Well, this sucks.

We have an office two blocks off the river near Canal Place in New Orleans. Old building. Leaky roof. Leaky windows. At least we're not on the ground floor - Subway leases that spot!

We're probably shutting them down today and giving them the day off tomorrow. We're just waiting for the 2:00 pm NHC update.

<gripe> And we just did this with our Palm Beach and Miami offices. Twice! </gripe>



-jk

Yeah, i'm freaked out about it too... i have a lot of friends and family in New Orleans, and my grandparents beach house is in Pensacola (which was turned into twigs during Andrew.) If a cat 5 hurricance hit New Orleans it would be disasterous. The whole city sits well under sea level and is surrounded by a levee system... a storm surge of what is it.... 10 ft or so would flood the city. Scary stuff.

It is an absolute risk. On the other hand, I'm more worried about being in 10-12 feet of water this time thursday. As a hurricane passes east of New Orleans, it counter clockwise flow is filling lake Pontchatrain. As the storm passes, the winds shift, possibly overcoming the seawall and filling the city with water.

Absolute worst case scenario is that a Cat 4-5 goes up the mouth of the Mississippi. I don't even want to think about that.

All that being said, if the storm surge is greater than 12-14 feet, the levee system is underwater and the city gets flooded. Even though we have the best pumping systems in the world, if there's nowhere to pump water TO, it's rather moot. And of course, since I made the first post, the danger cone has shifted west, so we're in more danger than we were yesterday, although it looks as though it will be to our east. This is good news, as the most rain from a hurricane is dumped on the east side. Most places around here can handle the winds, just not the water.

I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that it stays east of me and mine. Granted, I don't wish it on anyone, but at least other places have less dire consequences if it does hit.

Loren, where do your parents have condo's? We have a couple in the Santa Rosa Dunes on Pensacola Beach. When Erin and Opal hit in '95 we sustained minimal damage, although the other side of the island wasn't so lucky.

My grandparents (RIP) own(ed) a house on Gulf Breeze, on the Gulf side beach, which is now my father, aunt and uncle's. They've owned it since before i was born... spent almost every summer there. I need to scan some pictures i have of the aftermath of Andrew... pretty unbelievable. I walked up and down the beach (what was left of it) and took black and white shots of the twigs and cement blocks that were left. It was so weird how one house would be completely gone, some washed away, and some still standing half collapsed. This is what was built to replace it. That pic was taken shortly after it's completion in '98 i believe. The bottom story is built to wash out completely... and the rest is about 15 feet up from the slab. Hope i'll get to see it again in person.

Found out today that most of my family in New Orleans made it all the way to Houston. They could have stayed with my mom in Baton Rouge, but they didn't even wanna be in that close when it hit. Heheh. My mom has a camp in Grand Isle i believe (haven't been there... it's a recent acquisition)... they are probably going to get a ton of damage on that place. They went and took the boat out and boarded up and said that i-10 back was going 25mph the whole way. They turned it into a one way out of N.O. Than there's my friends in N.O. who CAN'T evacuate since they have no car. Yeesh. Keep us posted... hope you make it out unscathed.

Ahhhh... OK. In good news, they're projecting a much tighter cone and we're not in it. We're still going to receive a LOT of rain, but that should be OK. Looks like Grand Isle is going to be taking some damage. They're starting to get rain NOW. Most of my immediate family in New Orleans is in memphis with the exception of my mother-in-law iand father-in-law. He works for the Police Dept. and she is the director of 911. My wife and I are both at City Hall getting things prepared to hopefully run smoothly. She's the web admin and is keeping things up to date and of course I'm the alpha geek. So we're both required to stay.

As time passes things seem to be looking better and better for us though.

Sweet. That's good to hear. Tons of rain is never good either, but it's better than tons of rain and lots of wind. Can you post a link to the site ya'll are maintaining?

Sure. http://www.kenner.la.us

As of 5:00 PM there hasn't been a drop of rain. Unbelieveable. It seems that a band of dry air is killing the rain bands that are sweeping west about 20 miles east of New Orleans. New pictures should be up in 15 minutes or so.

Looks like you'll be getting some rain shortly. Stay dry.

http://www.weather.com/maps/news/atlstorm9/dopplerradar600mile_large.html

I agree, but the picture has looked like that for hours now. That dry wind keeps evaporating the rain before it gets here. Hey, do me a favor and try to get as many people as you can to hit the site. We're counting unique hits and since my wife is doing the site I want it to be a high number!

I like this one. This is our lake Pontchatrain. The normal wave rarely exceed 2-3 inches.

Well, we made it through withou even a drop of water. We had some wind, but very very little got damaged. My family wasn't quite so lucky. They're OK, but the neighborhood got pretty messed up. The amount of damage is unbelieveable. It's weird that I vacationed in Gulf Shores about a month ago and the place where I stayed no longer exists.

For those interested, my family is all OK. Finally got in touch with them this morning. It seems a tornado went through the woods about 50 feet from the house but missed the row of houses. Bad news is that restoring power could take anywhere between 3-6 weeks. Dad's practice took some damage, but the building is still there. He should be able to start seeing patients again in about 5-6 weeks.

wow. I am glad they are okay, but that was too close!

