SC's and Natural Disasters

Are you hoping to evacuate Houston to a strip club in a Cat 4 Hurricane?

I wouldn't call them disaters But when ATL gets it's once a year snow/ice storm the city shuts down. We are not prepared for it. No salt or sand. Just dirt. 18 wheelers turn over. Schools shut down. Mothers do not go to work at strip clubs. The airport cannot keep up with it and 90% of flights get cancelled. My company always puts up the critical employees at hotel within walking distance to the office. My last one was 2 years ago and it was a $200/night hotel.

Interesting. Strip clubs in New Orleans were among the 1st businesses to open. First responders and other workers needed some place to go.

One night, I drove into Brass Flamingo, Indy when a blanket of snow was just starting to fall.( Christy Canyon was featuring that night). Three hrs & several inches later, I left, with drive home taking much longer than usual.

Dudester- That 4" or so snowfall is fairly routine in Indy, I think Houston would freak out in any snowstorm.

SC- I concur on ATL. Got stuck there once in "snowstorm"- felt lucky to even get a hotel van to the hotel.

Well, being in South Florida, when anything of note hits, clubs are so far removed from my thoughts. I do recall, however, after andrew and I was back at work (about a month), we did visit clubs further north. There wasn't really much damage to clubs as most everyone was out of the real destruction zone.

Houston Dolls is not only close to work, but I have to pass it twice on my work rounds. With that said, I've noticed it stays open 365 days a year. Also, during Ike, Dolls was in a small pocket of the city that had 7/24 electricity (the rest of the city was in the dark for 2-4 weeks). Anyway,the staff there made money, hand over fist.

Shadowcat is right about nawlins. The SC's were open like three days after Katrina, and doing business.

"First responders and other workers needed some place to go."

No, they were simply trying to get the city back to "normal" for tourists...the actual residents be damned.

I imagine the bigger clubs in my area would stay open if they still had power and people were visiting. There have been bad ice storms that knocked out power to whole cities in years past. Trees down across roads, pitch black roads, ice, etc. keeps a lot of people home and not too many even think about visiting a strip club. I believe losing power will close down just about every strip club I've visited unless it's only a temporary outage. If it's just snow, yeah the strip clubs will likely still be open. However if they are even predicting snow or frozen precipitation that night, many people will stay home so the clubs may be almost dead or with vastly reduced crowds. I will stay home if I think the roads are going to be bad. I have an hour drive if the roads are good.

Interesting to hear that SCs were among the first to open in New Orleans after the disaster. I wonder if the disaster and their closings set them back in the ratings here on tuscl because no New Orleans club makes the top 100 list.

I was in New Orleans area shortly after Katrina and wanted to visit Visions after reading reviews on TUSCL. The club is located east of NO in an area devestated by the storm. I almost decided it would be pointless to exit the interstate after looking at the damage. All buildings in site were vacant, boarded up, closed or badly damaged. After driving two blocks through total destruction an oasis appeared on my left. The club was open with many cars in the parking lot and this was middle of the day. Guess the strip club industry is very resiliant to natural disasters.

snowtime,

Something you said above interested me. You state, "All buildings in site were vacant, boarded up, closed or badly damaged." I was wondering about the damage. Was it mostly roof damage or flooding damage? I am wondering about the result of a "3" vs. a "5" and major flooding vs. no major flooding.

Clubber: It is hard to describe the damage but basically the buildings are in tact. They were probably under water for several weeks and my guess is all homes and buildings on that side of NO were totally destroyed inside. The last time I went through there a few had been torn down and replaced with new structures. Most of the rest (90% by my count) remain empty and uninhabited. It looks like most of the residents have relocated and their previous homes remain in unusable condition. My comments are just based on driving by, some of our NO members could probably give you a better idea of the situation. By the way, as you drive in from Miss. the area of damage is on both sides of I-10 and continues for miles.

snowtime,

Thanks. You reinforce what I've heard about katrina. katrina was a Cat 3 hurricane, and as such would not do the damage they claimed, as opposed to the Cat 5 andrew's damage. With katrina, it was, in fact, government "levee" inaction and/or incompetence over the years that allowed the levee to break and flood the area.

