Ivan cometh. New Orleans (and much of the Gulf Coast) is under a hurricane watch. The university is closed today and tomorrow. So is NOPS.
The National Hurricane Center says there’s a 20-49% chance that the eye of Ivan will pass within 75 miles of New Orleans within the next 72 hours.
Panama City Beach is in the 10-19% range, but MAD bugged out for Indiana. Here in New Orleans, Homan says he’s staying no matter what. The neighbors are staying for now. I don’t know what our plan is quite yet. Xy doesn’t seem inclined to take this very seriously and refuses to have a real conversation about it; right now she’s grading papers. It’s a sunny day here with beautiful blue skies and fluffy white clouds. I’ve gotten calls from friends both panicked and cavalier.
If they evacuate the city we’ll leave for sure, even though at that point we’ll surely be peeing in a cup. I hear it takes hours and hours to get out of the metro area during an evacuation. The real question is: What critical determining factor would cause us to leave early? A hurricane warning? A strike probability of over 50%? I think we’ll wait until tomorrow morning and see.
We do have a hotel reservation for Wednesday night in Baton Rouge, thanks to my boss.
some good fear-inducing links here: http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/35586
good luck!
Stay safe. I very much enjoyed drinking lots of cocktails during Hurricane Bob, but only after making sure that I was well “battened down” and unlikely to be anything other than wet.
Well, the interstate’s packed even without an official evacuation – I’ve heard one report of someone who left town at 10:00 AM today and was still within the metropolitan area at 1:30 PM! I-10 W was backed up to the CCC at around noon, so leaving right now doesn’t look like a good option. A friend said he hit the road once about thirty minutes before they closed the interstate and it was pretty empty. I’d have to consider this a last-resort tactic, but you might want to have your car all packed and ready to go within ten minutes notice if panic strikes.
I’m in Central City and most of my block is staying, for what it’s worth.