Man, Rita has thrown a real wrench into what was going to be a fun weekend decompressing from Katrina.
Forecasters are expecting the storm to pass close to Austin as a tropical storm, with possible hurricane-strength winds in central Texas. At the very least, it is likely to be a catastrophic storm somewhere along the Texas coast, and possibly in Houston.
So it seems prudent to prepare around here. Bring in all the plants, lawn furniture, trash cans, etc. Get ready for possible downed trees and power outages. And prepare for the possibility of the kinds of shortages of food and gas currently seen in Baton Rouge if we get a huge influx of evacuees from the coast.
And just in case we get off easy, we still need to prepare for a possibly damp Austin City Limits festival, on the off chance it doesn’t get cancelled.. Find ponchos and tarps instead of sunscreen and blankets, etc.
All this while the poor Katrina evacuees are being booted out of the convention center as of Friday. Right about the time we start seeing the first rain bands come ashore. CERT is trying to round up volunteers to help escort Convention Center residents through the process of checking out, and once again I feel guilty for not being able to volunteer.
Meanwhile the Houston Katrina evacuees are being shipped to Arkansas to get them out of the way of Rita. Like the lost tribes of Israel.
Moses, Moses…
Frantic activity
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Ray, The Statesman has just put up its own contribution to the “too many places online for people to search for loved ones” syndrome:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/rita/msg_board.html
I emailed them and begged them not to, got this response from News Editor Christian McDonald:
“Yes, we are admittedly ill equipped and we are using the only resources we have available. We’ll keep an eye on this for a specific Rita board. thanks for your note.”
I’m annoyed as hell but wrote back politely to repeat my request. I couldn’t stop MSNBC or CNN from adding to the problem, but surely I can make some headway with my own hometown paper?
Oy.
I can kind of see their point, in that there aren’t any Rita-specific people finders yet. But then again, there isn’t an urgent need for a people finder yet, since people are just now starting to evacuate, so what’s the Statesman’s rush?
I’ll try writing them, but they don’t call them the Hooterville Times for nuthin’. The Statesman is just an all-around poor excuse for a newspaper anyway.
I’ll try not to worsen your stress with the server move, man. We don’t wanna stop you from live-blogging the storm.
I’ll try to make the move as painless as possible. B^)