"katrina was a Cat 3 hurricane, and as such would not do the damage they claimed, as opposed to the Cat 5 andrew's damage. With katrina, it was, in fact, government 'levee' inaction and/or incompetence over the years that allowed the levee to break and flood the area."

Hurricane Andrew was only re-classified as a Category 5 hurricane 12 years after it hit, and that was a very controversial decision to say the least. The re-analysis project concluded that Category 5 conditions on land occurred only in a small region of southern Dade (now Miami-Dade) County, specifically closer to the coast in Cutler Ridge. The remaining areas affected by Andrew's initial landfall in FL only experienced sustained Category 4 & 3 hurricane conditions.

Katrina was the deadliest U.S. hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane. Many have argued that Hurricane Katrina was the largest natural disaster in the history of the USA, since damage estimates were well in excess of $100 billion, eclipsing many times the damage that was wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The National Hurricane Center concluded that much of New Orleans experienced sustained winds of only Category 1 or 2 strength from Katrina. As for the flood protection system, surely there were many failures, but flooding is flooding. The idea that one can effectively protect a city like New Orleans, which is surrounded by water on three sides with a large part of it lying well below sea level, isn't exactly sane. Katrina wasn't even the absolute worst case hurricane scenario for New Orleans.

YAWN!

New Orleans damage, and water levels, and degree of rebuilding ...

It's all hit-or-miss. In my neighborhood, on a supposedly flat street, just three doors' difference from one end of the block to the other can make the difference between a house that received no appreciable damage, and a house that needed to be gutted.

In the neighborhood of Visions, very few things came back soon at all. Now, most of the "main" street is occupied, but just one block back, into the (formerly lower-class or low-end-of-the-middle-class) residential neighborhood, and you're only going to see one in about every six houses even being worked on. The other five are overgrown and have become derelict. Visions is in a light-industrial area, tho', so the rebuilding of residences is less likely to be thorough there.

PS -- of course, obviously, the strip-clubs re-opened early because there were a large number of single men with cash back in town. Construction / destruction workers, cops national guard units from elsewhere, linemen, etc. Goes almost without saying.

You may have heard that we're having one hell of a snowstorm here in the DC area. Basically the entire region has been shut down since late Friday afternoon and it's still snowing. Doubt any clubs will be open tonight, since most people can't even get out of their driveways.

Even after it stops snowing, it's probably going to take until mid-week for things to get back to normal. I imagine by V-Day weekend there will be some pretty desperate dancers out there. (rubs hands together with a sinister laugh)

Steve, I feel for you. I am glad I have retired from the air line industry. I am sure that DCA, IAD and BWI will be shut down for days.

As an aside about hurricane andrew for anyone uninformed, and I know there are, andrew was "upgraded" to Cat 5 for two basic reasons. 1) It destroyed the hurricane center, it's weather stations, and such. 2) By looking at the damage it was clearly seen that ONLY a Cat 5 could have caused the devastation.

I spent my time through andrew with two people that had survived the The Labor Day Hurricane of September 2, 1935, one of the other two Cat 5 hurricanes to make US landfall. Camille is the third. They said that andrew was worse, but I believe that was because the eye went over us during andrew, but much further south in '35.

I wanted to go out to the grand opening of Whispers Cabaret on friday but Columbus got hit pretty bad with snow. I heard the grand opening was still a success though.

"Even after it stops snowing, it's probably going to take until mid-week for things to get back to normal. I imagine by V-Day weekend there will be some pretty desperate dancers out there. (rubs hands together with a sinister laugh)"

I like the way you think!

"1) It destroyed the hurricane center, it's weather stations, and such."

It did NO such thing, liar.

