I saw an interview with a woman from NOLA who wrote her identification information on her arm with a permanent black marker. IIRC, she also wrote all over her son, both for identification and to help reunite them if they got seperated.
Eh. My parents’ house is over 75 miles inland, way out of the range of the storm surge, and has never flooded in the 20 years they’ve been living there. I’m not too worried.
lieu partly answered that in an earlier post. Here’s more info than you wanted, gleaned from Wikipedia.
Tropical Storm Arlene: made landfall in the US, one person killed by riptides.
TS Bret: made landfall in Mexico, two deaths in a car taken away by floodwater.
TS Cindy: hit the US, killing three.
Hurricane Dennis: became a hurricane 7/6, and did most of its damage in the Carribean. Killed at least 70 people with an additional hundred missing, and briefly had the highest windspeed for a storm before August.
Hurricane Emily: became a hurricane 7/14 and broke Dennis’ windspeed record, hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, killed seven people.
TS Franklin: passed over the Bahamas, briefly threatened Bermuda.
TS Gert: made landfall in Mexico on 7/24. Hit roughly the same area as Emily, four days later.
TS Harvey: soaked Bermuda.
Hurricane Irene: never came near land.
TS Jose: made landfall in Mexico on 7/23, eight killed.
Hurricane Katrina: nothing I can tell you you wouldn’t already know.
TS Lee: never came near land, was only tropical storm strength for about a day.
Hurricane Maria: brought heavy rain and wind to Iceland.
Hurricane Nate: went past Bermuda, briefly disrupted aid coming to Katrina survivors.
Hurricane Ophelia: figures that a storm named Ophelia would be crazy- hung around for days, finally dumped 18 inches of rain on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but never reached land.
Hurricane Philippe: still in the Carribean, but it’s down to a tropical storm again.
Sorry, Star Trek fans, there is no Q.
Hurricane Rita: the second time the NOAA has gotten to the letter “R” since they started naming storms in 1953.
The record for named storms in a year is 21 (1933), we’re now at 17 with nine hurricanes. In case anybody’s curious, the names still on the list are Stan, Tammy, Vance, and Wilma. If they needed more names, they’d use Greek letters.
This is unreal. Sounds like even a little rain could be a problem for New Orleans, too. This has turned into a really major hurricane, and fast.
New tracking forecasts put landfall much closer to Houston and Galveston than was originally predicted earlier this afternoon. Not good, my friends, not good. Good wishes to all dopers and everyone else along the Texas gulf coast.
And if you think gas prices are bad now, pray that Rita doesn’t track further east and make landfall east of Houston near all the refineries.
Rita’s tracking a bit West of Houston now - let’s hope it stays to the West. I don’t hear anybody saying this, but it seems obvious that risking flooding New Orleans again is a much better scenario than ravaging *another * couple of cities. And if those refineries in that area get nailed the whole U.S. economy is going to take an absolute beating.
For comparison, the 1900 storm was measured at 28.55" (at landfall of course). That’s about 966.8 mb according to NOAA. Mind you, they expect this storm to weaken somewhat when it makes landfall, but it nonetheless looks like it will be equivalent to that storm from a century ago.
It’s going to be just a LOVELY weekend here too. Oh dear. We didn’t get anything from Katrina. Looks like we’re going to get some of Rita, inland or not.
Remember when the mayor of Houston and other people from Texas were saying that of course they were going to help the people in New Orleans because it could be them next time? I doubt they expected next time to be a month–and the first real hurricane–later.
Houston is a nice city, and minus the traffic it’s kind of neat. Cops usually just respond to calls, but now they’re out patrolling. Just lookin’ at how the stuff sits.
I can’t leave until I deliver my mother to Bush Intercontinental for her 9:40 AM Friday flight out to Albuquerque. That’s the only flight I could get her and it leaves me with too little time, since I must get her to the airport, to evacuate myself.
Fuck, Mom, I hope you live through this, but you’ve screwed a lot of lives by insisting on these few moments that you alone appreciate.
I remember what happened with gas prices after Katrina, so today right after work I bought a 5-gallon gas can and filled it up when I stopped to fill up my car. This extra gas should let me go about a week without having to buy gas. Hopefully, I can avoid the worst of the supply disruptions.
Tonight I’m filling up my tank and doing some shopping. The farther east she goes the worse it’s going to be here; yes, I’m inland, but it sounds like it’s going to be an awful weekend. I keep telling myself the news is always going to jump to the worst-case scenario, but it sounds like we’re going to have a heck of a tropical storm nonetheless.
I’d wait and do the shopping tomorrow morning, but for the heavy stuff I want my guy to help. He’s got more muscles than I do and we live on the second floor.
Well, my sister and her boys (including one with Juv.Diabetes) arrived at the airport at 10am for their 1pm flight out, and as of 4pm, they were still waiting…