Some Web sites to check before you get back on the road (and note that Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Charles, St. Tammany and St. Bernard Parishes are all closed until at least Wednesday):

- Louisiana official emergency Web site: Lots of information about parish openings, highway closings, curfews, state government office status reports, etc.

- Louisiana Department of Transportation: Interactive maps with road closings, alerts, lane closures, etc. Pretty detailed information.

- City of New Orleans: Not the most current info, but worth checking.

- Jefferson Parish:

Over 120,000 Entergy customers lost electricity and tours of the parish by Parish President Aaron Broussard, Parish Council members and parish work crews revealed the extent of damage. Power lines and poles are down, some blocking streets, and many traffic signals are down and blocking some intersections. Trees are toppled and many tree limbs and other debris are obstacles on roadways and some billboards were shredded by the storm.

Although a number of fences were pushed over by high winds and there was some damage to metal structures such as carports and storage sheds, most residences and businesses were spared major damage and there were no reports of street or structure flooding outside of the communities of Grand Isle and Lafitte.

The parish is working with surrounding parishes and the State of Louisiana on re-entry but the parish remains under a mandatory evacuation order and residents will not be allowed to return tomorrow, Tuesday, September 2.

Parish public schools will remain closed this week and Archdiocesan school officials said they will concur with the civil authorities regarding reopening of Jefferson Parish parochial schools, which will also remain closed through the end of this week. An announcement regarding all phases of re-entry will be made tomorrow so that all citizens and businesses can return to the parish this week.

- City of Kenner:

With the passing of major winds today, Kenner city officials have turned their attention to serving curious residents.

The city’s emergency command center opened three new phone lines to handle the inundation of phone calls. If residents cannot get through using 504.468.7200 or 504.468.HELP, they can use 504.712.2399, 504.712.2333, or 504.712.2334.

Authorities are keeping an eye on Kenner’s sewerage, drainage and levee systems, but so far no flooding has been reported, authorities said. Power is still out in most of the city and the mandatory evacuation remains in effect. No word on when residents can plan on returning to their homes.

Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker and a number of other books, is both a New Orleans native and a writer for The New York Times Magazine, and he has filed a report from Uptown, where he and his wife rode out the storm at his sister’s house:

One day someone is going to study the difference between our culture’s ability to process and respond to earthquakes (which strike without warning and so are of little use to cable news networks) and hurricanes (which might as well have been created with MSNBC in mind). The buildup, the uncertainty, the waiting — the narrative structure of hurricanes lends itself to melodrama. Click from the New Orleans local news — fairly sober analysis of the city’s chances, which the local weathermen concur are pretty good — to the cable news — where all bad news is actually good news, as it excites cable news viewers — and you get the feeling they are talking about different storms. New Orleans is safer from Gustav than it is from Geraldo.

There’s more at the link, all very New York Times-ish.

Image lifted from WWLtv.com; Photo by Michael Ainsworth/MDN Photo Staff

Really great picture from a great picture gallery over on WWL-TV’s Web site. What can you say other than maybe Fox News is looking to get rid of Mr. Rivera? Or maybe the brass over there actually think this is good journalism? I think the people at WWL-TV have figured out best:

Geraldo Rivera of Fox News does stand up over the industrial ship channel during Hurricane Gustav on Monday.

I hear Geraldo Rivera is the Carlos Mencia of terrible telivision.

On September 1, 2005, I had a mental flash and Googled “Hurricane Katrina T-shirt.” Surprisingly, there was nothing yet (though there was, of course, within a week… and Katrina- and recovery-related domain names were already being bought up.)

This time around, the culture vultures are much savvier, and speedier.

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Our resolve to ride out the gust of Gustav scuttled by a creeping awareness of what it might mean to live in a first-floor apartment two blocks from the Industrial Canal, my boyfriend and I loaded up the dog and headed out at about 3:30 yesterday afternoon. After an hour of sitting in the well-documented misery that was I-59 in the waning hours of contraflow, we got off as soon as we reached an unblocked exit, just past the Mississippi border. Now I’m suffering what I’m going to call contraflow survivor guilt. The road we took - Mississippi Highway 43 - was completely devoid of traffic. As in, we would maybe see another car every half hour, at most. We tore down the two-lane blacktop through scenic rural Mississippi at 65 miles an hour, reconnecting with I-55 near Jackson, and had smooth sailing the rest of the way to Memphis. Our total road time was just under eight hours, only two hours longer than the same trip under normal conditions. I may never drive on a major interstate again. It might be a little late for this advice, but (knock wood) if this ever happens again, use those maps creatively. Or ask Mapquest or your GPS to program your route without interstate highways. It’s literally the difference between hell on earth and a nice Sunday drive.

Everywhere we’ve been, Memphis treats us, oddly, as if this is a reunion of sorts for the events of three years ago. Bartenders are reminiscing about their Katrina evacuees. We’re staying wth friends who evacuated here in ‘05, lost their Lakeview home and never returned. And I’m sitting in the same Starbucks I made home base after Katrina, overhearing conversations from New Orleanians and feeling like I’m sitting through a lame sequel.

