Forecasting the Storms of Entergy

Today I did something I haven't done in quite a while. I actually read a hard copy of a newspaper. We have some dear, old friends in town for a few days and we walked to Rue De La Course for coffee (photo) and to peruse the local rag and the NY Times.

In today's paper I found two stories that I found quite alarming. The first was to do with our storm forecasting capabilities in this country. Apparently we have a less than satisfactory means of predicting hurricanes. This is alarming. We need 400 million bucks to put a Quik-SCAT satelllite into orbit. I personally think this is money that would be totally justifiable. However its not going to be spent and on top of that the Feds are already $700,000 below what the funding should be for hurricane research in this country as it is.

Maybe its just me but surely the huge costs ensuing from Katrina would make hurricane awareness, prediction and evacuation a top priority in this country? But that's just little old naive moi!

The second article which made me mutter was an opinion piece about our lovely energy company in N'awlins, Entergy. Our bill was quite shocking last month and some friends of our had even worse ones ($500 - that's Cleveland winter prices - and a big apartment at that!!). So I read this article with interest. The conclusion particularly had my attention:

The Utility Committee is open to exploring any regulatory structure that will bring rates down. We welcome proposals from community groups.

But let's not repeat our past mistakes under some form of statewide regulation that dumps disproportionate costs onto New Orleans ratepayers.

I think I need to read the paper in hard copy more often.