7 years is not that long a period of time. On a hot August Friday in 2005 most New Orleanians and southeastern Louisianians were content with a pre-season Saints game and the news that a hurricane was messing with Florida. By the time the game was over and we awoke on Saturday, everything changed. Katrina was not headed for Florida, she was coming for us and she was big. By now, the rest is history. It has been well chronicled what Katrina did to New Orleans, mostly because of faulty flood control, and areas like St. Bernard and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Back then, the Saturday reality of being in the bullseye afforded most only a short window to plan or to even flee. By Monday morning, August 29th Katrina hit. This quiet Sunday morning is so eerily familiar. And I could not be more taken aback by the similarities.
Consider the following: the storm has been a Florida event as proclaimed by the media and the forecasters for over a week now. Even as late as yesterday, just yesterday, the media reported that New Orleans would be less and less in that dreaded cone of uncertainty. My sister likes to call it the cone of confusion. But things started changing late last night and on this, a Sunday morning, we are being told the storm is headed for Mobile, Alabama but possibly as far west as, you guessed it, New Orleans. Unlike 7 years ago, we are told this morning that we still have over 48 hours to prepare, or flee if that is called for. Yet the recent predictions of landfall, if it were to move west and hit southeast Louisiana place the time at 1 a.m., Wednesday, August 29, 2012; 7 years to the day Katrina struck. Eerily similar!
With 48 to 60 hours to go many things can and will change. The only thing constant about hurricanes and their forecast is change. This is life in a hurricane zone. Among the top reasons I loathe the summer is this annual threat to our very lives. And from mid August to mid September we always have to be keeenly vigilant as this is the peak of hurricane season. And so, here we are.
Prayers are needed and prayers requested from you for all of us; and I'm refering to all who live along this vulnerable and all too often affected Gulf Coast. Down here as we pray to God for his mercy, we turn to Mary, under the title of Our Lady of Prompt Succor, to help us with her prayers. Her intercession has helped New Orleans and the surrounding areas before, may they do so now.
Ouch.
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