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Gustav: The Day Before

Hurricane Katrina Third Anniversary Memorial

Hurricane Katrina Third Anniversary Memorial

3rd Katrinaversary: The Day in Pictures

PHOTOS (1st five) BY DARRYL MALEK-WILEY

Holy Cross Neighborhood and CSED members lead today's August 29 anniversary march.

Dropping memorial flowers into the Inner Harbor Canal from the Claiborne Avenue Bridge.

Yellow rose memorials.

Pam Dashiell of CSED and Tricia Jones of NENA.

SOURCE: CNN

Reverend Gilbert Scie of Greater Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Holy Cross leads a prayer during a Katrina Anniversary memorial.

Stay in Touch using Twitter!

To assist all residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in the event of a hurricane evacuation, the Center For Sustainable Engagement & Development (CSED) has set up a new Twitter service. It's free and easy to use – and will assist everyone in staying in touch if you need to leave the city. With a Twitter account, you can set up your mobile phone/device to receive text messages of all posts by the CSED.

Courtesy of Louisiana Rebuilds and the Neighborhoods Partnership Network, here are some helpful links and hurricane preparedness information in case you need it:

City of New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness
The OEP website contains information on hurricane preparedness, disaster information, evacuation plans, and more.

NOLAReady: New Orleans Community Alert System
Sign up to receive instant alerts in the event of a local emergency.

2008 Hurricane Evacuation Guide
Updated
The official state evacuation guides, including contraflow maps, for Southeast and Southwest Louisiana, put together by the Louisiana State Police.

City-Assisted Evacuation Plan (.pdf)
Updated
Residents in need of evacuation assistance are urged to call 311 to register to for assistance, but registration is not required (see the list of locations where you can be picked up). Click the link for more information about the evacuation plan.

Gustav Storm Tracker

Gustav: Watching and Waiting

Gustav is coming – as New Orleans watches and waits for this tropic storm that could become a major hurricane. Forecasters project that it might hit the Gulf Coast sometime early next week.

Today, the storm's winds and rain is slamming Jamaica. According to CNN, hurricane experts place its possible landfall anywhere from Corpus Christi, Texas, eastward to Panama City, Florida, with Gustav being a Category 3 storm by Tuesday evening. Meanwhile, New Orleans are preparing for any possibility. Stay tuned – and pray.

Holy Cross Voices: Sarah DeBacher

Holy Cross resident Sarah DeBacher – who in June was finally able to move into the double shotgun she and her husband Simon had been restoring – has kept a wonderful, gritty blog since 2005. In "Katrina in New Orleans: My Life in Post-K New Orleans", she documents their lives as educators in the rebuilding city, her love for New Orleans and her dream realized of buying a home in the Holy Cross Neighborhood.

Today, she writes of the approaching tropical storm, Gustav, that could become a hurricane and hit the Louisiana coast almost exactly three years after Katrina:

"Yesterday morning I got up early. I walked along the levee, where dragonflies divebombed crazily, aiming at nothing in particular, it seemed, as though drunk on the heat.

Even before we moved to Holy Cross, I'd planned to take these morning walks on the levee. Having access to greenspace in our clustered-up city is such a rare thing, and the path along the Mississippi is just one block from our new home--a fact that made me giddy. I looked forward to morning walks on the levee. Yesterday, after Simon woke me, I contemplated staying in bed until eight, but contemplating and then giving myself permission to simply stay there is a problem of mine. So I forced myself out of bed and into the company of the Mississippi River and the dragonflies."

Read her full post, "The Crazy Before the Storm: Or, Go, Go GO!" here.

Jimmy Carter & Holy Cross at the DNC

Amazing. There they were: Mack McClendon, Nathlie Alexander, Pam Dashiell and many others – walking together through the Holy Cross Neighborhood with former President Jimmy Carter – all on the big screen at the Democratic National Convention and all on our TV sets last night. You couldn't have scripted it better. Truly amazing. Take a look at the video below.

Pam Dashiell: On Rebuilding, Environmental Justice, and Why We Need to Sustain the Nine

A terrific new piece came out today on the New Orleans Institute Web site, and featuring Holy Cross's very own Pam Dashiell. Read the full article here.