Picking Up the Pieces

Well it's looking pretty certain that Hurricane Ike will give Louisiana a break, so everyone here is rapidly picking up the pieces and returning to business as usual. It's kind of depressing, actually. One bit of fallout from the storm is that three of our Fall races are now entirely up in the air, mainly because the municipal officials who need to give the "all-clear" are preoccupied with post-hurricane issues. The problem is that we're not getting any definitive answers (or in some cases we're not getting answers at all) as to when it might be possible to get the official Okee-Dokee on these races. Since it's already September, time's getting kind of short and by mid-October race turnout is going to get pretty sketchy as the training days grow shorter and riders start slacking off their training routines. If only we had a cyclocross season..... Anyway, it's kind of frustrating right now not knowing if or when the postponed races will happen.

This morning was warm and humid as usual, and we had a pretty standard group on hand for the long levee ride. It seemed that most of the guys were having a little trouble getting their motors started today, and so Mark G. and I kind of rode off the front for the first couple of miles, cruising along in the low 20s until the paceline finally came by. Although we may have gotten off to a slow start, the pace picked up nicely on the way out. Then, for some reason, the return ride seemed really inconsistent and jerky. The pace would go from 22 to 27 and then back to 22, and if you were anywhere near the back of the paceline you were constantly either closing a gap or coasting. I guess the little headwind may have had something to do with it, but I think that it was just that everyone wasn't on the same page today. Oh well. It happens.

Back at work I'm busy trying to collect updated data from the "Katrina Universities" to support our congressional efforts to get funds appropriated in next year's budget for the "Education Disaster Loan Program" that we got included as part of the Higher Ed. Reauthorization. That new "law" was a direct result of Katrina and creates a program through which universities can borrow funds for disaster recovery. Just to give an idea of the actual losses involved in Katrina, Tulane alone accumulated about $495 million in property damage (including stuff like restoration of library materials and lost research assets), and another $150M in other losses such as lost revenue and debt service on borrowed funds. Those are very big numbers, and UNO wasn't very far behind. Add the other nine affected universities and colleges in the area and you're looking at, conservatively, $1.2 Billion, and that's just the higher education piece of the puzzle. We're all making progress thanks to federal disaster relief funds from various sources and, for the private universities, insurance, but of course there's still a rather large gap.