There’s a decent chance that Gustav will hit southeastern Louisiana, at or near the New Orleans area. Here are two Weather Underground maps – the storm models with with 5 day forecast overlaid.  (Click for a larger image.)  There’s ample reason for concern.

Here’s a preemptive shush for anyone who says, “Why don’t you idiots just get out of New Orleans?  What kind of fool builds in a bowl below sea level anyway?” Those arguments have been debunked here and in a number of places on the web, but here’s the Reader’s Digest version: the city originally was built above sea level and a fair amount of it, including my house, is above sea level.  But developers put subdivisions on cheap, outlying, swampy land as the city grew, and so portions of the city are an average of 1-2 feet below sea level.  Those areas should not have been reopened after Katrina, but I can’t control that.  As a voter and a citizen, I did everything I could to pressure politicians to make the hard decisions with regard to zoning and rebuilding, but the race-baiters won that battle.

Before Katrina it was a good forty years since we had a serious hurricane (Betsy) and since then the Corps of Engineers delivered poorly executed levees built on faulty designs, which even they grudgingly admitted – while assuring us we were protected.  And after Katrina, they colluded with Congress to hide evidence of what they did and are still lying to this day. New Orleans is by far not the only city protected by levees, and in fact Sacramento is in greater danger of catastrophic flooding than New Orleans.  Keep in mind, too, that about $3 to $5 billion of the New Orleans metro area damage was caused by this man’s poor decision to send the pump operators far away instead of housing them locally like other emergency personnel.

As to why we idiots don’t just leave – probably for the same reason people don’t leave the Florida coast, which gets pounded regularly, the midwest, which suffers catastrophic levee breaks periodically not to mention tornadoes, and California, which has earthquakes, riots, massive fires, and Nancy Pelosi.

The nation needs New Orleans, which is already as far upriver as it can be and still accommodate ocean-going vessels.  62% of the public relies on goods which pass through our port, which is the busiest and fourth-largest in the world, and the largest in the US.  We’re also the second largest fishery in the country – and without our support for the Gulf Coast oil industry, your gas prices will rise considerably.  Remember those price spikes after Katrina?  And as to the money for rebuilding – first, Louisiana is the only state that didn’t recieve offshore royalties for DECADES – since the Eisenhower administration we poured money into the federal coffers without receiving a nickel the way other states did.  Second, the $110 billion that New Orleans supposedly got was a total sham.

Actually the $110 billion went to emergency response and administration for three storms, Hurricanes Rita, Wilma and Katrina across five states, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The allocation includes almost $30 billion for FEMA’s response and Department of Defense expenses including the restoration of federal facilities. And almost $20 billion was flood insurance payouts to citizens collecting on their own private insurance claims.

/preemptive shush

As for Gustav, I’m making my preparations both to stay and to go – we’ll know better by Sunday what, if anything, we need to do.  But if he does come here, I’ll remember that there are blessings in adversity and that Romans 8:28 is true in all circumstances, not just the ones I find convenient.

Added: I don’t know why comments and pingbacks were closed; this was intended to be an open trackback post.  That definitely wasn’t part of the preemptive shush.

The former Catholic in me is coming out, because reformed charismatic Christians don’t do baptisms for babies, we do baby dedications. But since Hurricane Katrina destroyed our old church building, I’ve had something of a theme, with the death and funeral of the old church building (see post and photos below the fold), and the “pregnancy” of the building program. Well, the birth or baptism is imminent, and the new church building will become an intrinsic part of our church family, just as the old one was. We’ve overcome one of the last hurdles (zoning/parking) and we should be able to move in before too much longer. Which will be a relief, as half of us have been attending in a rented church on Saturdays, and the other half in a movie theater on Sundays. People are fond of saying, “it’s just a building; the people are the real church,” and that’s true – but it’s not the whole story. We are a church who used our facilities seven days a week, not just on Sundays. The new building isn’t some monument to New Orleans’ ongoing financial recovery – it’s large, and it’s pretty, but it’s above all functional and will soon be serving people in our congregation and as much of the general public as we possibly can.

It’s taken about three years, and the journey has been amazing. The testimonies of people giving sacrificially – so much so that several of the bankers said they had never seen anything like it, especially given how many people had to rebuild their homes and businesses at the same time they were giving to buy additional land and construct the building. We’ve been privileged to be able to serve people by gutting homes, mowing lawns, and helping them rebuild their houses in the neighborhood. We’ve reached out to the hurting and distraught – people who thought they lost everything, only to find the one thing they never knew they needed – a Savior.

Above all, Hurricane Katrina – in the midst of everything we lost – gave us the chance to do what Henry Blackaby’s Experiencing God course advises – to see what God is doing and join Him in his work. It’s been both awful and awe-ful. If anyone had asked us, we’d have said no, but I suspect now that we’re coming out on the other side, if you asked us, we’d all say that we’d go through it again because of the gains we have made in our relationships with God, with each other, and with the community we serve. And the best part is, moving in to the new building is just the beginning.

_______________________________

A Funeral for a Church – 11/2006 [Read more...]