worst hygiene in the nation? Try the patrons of Fulton County Stadium – I mean, Turner Field. According to a American Society of Microbiology study, 37% of men left the bathroom without washing, and 16 percent of the women did.
“New York’s Penn Station had the biggest gender disparity, where 64 percent of men washed their hands compared with 92 percent of women.” Hmmm, that’s [not] reassuring.
Well, in keeping with tradition, I’ll make my customary hurricane report post as Rita bears down on southeast Texas/southwest Louisiana.
From the looks of things, Rita will play out a little less devastingly than Katrina, especially since it’s turned away from the Galveston/Houston area and is beginning to show signs of weakning. The central pressure, at 931 mbar as of the 1 PM CDT update, is still on the low end, though, so it could still spin up a significant increase in wind speed before the eye comes ashore in the next 24 hours or so.
I suspect, however, that the places hardest hit this time around will be the Beaumont/Port Arthur area of Texas and the Lake Charles area in Louisiana. Flooding in those regions can be intense, since there’s lots of lowlands, but nothing like what happens in below-sea-level areas like New Orleans. If the storm slows down significantly, the accumualted rainfall could rapidly escalate towards widespread flooding, but I would hazard a guess that the worst damage will come as a result of wind and any tornadoes that are spawned.
Unfortunately, the high-water activity caused by Hurricane Rita in the Gulf has already caused a levee break and renewed flooding in New Orleans. That situation may yet again worsen, should the storm take a track after landfall that shuffles along the coast or just inland from the coast, as the rain and wind will further strain the weakened infrastucture of New Orleans.
I’ve heard from many of my Houston friends, and few of them have opted to evacuate, given the horrific traffic jams. Even those who a got a good jump on the crowds were eventually bogged down on the way towards Austin and opted to turn around and ride out the storm in Houston, especially after hearing that the storm took a turn back to the east. I’ll be trying my luck to reach some folks in Houston this weekend after the dust has settled, and I’ll be sure to pass along any newsworthy updates.
It’ll be interesting to see how the government and media respond to the aftermath of this storm, and I’ll be aiming to compare the experiences of the storm relayed to me by my friends in Houston to the story as the media spins it.
