It’s funny how hobbies start. For most of my career, I took the month of August off from work. Meaning that all my vacations were during Hurricane season – often involving a week at a friend’s place on the Gulf Coast. So I got into "tracking" Hurricanes. Back then, it was dots on a map. But as the years progressed, I continued to track Hurricanes, whether they matter to my travel plans or not. And with the coming of the computer, it got to be more and more fun. Recently, I got some sophisticated mapping software [for another hobby], and so this season, I’m loaded for bear.
Another factor is that my only sibling is an English Professor and Department Chairman at LSU in Baton Rouge. She’s been there through Andrew, Rita, Katrina, and now Gustav. They are inland, and ride them out [the blue spot is where she lives]. So I started tracking Hurricane Gustav when it entered the Gulf. The picture is a Microsoft Virtual Earth Satellite image. The tracks are downloaded expected paths from the National Hurricane Center. All of this stuff is very accurate using my GIS software. When I woke up at 4AM, I got the current prediction which had Gustav slowing down when it got over land. That would have drowned New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It was also frightening because it was west of Baton Rouge, so for the first time, she’d be on the "bad side" of the Hurricane.
I just talked to her. Their power is out. She said it was pretty rough – worse than any of the others. Winds pushed the rain horizontal and "through" the windows – around the edges of the glass panes. Winds gusted up to 90 miles per hour. Tumbling trees were everywhere. But the good news is that this Hurricane never slowed down. It’s still moving at 16 miles per hour just like it was when it left Cuba. So, she says that it’s still raining, but it’s not a deluge and people are out and about assessing their damage – it’s already essentially on the way to being "over" – saving Louisiana from the predicted drenching. The current guesstimated track is labeled 6PM Monday. Now we’re hoping for a fair wind that will blow some of that rain to drought-torn North Georgia where we live. Hurricane tracking beats watching the Republican National Convention hands down. No contest!
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