Thanks Gustav

As of 4:30 pm yesterday afternoon, the number of outages (750,000) already known to have been caused by Gustav is the third highest in Entergy’s 95-year history. The only larger numbers were 1.1 million during Hurricane Katrina, which has been described as one of the worst natural disasters in American history, and 800,000 during Hurricane Rita, which occurred back-to-back in August and September of 2005.
A number of us Finance/Tax folks volunteered our services this past Sunday and Monday to help out in the Pinecroft Service Center with preparations to restore power post storm. Actually there was a miscommunication and the commitment is more like 7 to 10 days. So with one quick call to Almost Home this morning, I've got Waldo boarded for up to a week, Dottie Sue will be in the backyard with neighbors seeing about her and I will be headed somewhere in south Louisiana today to help support the storm restoration effort. And no, I will be nowhere near the actual wires, that would put restoration efforts behind instead of ahead.
It's hard to believe that its been 3 years post Katrina. My time here in The Woodlands has flown by. This should be an awesome experience for me. Playing with numbers all day in the Finance function of a company is so different than actually being out in the field. All of my family are currently without power; my mother and brother and his family are north of Lafayette in Ville Platte and my son and his wife are in Baton Rouge. Both locations are far inland so there was no flooding possibility for them but it is still a little unnerving not being able to communicate with them.
I do plan on taking my running gear with me. Hopefully, there will be time for me to get some mileage in over this next week.
Update: As of 5 a.m. this morning, Sept. 2, electrical power outages from Hurricane Gustav had reached more than 825,000, the second largest outage in company history, behind only Hurricane Katrina.