A weary and hot hello from Baton Rouge
Hey guys! I finally have access to internet for the first time in 8 days. I plan on posting a full story of our Gustav adventure complete with pictures, but until then I just wanted to take a moment to say hello and thanks to all who stayed in touch with us and offered help.
The storm came blowing through town on Monday, and don't let the national media fool you, it packed a hell of a punch. Unfortunately for us, the TV cameras set up on the levees in New Orleans waiting for them to break, and when they didn't, they packed up and went home. Meanwhile, Baton Rouge is facing the worst storm in it's history, and we don't hear boo about it on the national news (what little we've been able to access).
In a nutshell, our city went completely without power on Monday morning and is still struggling to recover. Billy and I were unable to find basic supplies such as ice, food, gas, or water until Thursday, and even then what we found was subject to ridiculous lines stretching for blocks. We cooked what we could out of the freezer on the BBQ pit, but other than a few things our entire fridge contents were lost.
My neighborhood (and about 75% of the city, for that matter) is filled with cars and homes which were completely crushed by falling oak trees. Power lines around the city, including the major transmission lines are down everywhere you look. Even today (8 days post-Gustav), when around half the city has power back up, it took me 1.5 hours to drive 4 miles to work because of the lack of traffic signals. At the peak of outage, about 1.2 million people were without power. I believe as of this morning that number is down to around 500,000. My mother's neighborhood was told they would recieve power on or around September 24th.
But I guess the good news is that we were one of the few that didn't have a tree fall through our house, and despite the intense damage surrounding us, the only person in danger in our househould was Billy - I've never heard a grown man whine quite so much about being hot and I thought I was going to kill him! :o
We do have power back at the house now as of Saturday night, but still no internet. I'm at work for the first time today, and we have power but no air conditioning. Now we are looking at the possibility of Ike heading our way, which I fear would do far more damage to our already weakened city. The news has already forgotten us - I guess our disaster wasn't as flashy as Katrina, and the overhead camera views just didn't grab attention like before. /sigh
For the WoW folks, who knows when we will be back. Our cable/internet provider suffered a 100% outage in our city (of almost 1 million people), so nobody can say when things will be fixed.
Thanks again for all the concern you guys showed us, and I'll have pictures up soon.
