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August 31, 2005
Hurricane
I grew up on Florida’s Gulf Coast where hurricanes were a regular threat. When I was a teenager, my friends and I loved to hear that a tropical storm was headed up the gulf. Unlike the oceans, the gulf is calm and peaceful. The approach of a hurricane meant a great opportunity for body-surfing.
Later, when I was a journalist in Florida, I took a more responsible view of hurricane threats. When one was headed our way, we invariably quoted Dr. Neil Frank, director of the National Hurricane Center. He was a doomsayer, always predicting the worst. Only rarely did the damage match his warnings.
Last year, with four major hurricanes hitting Florida, something had obviously changed. This week’s horror on the Gulf Coast – cinderblock buildings simply disappearing in Gulfport and Biloxi, New Orleans inundated – was exactly what Frank worried about all those years.
My friend Jim Amoss is editor of the Times-Picayune, the New Orleans newspaper. Through heroic efforts, the paper is being published online. The staff evacuated the newspaper building yesterday. If they had a way to print a newspaper, there would be no way to deliver it and few people to whom to deliver it.
The online edition includes sections where local readers can share information. Two are titled “Missing persons” and “What’s happened to my neighborhood?” Today’s lead headline tells the magnitude of the tragedy:
UNDER WATER
LEVEE BREACH SWAMPS CITY FROM LAKE TO RIVER
Population urged to leave; years of cleanup ahead
Gwen Filosa, a former Monitor staffer, works at the Times-Picayune. She is one of many staffers there who lost their homes and possessions. She wrote an e-mail a couple of hours ago to inform us at the Monitor of her situation. It reads:
“We evacuated the paper, 20 at a time, in the backs of delivery trucks, and made an 8-hour trek to land in Baton Rouge (usually a 1½-hour trip). We’re in Baton Rouge, taking over LSU’s journalism dept. Just wanted to say hello and let you all in New Hampshire know I’m okay. We’re all working, for now. I’m still a renter, and pretty much lost everything I owned, but as soon as we waded out of New Orleans, where lawlessness is reportedly hitting all-time lows, I was relieved. I feared people, 7,000 inmates next door to our paper, more than the water.”
(We’re running a longer account from Gwen in tomorrow’s Monitor.)
What an enormous tragedy Katrina has wrought. We can only hope that it is an anomaly, a storm of the century like the Galveston hurricane of 1900. Unfortunately, the evidence points another way.
Posted by Mike Pride at August 31, 2005 06:52 PM
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Comments
It seems like Hurricanes have become very active again like they were in the 50s and 60s.
Posted by: Ryan at August 31, 2005 08:43 PM
I have found it curious over the past week to hear both the governor of MA and reporters in NH excitedly announce that hundreds of Katrina refugees/victims would be coming north to live. Now that plan apparently has been called off, the reason given being that victims did not want to move so far from home.
My first thought upon hearing the announcement was to recall a news item from the sixties, when NH's (?) governor responded to a challenge by a racist from the Deep South, agreeing to a shipment (busload) of blacks from his state (MS?). The people arrived, but didn't end up living here successfully in the long term.
Now I can't find anything on that event, but I'm pretty sure I read about it in the MONITOR, maybe around the time the MLK Holiday was accepted in '99, in a large article that I clipped for a file on Race in NH that Conant School teachers were putting together to help students write NH History projects. Do you recall the incident? Am I nuts? I can't find anything on-line about it, or anyone who remembers? HELP!
Posted by: Jemi at September 8, 2005 10:30 AM