Powerless – How a Category 2 storm shattered our false sense of hurricane security
Dicky Broussard, 72, was a retired businessman and avid outdoorsman. Every summer he taught religion classes with his wife Mary Ann, a former member of the Vermilion Parish School Board and an educator for a quarter-century. Before the storm the couple evacuated their home in Abbeville for the safety of Baton Rouge. And here they died when a tree smashed down on the roof of the Pollard Estates home they trusted for refuge.
With the ghosts of Rita and Katrina in their minds, many from coastal parishes and New Orleans fled on familiar routes to greater Baton Rouge, only to find the devastation here worse than the damage back home. We couldn’t imagine our situation as bad as those to the south, either. But Gustav came to collect on the bill for our maturing urban forest, that great green canopy that looks like a security blanket from the top of the State Capitol, but that we so often take for granted while thinking ourselves largely immune to the horrors of a hurricane.
Early estimates of productivity loss suggest Gustav left a much larger economic crater in the Baton Rouge economy than Katrina did three years ago. But Gustav’s greatest legacy might be a psychological one. Others can no longer look to Baton Rouge as an indestructible safe house, and we, too, would be woefully misguided to think of ourselves as such.
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Now is the time for intelligent, proactive hurricane planning on all levels, from what’s on the mayor’s desk, to what’s in the police department’s action plan, to what’s in your garage. Now that we know a hurricane can knock us down, how does our city better prepare for the next direct hit?
As we face this challenge, Gustav fatigue has set in with a vengeance. At press time, a week and a half after the storm and at least one verbal chastising from Gov. Bobby Jindal later, Entergy had yet to return power to tens of thousands of its customers in the area. Homeowners sweated through un-air-conditioned September, and crucial intersections remained gridlocked as four-way stops.
Though a valid safety measure, a parish-wide curfew first set at a Puritan 8 p.m. then mercifully moved back to 10 p.m. dampened any pent-up energy we may have had, locking us in our dimmed homes for a string of sultry nights.
What we could use now are some late nights in cool rooms. We need a couple of big SEC wins in Tiger Stadium. We need to go out to dance, to rock or just to chill. Whatever it is we do, bring it on. Gustav is history, and next time—more than ever, we know there will be a next time—we need to be ready.
To read more stories about Hurricane Gustav, click the links below.
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