As am I writing this, I should be at IAH waiting to board a connecting flight to New Orleans to work a race in Baton Rouge this weekend. This morning, the office of the Governor of Louisiana informed the race track that they HAD to cancel the event scheduled to be conducted there tomorrow and Sunday because the region was officially declared to be in a State of Emergency. The state government wants all highways in the area to be clear for evacuation of the population due to the possibility that hurricane Gustav will hit the region sometime early next week. This was to be a relatively small race in terms of the number of expected racers and spectators, yet the state insisted that it had to be canceled, even though current predictions show the storm (if it hits the region at all) won't make landfall until sometime Tuesday.

I can understand a desire to start early to formulate plans to evacuate an area in the face of an oncoming storm considering what happened with hurricane Katrina. I can also understand a desire to implement actual evacuations with a larger overall time frame -- I had a connecting flight at IAH the Thursday before hurricane Rita, and trying to evacuate the greater Houston area in one day was a traffic nightmare. But, I think the actions being taken now are premature. I didn't know that a state government had the ability to order the cancellation of any legal event conducted on private property in advance of weather predictions that show excellent weather in the area until two days after the completion of the event.

I'm not a happy camper. I'll be really PO'd if we don't see hundreds of school buses transporting low income evacuees out of the region this weekend. If that doesn't happen, I can only view this to be an attempt by the Government of the State of Louisiana to repair some of the political damage done to it by Katrina.