As with New Orleans, we are not far away from seeing the effects that are being predicted. And as with New Orleans, many will be taken by surprise again.
The bad news is that two high pressures are hanging inland, in front of Rita's path, and that means Rita will be forced to dump all of her water as she finds herself with nowhere to go.
Katrina was sucked quietly away by the jetstream, but this won't happen with Rita.
We are already seeing that simply telling everyone: "Evacuate now," doesn't quite cut it.
You're seeing chronic bottlenecks (100 miles long on roads, and hours long in airports)and people finding themselves stuck in large numbers again. Our inefficiencies are really exposed in a crisis. Concentrated (centralised) food supplies (aka supermarkets), concentrated power supply and concentrated transport routes. We could blame any number of reasons for this, but really, there is only one number that is too high. The number of people swarming over all of this. There are too many people, creating too many problems, and what does Phil Collins sing, "...And not much love to go round."
I am not sure why everyone is driving north, when they could use the highways that go south and west as well.
We're also seeing people turning around and going back home because they feel being stuck in traffic is worse than being at home watching TV.
Every person who decides this, creates a crowd that will find itself without electricity, bringing on all the associated problems again.
We won't see the same situation, not as chronic as what saw in New Orleans, of mobs and crowds begging for rescue. But there will be some.
New Orleans will almost certainly suffer serious breaches in its levee system.
One hopes that when the Hurricane season is finally over, people will not be stupid enough to rebuild in the wake of these storms. Has anyone thought as far ahead as October 2006? And September 2007?
At best, if any rebuilding is contemplated, these should be in historically rich areas (I don't mean wealthy neighborhoods, I mean culturally rich areas) on elevated land that have survived virtually intact anyway. Chances are, the people who built them, learned the best place to build the hard way. Will we also lose these lessons?
The oil stocks have moved lower because Houston is not going to take a direct hit. That's like saying someone is unlikely to suffer from a shotgun wound, because it missed the heart. It's still a shotgun wound, and people aren't waking up to the fact that the devastation of a Category 4 storm is catastrophic. It's a lifethreatening environment. You aren't rational if you're saying, "We have enough food so we'll ride it out."
We're going to see widespread destruction of oil rigs and facilities, oil spills and damage to refineries.
We're going to see people needing to be airlifted to safety, needing food and water.
And we're going to see plenty of flooding, inland flooding, as Rita unloads everything in a small area.
Meanwhile people wait in queues, and people are already dying. 20 have burned to death in a bus already.
And trucks are being sent to fuel cars that are running out of fuel where they wait in long highway queues.
We will see similar scenes of entire communities, I mean homes and neighborhoods, wiped off the face of the Earth. We'll see skyscrapers in Houston with holes in them.
This event is the first time two Category 4 storms have struck so close to each other. No doubt, scientists will again say, "This may not be due to global warming."
We already know that it is.
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