Holding pattern

I went into work for a while this morning, but we were under voluntary attendance and it was a skeleton crew so I came home after a couple of hours. We spent the day cleaning up stuff from the yard that could turn into projectiles and watching the news. The big news here is the traffic jam; at one point today there was a 100 mile continuous traffic jam on I-45 north of Houston. Several interstates were turned into one way roads, which is helping a little, but people are running out of gas or overheating, so it’s a big mess. It may well be the biggest peacetime evacuation in American history, with up to 2 million people on the roadways.

The airports shut at noon tomorrow. Most businesses closed this afternoon. I drove over to the local shopping center and it’s a ghost town. Very strange to see even the grocery store closed. The gas station was open, but no gas available for sale. None in our county anywhere, though there are supposedly tankers on the way.

The current predictions are for the storm to make landfall a little east of us, coming on at the Beaumont area. This is not good news for western Louisiana. Our board mate RJ Sevin, editor of Corpse Blossoms, and his family have had to evacuate again–they were in Sulphur, LA, which is near Lake Charles, which could get the brunt of the storm if the predictions hold.

As for where I am, we might get tropical storm force winds and a bunch of rain. Gusts to 75 mph. If the storm tracks further east, even that will be diminished. I’m cautiously optimistic that it will be far lighter than what was feared a couple of days ago when the storm was anticipated to landfall to the west of Galveston. Still, Galveston is so low that even a modest storm surge could put huge sections of it underwater.

By this time tomorrow, we’ll have much better idea of what’s in store. It’s very strange to see camera footage of Kemah, on the ship channel, abandoned, and the streets of Galveston empty. A few enterprising teenagers were surfing this afternoon but wouldn’t agree to be interviewed on camera because they’d told their parents they’d already evacuated.

I spent the evening signing hundreds of Corpse Blossoms signature sheets. The mail won’t go out until early next week, but they’re done and ready to go!