If you are in the path of Ivan and can get out, do so! Go. Leave. Get out. You are more important than your stuff. You don’t have the evacuation problems South Florida has, you have more than a couple of roads north, and you can also go way east or west. Yes, you could feel like a coward. You might even feel silly if you leave and it doesn’t hit you. But, believe me, if it hits you as a category 4 or 5 and you are still there, you will regret it.
This especially applies to New Orleans and the bayous. Got that? BUG OUT! I’ve been thinking about what could happen there all day long. Then I go blog reading and catch this post at Wizbang. It could be even worse than I thought. Get out. Down here in Florida, we had no where to go and no gas to get there if we did. You don’t have that problem. Get out of its way.
So speaketh one who lived through a Category 4. Believe me, there were times during that storm that I wondered if I would live.
From Scientific American Magazine Oct 2001
New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh-an area the size of Manhattan-will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die.
Comment by Kevin — 14 Sep, 2004 @ 22:00