep my mind affixed on any of these events as long as I can keep my attention off tropical storm activities.

Disasters of both kinds

Thank you, Cuba. While I thought for sure that Hurricane Ike would be moving into the Gulf of Mexico as a powerful category 2 or 3 storm before re-strengthening, your jagged and mountainous landscape provided just the resistance needed to tame the storm into a category 1. Of course 73 deaths were attributed to Ike in Haiti and we’ll probably hear about the death toll in Cuba within another 24 hours. But as was the case with Gustav, any lessening of strength is something for which we should all be grateful. While many in New Orleans and along the Louisiana Gulf Coast have kept a wary eye on Ike as the storm churned in the Caribbean, others in the nation are looking to Washington, D.C. to witness an unnatural disaster. I am speaking of the incredible bailout by the federal government of FannieMae and FerdieMac. Thanks to lobbying on behalf of mortgage and banking interests who needed it to save their financial necks, the United States assumed the assets and liabilities of those two giant lending institutions that will cost taxpayers anywhere from $200 billion to as much as $500 billion. As the late Senator Everett Derksen was wont to say “A billion here and a billion there…pretty soon you’re talking real money.” So, which will have the most impact on our lives? The natural disaster that could cause levees to fail or the unnatural bailout of two financial institutions who were run so shabbily that the government had to come to their aid after creating financial havoc in the lending industry? Only time will tell, but either way we’ll need a lifesaver to hold onto or else risk being sucked into the vortex of financial doom or social upheaval.

I don't like Ike and neither should you

A possible one, two punch from two major hurricanes within a week of each other? That's preposterous. That's ridiculous. That's exactly what could be happening right now. The likelihood that Ike will strike Florida is fairly certain. Experts are suggesting it could be the most powerful storm to strike Florida since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. People in New Orleans will recall two facts. When Hurricane Betsy hit Miami in 1965, it started on a track that eventually hit New Orleans. When Hurricane Andrew struck the southern peninsula of Florida, it followed a similar track. With those historical markers stated, let me now give you my gut feelings. All through the Gustav crisis, I kept eyeing Ike. It developed very quickly and reminded me of Hurricane Camille in how compact and destructive it seemed to be. Because it already is or is about to hit areas devastated by Gustav and Hannah earlier, this storm has the potential to inflict major loss of life in the Caribbean. But closer to home there are several things that are clear. To mount another major evacuation in another few days on the scale of what we went through with Gustav seems unlikely. Like the boy who cried wolf, Mayor Nagin's call for everyone to leave the city for the "mother of all storms" might come back to haunt him. People may reason that nothing happened before, so why not ride out the storm. That's a dangerous assumption and one that police and Homeland Security definitely don't one people to take. Like it or not, a good number of people in Southeast Louisiana don't have the means necessary to evacuate and stay away from their homes for extended periods of time. I am holding my breath a bit on this one. As Ike makes its way towards the Gulf, we'll get a better sense where the storm will eventually make landfall. The forecasters were dead on track for Gustav. Their suggested path of the storm has it in the Gulf by Thursday, a horrifying thought indeed.

Getting over Gustav

There's still plenty of folks in New Orleans who still don't have power, but you can see progress is being made. I was reminded again of the many months following Hurricane Katrina, when I would return to the city on a sporadic basis from my home base in Cleveland. Every single major intersection in the city had stop signs. Many of those same busy intersections were again without power after Gustav and stop signs were hastily erected to prevent accidents. Incredibly, in a city marked by horrible drivers, the low technology worked. Normally disagreeable red light runners would slow, stop and give way to slower vehicles at the all-way stops. It was one of the good things that came out of the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. No one was going any particular place very fast, so why bother driving like a maniac? It all seemed so clear then. The winds of Gustav may have created more damage than Katrina over a larger area in the state. Of the 64 parishes in Louisiana (every other state calls them counties), only two suffered no damage from Gustav. That's an amazing fact. The hardest hit area continues to be where the storm came ashore, including Grand Isle and Cocodrie, and north of that point in Houma. Many residents who have chosen to return will face lack of power, potable water and sewerage service for several more weeks to come. School districts are having to deal very harsh conditions for students as many facilities are now destroyed. In the end many students will have to be bused or will have to be driven to more remote locations while the recovery effort continue. In the meantime, city and state officials continue to make progress as we all cast a wary eye on the other major storm in the Caribbean, Ike. Hurricane Ike is a dangerous category 4 storm churning up seas with 140 miles-per-hour winds. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has announced several locations that are in need of repair before Ike gets much closer to New Orleans. Some of these projects are already being undertaken, while others need to be started immediately. The biggest danger seems to be in Grand Isle, where 85% of an 8,000 square foot area on the island's eastern area disappeared after the storm passed. We are all busy getting things back in order, but not all of the boards placed along windows have come down. It would seem silly to take them down only to have to put them back up in another four days time when Ike could be threatening offshore oil operations and moving towards landfall somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. For those interested in looking at statistical data in a graphic presentation as to the impact of Gustav's storm surge, here's an excellent link prepared by the Times-Picayune, whose award-winning reporter and author Mark Schliffstein has been on top of his game again. 

