I think maybe I'm psychic. Or maybe psycho.
About the time that hurricane left Key West and had been declared a catagory 2, I got a strange feeling that it was going to be a bad one. Later in the day, I was looking at the perfect shape of it, and knowing that the Gulf water was very warm, I mentioned to my wife that I had a bad feeling about that one. She says I said it more than once.

I've watched a lot of hurricanes and I have a fair understanding of how they develope, but this one seemed different. The weather forecasters nailed it almost perfectly. They predicted the growth and direction and it did what they said. But it was a gut feeling that worried me, much more than the forecast. My gut didn't tell me where it was going, it just said this one was going to be bad. I felt like that, when it was over, it would not really be over.

I was in New Orleans last year about this time and a tropical storm passed through following about the same path as Katrina. It never made it to hurricane strength, but it dumped a lot of water on the freeway and we had to pick our way around standing water, car wrecks, and fallen trees. Once, in backed up traffic, we had to pull off into the median to let an ambulance pass. But it was just a rainy, blustery day which is not uncommon in that climate.

Katrina could have wandered off to the west, to break up over Mexico. It could have crossed back across Florida, leaving it too weak to hold together in the cooler Atlantic. But I knew it wouldn't. Even a psychic could not have guessed how bad it would be, but some of us psychics had a real bad feeling about it.

We watched it on TV, as it worsened day by day, and even since the rescuers arrived, it doesn't seem to be a lot better. I guess we will just keep watching. My gut doesn't tell me why.
Howard