Goodbye Gustav, Hello Hanna

If the latest reports hold true, it looks like the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region in general have dodged a bullet. Thanks to the fact that Gustav moved more quickly than expected, it was not able to pick up as much energy as had been feared. As a result the storm landed as Category Two and now has been downgraded to a Category One.

Although there is certainly lots of wind and rain damage, it does not appear that the levees will be breached and that is a wonderful blessing. At this point it looks like Gustav will lose hurricane status sometime today and will then become a tropical storm and then tropical depression.

Of course, the storm will still bring lots of rain to Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma and there will probably be localized flooding. But given the possible outcome of  a major Category 4 or 5 storm slamming into the region, things look to be fairly positive – all things considered.

But things are not over yet.

When we saw Katrina come through 3 years ago, it looked like we had dodged the bullet then but we soon discovered that this was not the case. This year the problem may turn out to be Hurricane Hanna.

Right now Hanna is a Category One storm and it is expected to make landfall somewhere along the Georgia/South Carolina coast sometime on Friday.

Now according to current projections Hanna will probably be only a Category 1 or 2 storm when it makes contact because it will not hit the warm waters of the Gulf.  Since we are relieved with the fact that Gustav was only a Category Two storm when it landed, you might wonder why Hanna is such a big deal.

Well the problem is, ironically enough, the same one as we faced three years ago. There is a very good chance right now that Hanna will land very near Savannah, Georgia. Savannah is a large city with many trees and lots of 19th-century homes and, like New Orleans in 2005, it has not been struck by a hurricane in many years.

In fact, the last time there was a direct hit was nearly 30 years ago, in 1979, and the last time a really-bad storm struck was back in 1940. Hurricane Hugo landed to the north in 1989, but even that was almost 20 years ago.

As a result, Savannah may be in the same boat that New Orleans was in 2005, unprepared for a major storm and no time at this point for a lot of the preparations to be made. Louisiana and the Gulf Coast have been preparing for a major storm for three years, Georgia may only have a week.

Hopefully, of course, the planners in Georgia have taken heed of what happened in New Orleans and are ready to swing into contingency plans, but it may well be that Hanna is the storm we have all been dreading.