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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.]