*A* Big One, But Not *The* Big One?

Miraculously, New Orleans didn't take the direct hit that we feared it would, and the French Quarter fared better than most areas. Not to take lightly what did happen, of course; there was plenty of flooding and wind damage and even some loss of life, but the worst-case scenario known as "filling the bowl" didn't take place. The two things that had to happen to keep this from being The Big One did in fact happen: the storm changed direction ever-so-slightly before it came ashore (putting New Orleans proper on the "good" [west] side of the storm), and it also weakened slightly.

(UPDATE: This, of course, was written before the levees broke and much of the bowl did in fact fill. *sigh*)

During the day, I got a lot of good coverage from local radio (it helps when the news station I listen to has a full-time meteorologist as its morning news co-anchor), but I also got an amazing amount of information from bloggers. This new media form is coming through with flying colors in a situation like this; even a loss of power didn't stop some people from getting through, MacGyver-ing a computer connection with a pre-charged laptop and one of those free AOL trial disks (hey, we knew they had to be good for something). If you're interested in some hurricane-blogging, here are some good sites:

• Continuous coverage from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, as well as their in-house blog.


• Lots of New Orleans pictures over at Brendan Loy's blog


• An LSU professor has liveblogged the hurricane from Baton Rouge. (I wonder if the UNT/LSU football game, scheduled for this Saturday, will be affected.)


• Terry Teachout has a clearinghouse of hurricane-bloggers.


• Want to help? Contribute to the American Red Cross or the Salvation Army.

As soon as I find out the status of some of my favorite haunts, I'll update. In the meantime, we can all be thankful that it wasn't any worse that it was.

Not again: Another place where I've recently played has gone out of business; read more on the TD/D blog.