Dianavan asked: Do you all have cellars?

Not in New Orleans, as a rule, since we're below sea level. Our house, like many around here, has a ground-level "basement," with the main first floor raised one full story above the slab. Because our house is one of the oldest in the area, our lot is a few inches lower than the street and the surrounding properties, and we get an inch of two of floodwater in our basement maybe about once every year or two. Not necessarily when there's a hurricane; we flood when rain comes down so fast that the pumping system can't keep up (3 inches per hour or more)

We don't generally get Great-Plains-type twisters that would require hiding underground. The recent "minor" storm Cindy was very unusual in that it seemed to spawn small local tornados, or at least isolated gusts of extremely high-speed winds. It came up suddenly, too, forming in the upper Gulf less than 24 hours offshore; it's more typical for storms to be identified way out in the ocean, a week or more before they approach the US coast.

RangerSteve, the storm whose remnants have already reached NJ has to be Cindy. Dennis is still out in the Gulf, and won't hit the mainland until Sunday night, plus or minus 8-12 hours. We don't know yet where it'll hit ~ mostly likely Pensacola, we're told, but these things are very unpredicatble.