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The Stuff of Human Drama. (Or, Oh God Oh God We’re All Going to Die!)

The Stuff of Human Drama. (Or, Oh God Oh God We’re All Going to Die!)

Saturday evening, I and my roommate (an Atmospheric Sciences major) began watching CNN and the Weather Channel religiously, anxious for a finalized storm track. Sunday, we began preparing to house his parents, his little brother, and their two dogs indefinitely. His parents didn’t think they were going to flee as of Saturday morning. They arrived Sunday at eleven a.m.

For our part in North Louisiana, the disaster has yet to hit. I’m not sure how well our infrastructure will sustain the 1.1 Million refugees that are projected to be here through at least next week. Many if not most of them will be here for months. Already the gas stations are straining to keep up with demand and prices are climbing. Grocers are running low on staple supplies like eggs, milk and bottled water and the warehouses are emptying quickly. And yet the water is still filling our favorite city to the south.

The readers of this blog will fondly remember the post from February “three days in the quarter.” As it now stands, the quarter barely exists. For all intents and purposes, New Orleans is a ghost town and will be for the foreseeable future.

I’ve spoken with several friends in the state government and emergency agencies, and they assure me that we will prevail. But quietly, they say, the state is preparing for over one million unemployed and homeless for the next six months. In short, it doesn’t look good.

All of this, and all we got here was a few clouds, a wind gust of thirty-five miles per hour, and the sky going “phtuh” on my windshield. It is so easy, while driving through town conducting the business of life to forget the massive scale of this tragedy, until you return home to CNN and three people who cannot return home.

Katrina is such a pretty name for such an awesomely destructive force. More on this later. For now, we’re just trying to keep up.