Here’s some video I shot this morning where I live in Baton Rouge.
Although it is not directly on the Gulf Coast, Baton Rouge (largest city in Louisiana) is in the path of Hurricane Gustav (“X” marks the spot, below).
I will try to provide ongoing video clips as the storm advances. Since I can only post one diary per day, you can visit my channel on blip.tv to find new videos as I produce them.
Here’s the first one, a kind of baseline of where we are at on Sunday morning, August 31st at 9:25am. Bonus points for spotting the Obama sign in my front yard.
It started raining about half an hour ago at around 8:30 pm. Tornadoes have been spotted east and south of here in East Baton Rouge Parish. The wind isn’t blowing too hard — yet.
3:30 am: The rain has stopped and what little wind there was has died down. Oh, and I found a dead rat in the hallway — no doubt a present from Itchy.
Dude, I hope you’re hunkered down, cuz they say it’s hammerin’ time for BR, with the strongest winds bearing down on your front yard.
[…] NOLA.com is the place to go for updates. Inland, blogger Ara Rubyan will be putting up videos and reports inland, from Baton Rouge. […]
Yesterday afternoon I went around the side of the house where I had stacked the patio furniture — away from the patio doorwall — and tied everything to some concrete pylons. then I tied down the patio table underneath the magnolia tree (“that way, it’ll be safe from anything that might fall on it..” I told Miss Julie. ” Like the magnolia tree.”) I had put everything else in the yard into the shed, except for one of the garbage cans which was too big to fit through the door. Probably a good thing as it had a couple pounds of shrimp shells in it from the party we had the night before. I tied the can to the seesaw and another piece of patio furniture.
As for now (7am Monday) we still have power. The wind has picked up again from last night and it’s raining again. The day Katrina hit, we lost power around 8am when one of the trees in the neighbor’s yard snapped in two (I’ll never forget that sound) and fell on another tree which then toppled over onto the power lines. We didn’t have power again for 8 days.
I’ll keep going until that happens.
When it gets a bit lighter I’ll go out and shoot some video and upload it if I can.
[…] subscribeYesterday, I shot some video of Baton Rouge pre-Gustav. Today, I’ve got video of the storm entering the […]