Feels like rain
August 28, 2005 | Comments Off
During hurricane season, my friends stop answering their phones when I call. As longtime readers of this site will remember, my grandparents went through Camille, and my parents, sister and friends weathered Andrew. So I know what the aftermath of a Category Five storm looks like. And when a major hurricane looks to be bearing down on a place, I can’t think about much else.
If New Orleans takes a direct hit from Katrina, the storm could be the worst natural disaster the U.S. has ever seen. Maybe it’ll pull a Camille, and strike along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Or maybe it’ll weaken. They usually do.
But Katrina is massive and mighty, and experts say it threatens “an environmental disaster of biblical proportions, one that could leave more than 1 million people homeless,” destroy 60% to 80% of the city’s houses, and “turn one of America’s most charming cities into a vast cesspool tainted with toxic chemicals, human waste and even coffins.” A 2002 American RadioWorks installment on the likely result to the city of a head-on Category Five attack estimates that 50,000 people could lose their lives.
Let’s hope the Superdome holds. Although the city’s poorest residents are flooding into it, it’s not a Red Cross-certified shelter. It is, in the words of the New Orleans mayor, a shelter “of last resort.”
A scientist at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory Hurricane Research Division recently compiled a list of novels, plays and movies featuring hurricanes as major dramatic elements.
Among them are William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the Bogart & Bacall-starring Key Largo.
A possible cousin of mine in Birmingham is coordinating offers of inland shelter for those fleeing the Gulf Coast. Friends in New Orleans, please check in.
Updates:
- Jeff of Syntax of Things, who has “friends and family members in the storm’s path, or too close to it for comfort,” passes along a link he found earlier today to Oil Storm, “an FX movie that aired a few months ago, and damn if it isn’t quite eerie to read the synopsis.”
- Ken Ringle writes a gorgeous and chilling meditation on the storm: “Katrina: Like 1969’s Monster Storm Camille, Only Bigger.