Nix Bits

Actually, we’ve been back for a while but much too mentally drained to post. We felt an enormous wave of relief opening the door to the house and seeing everything just as we had left it. That moment of opening the door on return was so vastly different from our last evac and return.

The timing of Gustav was just too eerie, too unsettling, too close. But, as my wife said, this time we cleaned the house before we left. You don’t clean a house you don’t think you’re coming back too. When we bailed our mid-city house for Katrina, we didn’t waste time trying clean before screwing down that last piece of plywood.

So the wife went to our friends home near Jackson, MS and I went to work in Little Rock, AR. Neither one of us liked the idea of being separated at such a stressful time. For me it was a case of hurry-up and wait. I rushed to Little Rock and then we just watched and waited to see if anything bad would happen forcing our hand and requiring action. Managers would come up with various doomsday scenarios and we’d answer their questions and return to our temporary cubespace and track the storm’s progress.

I made the mistake of looking at CNN. I had forgotten how incredibly bad cable news is. Not just Fox. All of it. Absolute garbage. But twitter, on the other hand provided real news. And via twitter we found a link that aggregated all the local TV news stations so we could get decent, straightforward reporting. This and of course WWL 870 radio. So while CNN and the like were reporting “OHMIGOD the levees going to break and flood the lower 9!”, WWL’s Lee Zurik was standing directly in front of the supposedly broken floodwall with a Corp official — on the upper 9th ward side.

Still weary, a little worse for the wear, but also blessed and thankful. Because while Gustav mostly spared us, it did great damage to our Terrebonne and Lafourche neighbors that you likely won’t hear about on any national news report.

Linky-loo:

• Social Media Proves Itself as Emergency Tool – a bit more on Twitter, etc.
• How the Internet is Changing Natural Disaster Reporting
• The eye of the storm : Leaving new Orleans is not an easy choice – Blogger Maitri on the reality of evacuating.
• Maitri on her trip to the devastated Isle de St Jean “Their loss is our loss, and every bit of aid helps.” Their fate is our fate, the same refrain….
• Karen Gadbois on the same trip
• My flickr page has some Gustav evac and return photos