I see the bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightnin’.
I see bad times today.

Chorus:
Don’t go around tonight,
Well, it’s bound to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.

I hear hurricanes ablowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear rivers over flowing.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.

Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.
One eye is taken for an eye.

Hurricanes always bring this song to my mind, probably because the oldies stations in Louisiana love to play this song when there is a storm coming. Back when Andrew came to New Orelans, the first storm that we experienced after we moved there, I listened to the oldies stations a lot, and so when we evacuated the city and headed north, I listened to this song a lot on my Walkman.

I decided to read the local New Orleans coverage of Katrina, going to the Times Picayune's website, nola.com, and WWL channel 4's site as well. Reading the stories posted there is interesting. I know the places that are mentioned. It's not like other storms where I can read about flooding to the rooftops in such and such a place, or how the windows of the buildings in a particular area of a downtown are all blown out and these palces have no meaning to me. I've been to these places. When they say that the Chevron station at Franklin Ave and I-610 is almost completly submerged, I know exactly where that gas station is and have gotten gas there many times on the way home from church.

There was a lot of destruction in the city. Holes ripped in the roof of the Superdome, the I-10 bridge over the lake is devistated (that's one of the main arteries into the city from the east), there are, or at least were, houses with water to the rooftops. The whole time I lived in the city the hurricanes skirted around it. They would head straight for it and veer off at the last moment. This one hit pretty hard.

It's also odd to hear about how everyone at the motel in Memphis was checking nola.com and the local TV stations, watching local news reports on their laptops. 13 or however many years ago Andrew came you couldn't do that.

My friends Jason and Jennifer got out of the city, heading to Texas with some friends of theirs. My friend Carey is apparently north of Baton Rogue. I don't really have contact with anyone else in the city these days, though I do hope all the people I know from days gone by got out and are safe.

I wonder how the seminary fared through this. I bet that one lone trailer -- the one we lived in and had to move out of so they could build a building where it sat but it continued to sit there even through this past winter, three years after the forced move -- is gone.

Nola.com's coverage

WWL's slideshow
- posted by Nick @ 8/30/2005 01:27:00 AM | 0 comments