Gustav, Revisited

To call Hurricane Gustav a non-event would be trivializing the reality of what actually happened.

With Gustav, we dodged a bullet. It was supposed to have hit our area point-blank. We ended up not even losing our electricity, and only received a couple of inches of rain! (They had told us to expect 10-15 inches!)

My daughter and my husband were in Baton Rouge for the first LSU game of the season (which was pushed up several hours, to 10:00 a.m.), then they left town and headed to Alexandria, to my hubby's apartment at LSU-A, which was supposed to have been far enough north to be out of the most violent weather.

Wrong!

Baton Rouge got pounded, and then Gustav drifted just a tiny bit north, which meant that Alexandria got hammered too! Hubby and daughter, who were in Alexandria when the storm hit, said that Gustav was to Alexandria what Rita was to our area in 2005. Not good. Alexandria received nearly 8 inches of rain. The power was out all over Baton Rouge and Alexandria, and Alexandria lost its water pumps all over town. They were actually down to less than half a day's worth of water at one point. (Ironic, isn't it, that an area can be almost out of water after 8 inches of rain?) Classes at LSU and LSU-A were cancelled for the entire week, but are scheduled to restart on Monday, 9/8/08.

Yeah, for us it was definitely a close call. If a mandatory evacuation had been ordered, instead of a recommended evacuation, we would have gone.......to Alexandria!! Gosh, I'm glad we stayed...and I'm glad the other members of the family came home AFTER the excitement!

Ciao!