Houma  

The latest on the hurricane:

The 11:00 PM EDT advisory is out. Gustav’s intensity appears to have plateaued, and it's expected to make landfall right around its current intensity -- a borderline Category 2/3 hurricane -- in the late morning or around noon, in the marshlands south of Houma. That city of 30,000, where The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore is stationed, will take the brunt of the storm. Significant deviation from this track now appears unlikely (though small, last-minute "wobbles" are always possible).

Earlier this year I spent a week in Houma and the bayou just south of the small city; I was there to photograph the work of a local nonprofit called Bayou Grace and the continuing recovery work two and a half years after Katrina. Houma has actually been booming since 2005 because a lot of traffic and shipbuilding related to the offshore oil industry goes through there; before 2005 that traffic went through Venice, but Katrina essentially destroyed that town.

I'm glad to hear that the hurricane is weaker than advertised and won't hit New Orleans directly, but naturally I'm really worried about all the wonderful people I met while visiting and photographing that area. Here are some pictures I posted earlier this year from that trip; I'll probably add some more a bit later today. If you want to donate to an organization that will do real reconstruction work in the area, I can personally vouch for Bayou Grace. If you're interested in my photographs, you can also contribute by buying prints of them at this site.