I have just arrived back from New Orleans, Louisiana, where I narrowly escaped Hurricane Ivan but when I phoned home every day to let my family know how I was, there had been no coverage in the media and nil from newspapers, including The Argus.
How could this be? New Orleans has a potentially disastrous casualty rate as 100,000 people there rely on public transport and it would be impossible to get all these people out of the city in such an emergency.
New Orleans was missed by Ivan by a whisper. Only Lake Ponchartrain had burst its banks and had flooded some homes up near the airport.
At the last moment, the hurricane swung to the right, also just missing Mobile, Alabama, but devastating everything north and east of that point, reaching right across to Pensacola on the Florida border.
On returning, I looked at the back-copies of The Argus covering that period but there was not a mention of Ivan. If it had hit the city, it would have been a disaster and the newspapers would have had to report it.
Perhaps it takes that sometimes to make it into the media.
-Del Doune, Lancing
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