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The funny thing about lightning is that even if it strikes twice in the same place, you don’t get any advance warning. You’re pretty much equally equipped for the second shock as the first; rationally, you can’t obsess over it.

Not so with hurricanes.

Before yesterday I hadn’t been watching local news or reading the paper, so my knowledge of the impending arrival in south Texas of Hurricane Dean was largely clinical. Where is the cone? Yes, we’re likely to be on the dirty side, even if it makes landfall at the border. Oh, but not until next week. Well, we’re likely to have more rain.

You might recall that the last time we had a hurricane hit near H-town, E and I chose early on to shelter in place. Other Houstonites didn’t, and—as you may have seen on the news—turned a greatly diminshed natural disaster into a highly amplified unnatural one.

Weather Underground 5-day forecast for Dean (latest).

So you’d think that, two years later, faced with a similar storm situation, this town’s hard-bitten residents would be composed, nonchalant, almost blasé. Oh, well, sure, there’s a hurricane, but I don’t live in the hundred-year floodplain, and my house has hurricane clips and a sturdy roof. A run on the grocery stores and gas stations isn’t warranted. We’re likely to have more rain.

My first clue that this was not the case appeared overhead as I drove on the highway yesterday. The looming traffic bulletin (and Amber-alert) signboard blinked rapidly between the following admonishments:

Anecdotal reports indicate that, indeed, lines are forming at gas stations, and supermarket shelves are starting to empty as well. Houston is whipping into a hurricane frenzy. The newspapers attempt to calmly prepare the public while local news anchors, giddy to discuss possible local death instead of recent local death, turn to their SUPER EXTREME WEATHER ASSAULT TEAM to wonder breathlessly about what might be in store and what you should do to prepare for the worst!

We are living in H-town. Hurricanetown.

E points out that all this activity could actually be a really good sign: Houstonians, once bitten, might be shy of evacuation and will hunker down until the storm has passed, armed with flashlights and fresh water and so on. They might even realize that it was the exodus, not the storm, that caused all the damage last time.

We shall see.

[Afterword: O-Week (see also) starts today on the Rice campus, and when I go to work tomorrow morning I'm quite sure that instead of the usual anthems (Ride of the Valkyries, Back in Black, etc.) I expect to hear the residents of SRC bellowing the Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane" from their 14th-story Klipsch stacks.]