Rita: Insult and Injury

New Orleans, while lying far to the east of the eye of Hurricane Rita, is in for it again. Rain from Rita has caused the levees near the city’s Ninth Ward to be breached and is causing the district to be flooded once again. The district had been destroyed by the floods resulting from Katrina, but the Army Corps of Engineers had already started repairing the levees. This new deluge makes all of their work for naught. This has to be very painful for that district’s former residents to watch. One wonders, however, whether the rebuilding plans for New Orleans will be reconsidered. Perhaps they should be scaled down a bit.

And Rita hasn’t even made landfall yet.

Meanwhile, East Texas is one big parking lot. For Katrina, too few people evacuated in time; for Rita, too many it seems, leaving millions stranded on the major interstates. (A little bird--not the one in my comments section--told me that the back roads are the way to go; just don't run out of gas.) I heard on the news this morning that some families were taking all of their cars, which are loaded with all of their possessions. ::::sigh:::: It gives new meaning to the phrase, “you can’t take it with you.” Since the local government opened the opposite side of the highways, however, it’s said that traffic is moving faster. And not too soon.

Horribly, 24 nursing home evacuees died in an accidental bus fire on I-45 just outside of Dallas. The accident poses a kind of gruesome symmetry to the Katrina incident in which 40 nursing home residents and staff drowned after being abandoned by the home’s owners…and their relatives.

And, finally, where’s the safest place to be during a Cat 5 hurricane (besides land-locked country)? Inside a nuclear power plant facility, with the reactor shut down of course. All bets are off, however, if Rita gets tougher than the Saffir-Simpson scale can measure.

Houston, TX (AHN) - As Hurricane Rita churns into a Catagory 5 storm, Texas officials are preparing to shut down two reactors at a nuclear power plant in Rita's path.

The South Texas Project plant is designed to withstand Category 5 hurricanes, but Rita may develop stonger winds. The plant serves 1-million customers and is built on elevated ground in Bay City, 12-miles inland from the Texas coast.

But let me hush up before the Big One ripples along the San Andreas Fault. We had a few baby ones yesterday.

One more thing: for all of you who are saying that God is punishing these people for something, maybe, maybe not. Simply put, however, you don’t know and neither do I, so stop fronting as if you have an inside line to God’s intentions. Much obliged.