The drive home, part two

A long line of cars headed into New Orleans at the merger of I-55 and I-10

Thursday morning I arose and loaded up my vehicle, iced down the remaining food items and left the camp around 10:30 a.m. Despite advice from a couple of people, I decided to take a chance and use Interstate-55 for reentry into New Orleans. Traffic was steady and flowing with only a few pockets of what I would term slowdowns where we creeped along at 25 or 30 miles an hour. The only major bottleneck was at the point where I-55 joins Interstate 10. I was there just in time to see the long line of blue flashing Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's deputies cars escorting a long caravan of yellow school buses filled with hundreds of our very own criminals to Orleans Parish Prison. It certainly made one proud.
A quick trip to Kosher Cajun Delicatessen and Grocery allowed me to enjoy a bowl of steaming matzah ball soup and a triple salad combination of tuna salad, potato salad and cole slaw. It was quite good and, as it turns out, necessary to prepare me for the rest of the drive.
The trip from Jefferson Parish into New Orleans seemed normal until I got off the exit for Howard Avenue near my home. It was then that I noticed quite a number of downed trees, especially palms and a few pines. Several oak trees had also been toppled by the force of Gustav's winds. As I approached Vendome Place, I noticed the tin roof from a truck leasing business was lying in the front of a next door residence:

There was the usual amount of debris on the streets, especially tree limbs from oaks that find their way into city streets and sometimes impede traffic flow. Luckily for me there were no large limbs blocking my way and I proceeded down Vendome. I spotted an unlucky victim of Gustav, a column on the portico of a home that was now pointed out toward the street:

I proceeded up Vendome to where it intersects with Fountainbleau Drive, near my home and made the turn onto Nashville Avenue. There I found my home somewhat shaken, but definitely marked by Gustav's gusts. The carport that had survived Katrina and all other hurricanes and tropical storms for the last 20 was gone! Only the rigid poles that held it in place remained stationary. Some pieces were in the driveway, but most had been blown into my back yard. The force of the winds had literally torn the carport from the side of my home:

Now don't get me wrong. I wasn't in love with my carport, but it was useful, especially when I had to enter my home in a torrential downpour. It did have a hole put into it one New Year's Eve by a falling bullet that bounced off the roof of my car and came to rest underneath the vehicle. Yes, in New Orleans it is advisable to stay off the open air streets during New Year's Eve. But I guess what struck me was that even with such powerful force evidenced by Gustav's effect on my home, it couldn't compare with the destruction wreaked on it by the floods that came after Katrina. The hurt from Katrina was on the inside rather than that which showed so readily on the outside following Gustav. Meanwhile, many residents of Jefferson and Orleans Parish are still without power. My power is on and I enjoyed a restful night in my own bed for the first time since Saturday night. May it ever be so humble....

The drive home, part one

The drive home from Memphis was done in two stages and at great expense in both time and energy. I had made the trip from Graceland in less than 15 minutes and still had about five or six minutes to spare before the ducks did their thing. So it was that I had just left the Peabody Hotel and thought to myself how lucky I was that I had been able to take advantage of the complimentary parking in their garage for the first half-hour. But my luck was about to change. Thinking ahead, I pulled into a service station in downtown Memphis and topped off my gas tank. As I turned from the street into the Exxon station on Union Avenue, my front right tire, (one of a set of four new tires I had put on my vehicle in June) hit something -- I'm still not sure what. Having a Chevrolet Blazer makes me always think that it's almost tank-like in the way it can roll over objects. But the truth is like many other trucks, it is vulnerable to tire punctures. When I came from having to pay for the gasoline, I discovered to my horror that the tire was already deflated and rapidly losing what little air remained. It was 5:20 p.m. My gut feeling was that I was stuck in Memphis for the night. However, with some helpful suggestions from the service station employees, I called a Firestone station three blocks away. The manager who answered the phone gave me directions. If I wanted to get credit for the punctured tire, I could have changed it with the spare and then put that tire inside my already filled rear compartment, driven to the dealership and replaced the spare with a new tire. Time was moving on and they closed their doors at 7:00 p.m. I knew I had to chance driving on the bad tire and risk not getting any credit for it at Firestone. As it turned out, the puncture was on the sidewall and probably wouldn't have amounted in my getting any credit anyway. The short drive to the dealership took less than two minutes, but by the time I got there the tire was shredded. Taking advantage of the break, I improvised a cocktail with some of the ice in the large plastic bags I had taken from my hotel earlier in the day. It took them nearly an hour to change the tire and for me to get back on the road with the shredded tire inside my very overpacked vehicle for the drive home. You'll recall that I still had a brand new generator taking up most of the available space inside along with food items, clothes and plastic water bottles. Although my rear vision was a bit obscured, I felt ready for the journey when the clock neared 6:45 p.m. Almost as soon as I hit the highway, I ran into a steady hard rain that was left over from Gustav. The rain was non-stop for the next two and a half hours. I got a call from a friend who advised me that the line of cars to get back into Louisiana was 20 miles long. Apparently, Governor Bobby Jindal overrode Mayor Ray Nagin's decision to not allow residents back into their homes and ordered the state troopers to open up the interstate highways to one and all. The cars began lining up at midnight on Wednesday even though the evacuees knew that their homes might be without electricity, water or sewerage services. I had had a busy day and very little sleep, so I called Jonathan Cohen late at night at Henry S. Jacobs Camp and he advised me to get permission from his assistant Avram to have a staff cabin for the night. That was a step up from the camper cabin I had slept in during the storm, mind you. By the time I rolled into camp, it was near midnight. I put the food under refrigeration and went looking for a parking spot along the side of the road near the cabin. It was dark in that area and just after I had pulled into a likely spot, I decided it might be too muddy. I was right. I tried backing out, but the car only went sideways. My rear tires spun around, but could get no traction. I reversed the vehicle and it lurched forward only slightly. I went back and forth, trying in vain to get out of the mud, but to no avail. Only a man possessed could have done what I did next. Instead of going to sleep and dealing with it in the morning, I elected to call AAA. The operator said they would not make an appointment for me for the following morning, so I told them to have a tow truck dispatched immediately. It took almost another hour, but a middle-aged tow operator and his much younger assistant showed up and took all of 10 minutes to get me out of the mud and onto solid ground. Then it was time for sleep.