Current mood:	tired
Entry tags:	gustav, hurricane

And she says, baby, it's 3 AM, I must be lonely...
It has been over half a year since I updated. I didn't even do my Katrina anniversary comments this year. Well, the drought is over, but the topic this year is not Katrina.

We have a different storm to be concerned with today, but thankfully not nearly as bad. At three AM, hurricane Gustav is more of a whimper than a roar. The winds are blowing a little bit, but not even as much as they do in a typical afternoon thunderstorm. Certainly not anything near as bad as we feared.

I have been at work since about 4 PM Sunday afternoon. I ran Chyron most of the day, broken into two shifts. The first went from 5:30 to 9:30 PM and the second went from midnight to around 2:05 AM. The work wasn't too bad. Mostly they needed phoner graphics, so I came up with a list, sorted by last name, which made searching for pages much more straightforward. That got us through the evening a lot easier than usual.

Around midnight, the producer rushed up the stairs and excitedly told me that we were going to do a call-in show. The director groaned, but I was happy because we normally do a phone-in show on Sunday night and this was a little taste of normal for me. I quickly cooked up a system using page numbers similar to the usual ones for the show we normally do and swung into gear.

We ran for about an hour with that. Carrie and Tommy took turns answering viewer questions, with Karen acting as host. We even got a late night Earl call around 12:30 AM. I believe that is the latest ever for Earl. To close the call, Karen asked him if he was normally up that late, but he was already gone. Too bad. I would’ve loved to have heard the answer.

They are still going wall to wall in there now, but the morning crew has arrived. I am not disappointed because now I get to sit in the Jeep and watch the storm come in. Here on the coast, the curfew has been in effect since 10 PM. Because of this, there is eerie quiet all around. In the entire time I have been sitting here, which has been roughly half an hour, nary a car has passed.

I am listening to 870 WWL again, and from the sounds of things the wind is blowing hard there. Make no mistake about it, this storm is going to be a problem for New Orleans and points west but for us it will be more of a nuisance.

The city of New Orleans has been evacuated, and it was the usual mess. CBS Radio News called it “an exodus of biblical proportions.” Contraflow on I-55 and I-59 and I-10 helped to get evacuees far from the city in a short time, but the traffic got bad when they neared the end of the four lanes of madness. I heard two WWL callers who were stuck in traffic, one man who had been on the road for 12 hours and a woman who had been going for 14. She had kids in the car, and a baby could be heard screaming in the background for the entire call. The end of the line was Poplarville, MS, where the cruising speed was a brisk 3 MPH. There was no place to stop for fuel or bathroom breaks. It must have been hell on earth for most of them.

A short squall went through a while ago, rocking the Jeep and hitting me with a quick burst of rain. I am sitting in the passenger seat so I have room for the laptop. No rain came in my window, but if I had been on the driver’s side, I would have been soaked.

Now that I am not on duty, this is more of an old skool hurricane experience for me. It recalls a time back in the days before I worked in broadcasting, sitting at home at the dining room table, my face in the window and the radio in my ear. Back then, I could hardly wait to go look at the mess. These days, it makes me cringe to think about it.

The Petal is not with me tonight. She opted to ride it out at the house this time. A few people asked for her and at least one person bristled when they thought I had made her stay there. She is normally a fixture when the storms come in.

So now I wait to see what happens next. I expect I will be sleeping for the worst of it. I will probably be able to go home later today. I am glad it will miss us, but we have plenty of friends in the Baton Rouge area, and for them we are concerned. Hopefully, this thing will be a wuss by the time it comes in.

Radio: At 4 AM, Hurricane Gustav is a category 3, with 115MPH winds moving NW at 16 MPH. LANDFALL IS EXPECTED TO BE IN TERREBONE PARISH SOMETIME BETWEEN 8 AND 10 AM...

Maybe we will all get lucky…