WWL-AM reporting that a private levee has been overtopped in Plaquemines Parish and that anyone left in the Braithwaite and Scarsdale communities needs to evacuate immediately. Water is rising rapidly.

Edit: Seems to be the Caernarvon Diversion Levee. Info hard to get. Folks at WWL-AM getting punch on the air but are trying to gather information about this and about Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes. TV cutting away from Louisiana coverage to show Laura Bush speech at the RNC. Finally CNN back on the story with parish president Billy Nungesser….

AND BLITZER IS CUTTING HIM OFF TO SHOW CINDY McCAIN’S ARRIVAL ON STAGE…

Second edit: Louis Maistros at Humid City saw the same thing and has words for Blitzer that we can’t print here. Apparently Wolf put Nungesser ON HOLD. Says Louis:

Someone tell me I am imagining this sh*t.

No, you’re not — they’ve been diddling about the Gulf Coast all day, trying to create news where there hasn’t been much (fortunately), and now that there is news, CNN CAN’T BE BOTHERED WITH IT.

JACKSON, MISS. — I’m downtown near the I-55 and the capitol building and tornado sirens are going off.

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reporting that the whole area is under tornado watch till midnight.

New Orleans geophysicist, blogger, and all-around beautiful writer Maitri Venkat-Ramani has a piece in this morning’s UK Independent, “The eye of the storm: Leaving New Orleans is not an easy choice”:

In the wee hours of yesterday morning, as we looked at computer models that put Hurricane Gustav closer and closer to New Orleans, my husband and I finally made the firm decision to leave the city. To go or not to go was not an easy choice because the act of leaving is sheer physical and emotional torture.

There is the physical impact of boarding up tall windows with plywood, going through the house to collect items of importance, packing said items into waterproof tubs and carrying them downstairs to the truck. And then there is the emotional toll which consists of the futility of boarding up windows when your entire home could be reduced to sticks, deciding which of your possessions qualify as keepers, distilling your life into the back of a truck and leaving this beloved town again.

The worst is saying goodbye to dear friends before we scatter to the winds again. When will we see each other again? In a few days, a month, years?….

Read the whole thing here.

Right now Maitri and her husband are in Birmingham, Ala., and she’s writing from there on her personal blog, the VatulBlog:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT WATCH CNN AND FOX NEWS!

1) Nothing of weather-related import ever happens in the French Quarter. Anderson Cooper standing at the corner of Bourbon and Canal and showing footage of debris blowing around is useless to me. Ali Velshi in Port Fourchon wasn’t so bad, though.

2) After Katrina, they did not learn that a local person well-versed in New Orleans geography alongside the regular reporter is a useful thing. It’s annoying when a cable news reporter stands at point A in New Orleans, refers to it as Point B and the anchor back in the studio asks the most irrelevant questions. MSNBC hasn’t been too bad as they show footage from the local NBC affiliate, but they had to go and interview Brownie.

3) Dear Wolf Blitzer, shut the hell up. Unless you’re right there holding the damned thing up, don’t scare people that a floodwall in the Lower Ninth Ward has breached.

4) If you can read this, you are online. So, go to this online TV news aggregator and watch all four local news stations simultaneously. They are more accurate, comprehensive and relevant than stupid cable news.

Maitri, one of the New Orleans’ blogosphere’s best writers, has promised to be a guest blogger for the Blog of New Orleans as soon as we’re back. Until then, you can read her thoughts and her words here.

David Hammer reports in The Times-Picayune:

State: Some outside media feed false rumor mill

The state communications center in Baton Rouge was thrust into rumor-control mode this afternoon when a Baton Rouge station showed stock footage of Hurricane Katrina flooding and national networks erroneously reported levee breaches, a spokeswoman said.

Christina Stephens, spokeswoman at the state’s Joint Information Center in Baton Rouge, said communications staffers scrambled when they saw footage on a Baton Rouge television station of flooding in the 9th Ward, only to find out that it was an old file from Hurricane Katrina.

That, along with confirmed images of Gustav forcing waves over the top of floodwalls along the Industrial Canal, helped feed rumors among some national media outlets that levees had been “breached.” Stephens said she had to explain to several outlets that water going over the top of walls is not a “breach,” in which a section of the flood protection is actually broken.

Please — turn off the national cable news.

Turn on the local New Orleans stations.

Between power-outages in Baton Rouge, we’re make obsessive, minute-by-minute checks of the media, e-mail and text messages for word about how our city is faring in this storm.

While the news has been generally reassuring so far, all the waiting and wondering adds up to a queasy anxiety that certainly dampens the appetite.

We’re feeling very fortunate to have a range of food options in our evacuation kitchen, knowing that many of our neighbors are in much less comfortable situations right now. Still, it’s interesting that all my palate and uneasy belly can comprehend eating at the moment is Louisiana food, something with rice, sausage and lots of seasoning.

This is easy food, and it tastes like home, the place we’re thinking of compulsively right now. Jambalaya was one of the last good things I ate in New Orleans, on Friday during a Katrina commemoration gathering at Finn McCool’s Irish Pub (pictured above). Soon, I hope, we’ll be eating good stuff like this back in our own neighborhoods again soon.
- Ian McNulty