Like I said in the last post, we are about to experience our first hurricane in Louisiana. We moved here about a year after Hurricane Katrina and are currently waiting Hurricane Gustav's arrival. The hurricane has actually started to hit the coast of the state this morning. We leave in the very northwestern point of the state, which is about 5 hours from New Orleans. Dan's dad and step mom as well as much of her family live in Lafayette, which is less than 2 hours from the coast. They have spent the weekend boarding up windows and packing away anything that might fly with the high wind speed of the storm. Donna told me that when hurricane Katrina hit their neighbor had an orange tree and the oranges flew through the window of their cars because the wind was so strong.
With hurricanes comes lots of tornadoes and flooding as well. Since we live so far north everyone has been evacuating to here but that doesn't mean we will miss out on all the weather. We are expected to get up to 20 inches of rain and I am sure we will be on tornado watch. School has been closed up until at least Wednesday because all of the school buses have headed south to help with the evacuation process that is in place as well as because of the chances of bad weather and flooding here.
Donna was telling us that in Lafayette all the regular and premium pumps are out of gas. All you can buy is the supreme now. They went to several stores to buy batteries for flashlights but everywhere was sold out. Most everyone seems to be planning for the storm a little better this time. When we stayed in a hotel on Friday night in Shreveport we learned that all the hotels in Northern Louisiana are totally booked and that you have to head into Arkansas to find a vacancy now. The local University, LSUS, is housing thousands of evacuees as well as the gym on base has been opened up to evacuees as well.
We are told to experience a much higher evacuee count than for Katrina becuase this time the entire gulf coast is evacuating due to the enormous size of the storm. It is said the storm is the size of Texas. At church yesterday we were informed that we may be getting phone calls from the ward asking us to help home some of our fellow churchmembers from the south. More than likely we may end up housing family this week. It will be an interesting week, one I am sure we will not forget for a long, long time.
1 comment:
Good luck with all this. My in-laws live down around there and are preparing for it as well. They are not in a high risk area but still it is scarey. I hope everything works out for your and Dan's family.
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