All eyes are on the Gulf Coast this week as Tropical Storm Isaac – forecast to become Hurricane Isaac – has skirted the coast of Florida and is now tracking to the northwest.
The current path brings Isaac toward New Orleans and has it arriving at or near The Crescent City on the seven year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
Yikes.
It’s too early to tell whether or not we’ll see any of the effects from Isaac in the Tennessee Valley. But, we all remember Katrina. Holly remembers the remnants passing through here and bending many of the trees in the woods behind our house.
We also remember the vivid imagery of television coverage showing people fleeing to safety in boats or on rooftops as levees failed and the city flooded. Many residents rode out the storm while others left New Orleans.
Some headed west on I-10 to Houston. Others headed for other destinations. We had quite a few citizens who made it safely to Knoxville for a brief stay. Holly had a classmate at ESK, in fact, who fled to East Tennessee from Gulfport, MS.
We also remember the tremendous spike in gas prices that resulted from that killer storm.
Maybe it is the memory of Katrina – or the fact that we really haven’t had a major hurricane to speak of recently – that has us all focused on Isaac. One of the local television stations has already sent a news team to the coast to report on the hurricane. I found that to be somewhat surprising during tight budget times.
In the era of super local, super niche news reporting, though, it does make sense. There is already a team of East Tennesseans at the coast from the local chapter of the American Red Cross and you can bet if Isaac does a tremendous amount of damage, there will be scores more Tennessee Volunteers heading that way.
That was one of the stories I remember the most from Katrina.
At the time, I was working at Roane State. On campus, we heard of a t-shirt drive being spearheaded by a local Ford dealership. They were collecting t-shirts. They had reserved a delivery truck to send the shirts to the Gulf Coast. At Roane State, we decided to kick off a local drive to collect our won shirts. Then, once we had a truckload, I took them to the Ford dealership so they could add our shirts to their collection.
I never heard what happened once the shipment of t-shirts arrived. But, you can imagine that if everything you had was wiped out and the sweltering late summer air was bearing down on you day after day when you had no power, no shower and no air conditioning, the idea of a couple clean, fresh shirts would be considered a luxury.
I liked to think it was an example of East Tennesseans and their generous nature to literally give someone “the shirts off their backs.”
Who knows how this hurricane will turn out. The forecast isn’t as dire as the one Katrina brought back in 2005. In fact, as of now, the storm still hasn’t strengthened. Still, we’re all a bit on edge as we wait for that city’s resources to be tested in the aftermath of the next big storm.
Then again, Isaac might skirt east or west. I’ve followed a lot of these storms over the years. They can be fickle. Sometimes, even with the best modern technology and thousands of brilliant professional meteorologists on the job, you just can’t tell what they’re going to do until they actually do it.
JG
(Source: weather.com)
Originally posted 8/27/2012
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