A satellite image shows Hurricane Rita in the Gulf of Mexico south-west of Florida and heading towards Texas. Photograph: Getty Images
There's a sense of déjà vu in the US Gulf Coast today, with residents in the path of Hurricane Rita packing up their belongings under a mandatory evacuation order just weeks after New Orleans was inundated by Hurricane Katrina.
Blogger Liberty is moving out of his home in Galveston, expected to be one of the worst-hit areas: "They are predicting at 10ft surge tides, maybe more. Bad news ... My home is 9 1/2 ft above sea level." Galvestonite Lou Minatti sums up the feeling of Texans waiting for the storm to hit: "I feel like I am trapped in a car stalled on a railroad track, and in the distance I can hear the sound of an approaching freight train."
Of course, thanks to the internet you can not only hear the sound of that approaching train, but track its movements and download cool animations of it before it reaches you.
For the armchair stormchaser, the US government's National Hurricane Centre provides all the information you could desire. Some of the images will put your heart in your throat and there are updates on weather conditions and evacuation plans across affected areas, but the amount of information occasionally seems too much for the lay reader.
Stormtrack makes things much clearer, while Wikipedia does a good job of explaining how hurricanes work. The National Hurricane Centre is still the place to discover the difference between a category 3 and category 5 storm.
If you want to know what the next hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico will be called, the names are already booked out until 2010. The World Meteorological Organisation has a guide to the naming of cyclones and here you can find an explanation of why there'll never be another Hurricane Keith.
The University of Wisconsin has some predictions of Hurricane Rita's future path and more images of the cyclone hovering over the Gulf of Mexico.
There are records of fatal hurricanes dating all the way back to 1495, when a storm off the north coast of Hispaniola destroyed three of Columbus's ships on his second voyage to the West Indies.
The deadliest of all hurricanes is still reckoned to be the Great Hurricane of 1780, which swept through the British and French fleets in the Caribbean at the height of the American war of independence. From a devastated Barbados, British naval officer Sir George Rodney wrote: "The most beautiful island in the world has an appearance of a country laid waste by fire and sword, and appears to the imagination more dreadful than it is possible to find words to express."
A history of this and other early hurricane accounts can be found here, while the National Hurricane Centre has a rundown of the other most deadly hurricanes in recorded history.
Tom Kirkendall and blogHouston have more dispatches from Houstonians battening down the hatches as Rita approaches. And somehow it's reassuring that, amidst all these apocalyptic predictions, blogger Tory Gattis is concerning himself with planning policy as Rita bears down on his home city.
