Forgive me if I seem to be obsessing over hurricanes. Really, I am not. But if I am it is only because it appears it is my area’s time — here on the Upper Gulf Coast of Texas — in the barrel for tropical storms and hurricanes. Sometimes Florida gets picked. Other times it’s Louisiana or South Carolina. Hurricanes rarely, if ever, hit Idaho but then we seldom get hail-sized potato storms.
So Ike is the storm du jour. The 5-day Cone of Insanity would have you believe that Ike will ultimately make landfall somewhere around Galveston Bay. But the center has to be somewhere. If the cone were to shift westward, the center might appear headed for New Orleans (Don’t get me started) or more to the east, the bulls eye might seem destined for Corpus Christi. But the center of the cone is simply the middle of the path that Ike may take which is roughly anywhere, for the moment, between Dauphin Island, Ala., and Monterrey, Mexico. Or that’s my interpretation of it. If you want real information, go to the National Hurricane Center’s Web site. Because you will likely find yourself sorely disappointed with local TV forecasting and even major network and cable weather dudes and dudettes.
One thing that is for certain. If a hurricane is within 1,000 miles of New Orleans, news people will flock there and await the second coming of Katrina. But seriously, the news media have obsessed over the possibility of a storm hitting The Big Easy long before Katrina. For years tons of media flocked there to await a storm that would end up hitting Cameron, La., or Aransas Pass, Texas. It’s easy to understand why. New Orleans is fun. Port Arthur, not so much. Corpus, don’t ask. We shall see what we shall see though. In the meantime, media folks, why not try Lake Charles? At least it has casinos.