So a bus carrying hurricane evacuees exploded this morning, killing 24 people. Clogging one of the exit highways, making traffic even more inert, and there are still thousands of cars at a standstill, waiting for the storm surge to sweep them away. Now God officially is majorly pissed off with us (or the Gulf Coast people, at least). I have a sinking feeling that more people are going to die in this one, probably mostly due to being in their cars when Rita hits. Think about it. If a brick building has a slim chance against a CAT 4 ‘cane, how’s your little Honda Accord gonna fare? Also, there is the new added threat of exploding buses, which is really just way over the top. A little too apocalyptic and doom-laden for my tastes. Seriously, enough people are probably going to eat it anyways without throwing giant flamey metal husks of doom into the equation:

This just goes to show that even advanced warning and massive evacuation can have its problems. Granted, the advanced warning really wasn’t all that advanced (Rita wasn’t even named until Monday, for crying out loud). Still. I bet most of the people evacuating have been spurred on by what happened in New Orleans, but the reason why that was so bad was because NO was a big bowl under sea water, kept from being filled in by unstrengthened levees. The people directly on the coast, Galveston and Texas City and such, really need to get out because of the storm surge, but the people further inland, like Houston, will probably be fine, apart from some flooding and definite power outages. At least, I hope. I am no weather expert, and even the actual weather experts seemed to have been confounded by this storm:

Haha. Wacky two-steppin’ hurricanes.