Same here. Everyone is okay, but we are still unsure of the status of the house on Gulf Breeze. They still aren't letting people on the island. Here's some photo galleries with some aerial shots of the island and Escambia county. Pretty amazing. Doesn't look as bad as when Andrew came through, but it's hard to tell from those shots. The ones of the cars in the middle of the water are pretty crazy... as are the ones of Ft. Pickens under water.

This church is about a quarter mile East of my family's beach house.

I apparently missed most of the fun, but Pittsburgh (and especially the areas south and west of the city) got hit hard by rain; I was on my way back from Manhattan (where I had to go for the day for my second job). At first things were ok, but soon the roads got bad enough that I gave up and found a hotel. Visibility never sucked; needing to traverse heavy water flows across major highways was getting scary.

Several creekside low-lying areas around Pittsburgh flooded. I have a few pictures to scan and put up later. One person is believed dead but in general it's just been property damage.

Virgina seems to have parts that got hit hard with tornados. Anyone in the World of Warcraft beta hasn't been able to play since friday night, since the data center got hit.

I live in Caroline County in VA where there were a whole bunch of Tornados ... Several about 5 minutes north of my house. Pretty freaky -- the sky looked amazing and ominous.

And that isn't snow.

Heh, if the typical SUV commercials are to be believed, that Durango should be able to just pull right out of there.

I hope that isn't your car Lectric, but seeing an SUV like that really puts a smile on my face!

http://www.pensacolabeachliving.com/pages/3C6W2519.htm
http://www.pensacolabeachliving.com/pages/3C6W2521.htm

The house in the far left of those frames is my family's. Looks to still be there. It's crazy how some houses are just gone, even some that were up on pilings. Man i wish they'd have used a higher res camera.

Can you even get house insurance in an exposed place like that ?

Yeap. But from what little i know of what happened with Andrew, the insurance didn't cover anywhere near the total cost of rebuilding. It's also amazing that that little slice of property is worth close to $2 Million, if not more.

People in the UK who get a small flood every few years are starting to have trouble getting insurance. I can't imagine what a UK insurance company would say if you presented them with a wooden house, on stilts, on sand in a huricane prone area

One last update. Finally found a clear shot of the house:

http://www.pensacolabeachliving.com/pages/3C6W2923.htm

Its on the bottom left. Looks like those storm shutters did the job well! Roof is in tact too. Phew.

Check out the slabs under the houses... there's quite a few feet of sand undermined beneath them.

I was just looking at that... probably missing shingles. It's not a skylight. I wonder if the Pelican weather vane is still up there... hard to tell! heh. The bottom floor where the storage area and Fridge were washed out as designed, which is pretty cool I guess. I was sort of hoping it'd all be gone so we could build a Dome Home! That one is about a quarter mile down the beach from our house ... you can see it in this shot. The owners actually rode out the hurricane in it. Crazy.

[edit] oh, and i should correct what i said before. The house is on Pensacola Beach on Santa Rosa Island, it's not in Gulf Breeze, which is across the bay. [/edit]

Shadow?

The dome home. Is that built sort of like a Planet of the Apes house? Concrete shell?

Hehe, not my car, I drive a mustang (It's the wife with the Expedition). But that's a LOT of sand to get moved around. As far as living on the water being crazy, it's very very rare that a hurricane that powerful passes over your home. As to a house being on pilings, those typically fare better than those built flat on the ground. When the sand under them is eroded, a piling house is fine, whereas a flat house crumbles. Not to mention much of the damage seen is from storm surge. Being on stilts makes it less likely that a storm surge is high enough to cause serious damage. As far as insurance goes, every area of our country has it's problems. In the SE, we get hurricanes, in the midwest, tornadoes. On the west coast, earthquakes, mudslides and forest fires, The NE is just too F'ing cold.

Keep in mind that some of the buildings in Pensacola that got destroyed were 150+ years old. To be around that long they must have been pretty good odds.

The Dome Home is pretty nifty (if a bit ugly). It's designed to withstand winds of up to 200 MPH. Wow. Some of it is made from steel reinforced concrete built in curves rather than straight walls. Some of it is built with the intention of breaking away in the event of a hurricane. Kindof the same idea as japanese homes being made of paper. If it get's destroyed every couple of years, make it out of something cheap and easily replaced.

All that being said, most of the homes built to the relatively new code were mostly unscathed. It was the older buildings that weren't so lucky. Also, I live in New Orleans, 10 feet below sea level. Between a large lake and the mouth of the mississippi river. When I lived uptown I was 2 blocks from the river. You literally had to look UP to see the ships passing. Guess what my flood insurance cost? ~$250 per year. Perhaps I shouldn't be so worried. The insurance companies aren't.

You may remember that one of the San Joaquin Delta Islands flooded recently. One bit of fallout is that a lot of farmers living on the islands have started building, new, really big houses. On top of man made hills.

A natural sandblasting.

I remember watching them build that dome home for the week i was at the beach last. They inflate a large dome "air bag" and blow concrete on it (or was it IN it... can't recall). Then they cut out the shapes you see afterward... pretty fascinating building process. I think it looks pretty amazing myself though the general consensus seems to dislike it.

It's one of those "so ugly it's cool) things. Looks like an alien from Batteries Not Included to me.

But this is snow!


The weather here hasn't been anything like elsewhere, but it was great yesterday to look up at the mountains and see the first snow of the year. Did the snow make it over to you Drakino? The ski resort just up the canyon from me got 8" The only downer is now my favorite bike trail is under snow