Photo du Jour: Irony, 30 September 2005

On the morning of Saturday, 27 August 2005, I went over to a friend's house in Lakeview and we sat and talked in the room pictured above . . .

KTMB had drenched South Florida the weekend before and all throughout the week the consensus on all of the local television stations (especially WVUE/Bob Breck) was that KTMB was going to come ashore to the east on the Florida Panhandle. The Saints played the Ravens on Friday night in the last home preseason game which I attended. After the game concluded, the WWL radio broadcast had a special weather announcement to make: uh oh--unfortunately there had been a big change regarding KTMB. When I drove over to my friend's in Lakeview the next day, there was a tension in the air/on the road similar to days before what turned-out-to-be near misses of New Orleans during Hurricane Georges in 1998 and Hurricane Ivan in 2004. When I got to my friend's house, the subject of conversation naturally was the hurricane and what everyone's evacuation plans were. In that conversation, the flooding potential came up and the question was asked to me, did I think it could flood in that house. My response, "only if a levee breaks or the water overtops the levees . . ."

The irony of this is that I said this while sitting in the exact spot on the sofa where that day's Times-Picayune with the headline KATRINA TAKES AIM came to rest following the eight to ten foot inundation within the house. The sofa of course is five feet out of place because it floated (along with all of the furniture within the house) and then came back down to the floor once the waters receded. The sliding glass door apparently exploded from the pressure of the water inside the house. The good news for my friend: his house is two stories and for the most part everything upstairs was unscathed. At least hes got that--many with one story houses don't even have that luxury.