"2) By looking at the damage it was clearly seen that ONLY a Cat 5 could have caused the devastation"

...12 years AFTER it had been cleaned up...LOL!

"I spent my time through andrew with two people that had survived the The Labor Day Hurricane of September 2, 1935, one of the other two Cat 5 hurricanes to make US landfall. Camille is the third. They said that andrew was worse"

...which means absolutely *nothing* of course, since this is, at best, anecdotal, non-scientific "evidence", period.

As of early 2007, the newer Enhanced Fujita Scale now tries to take into account differences in building codes which had previously made destruction seem "worse". Had any of the hurricanes that have been mentioned in this thread impacted the Northeast, where building codes are (in general) much more strict, the observed damage would have likely been less intense. That was one of the more controversial aspects of the re-classification of Hurricane Andrew.

YAWN!

Let me see here, hurricanes are measured by wind speed, IE:

CAT 1 74-95 mph
CAT 2 96-110 mph
CAT 3 111-130 mph
CAT 4 131-155 mp
CAT 5 greater than 155 mph

Now here is what happened at the station.

The National Hurricane Center, then located along U.S. 1 in Coral Gables, recorded a peak gust of 164 miles per hour (264 km/h) measured 130 feet (40 m) above the ground, just before 5 a.m. EDT, August 24. At 5:17 a.m. EDT, the anemometer was severely damaged and by 5:45 a.m. had been completely destroyed.

BTW, the equipment's spec's were Cat 5 survivability.

As I said it destroyed it. Now did I specifically say the anemometer was destroyed, no, but I did assume any thinking creature that knows hurricane wind speed is how they are measured and that if the measuring equipment is destroyed, then guess what, they do not know exactly how strong the winds were, so they used other means to determine.

If nothing else, this has proved once again that our village idiot is, in fact, NOT smarter than even a 1st grader, much less a 5th!

And to save time later...

YAWN!!

"BTW, the equipment's spec's were Cat 5 survivability."

No, they really weren't, and you've offered ZERO evidence of that, period. You simply do not know what the heck you're trying to talk about.

My goodness...in the midst of Hurricane Andrew, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) assessed its peak intensity as 150 mph (Cat 4), which was only upgraded a mere 5-15 mph to 155-165 mph in a post-analysis from over a DECADE later.

"As I said it destroyed it. Now did I specifically say the anemometer was destroyed, no"

...you said:
"It destroyed the hurricane center, it's weather stations, and such."

Was the NHC "destroyed"? Nope. How many people were injured or killed at NHC at the time? None. Were all of the weather stations in the region "destroyed"? Nope. Once again, you don't know what the heck that you are trying to talk about, moron.

During Andrew, the NHC (then located along US-1 in Coral Gables) recorded a peak gust of 164 mph measured 130 feet (or 40 meters, which is 30 meters ABOVE the international standard ground height for surface wind instruments) above the ground, just before 5 AM EDT on August 24th.

High SURFACE winds occurred in other locations across Southern FL, including peak gusts of 115 mph estimated at Miami International Airport & 132 mph recorded at Haulover Beach, FL. Just after Andrew's landfall, Homestead, FL was hit with winds of 150 mph. Data collected at the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Homestead, FL showed sustained winds of 145 mph. Those are ALL Cat 3 & 4 wind speeds BTW.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/1992andrew.html

The official records are just that...official, and they were changed more than a decade later to indicate that Hurricane Andrew was just barely a Cat 5. However, what clubber was trying to do far above (with yet another one of his idiotic, drive-by posts...with NO facts of course) was simple:

"katrina was a Cat 3 hurricane, and as such would not do the damage they claimed, as opposed to the Cat 5 andrew's damage. With katrina, it was, in fact, government 'levee' inaction and/or incompetence over the years that allowed the levee to break and flood the area."

Or, in other words, "I went through a 'much stronger storm' in FL than those whiners did up in New Orleans", which is pure bunk, period end of story.

Run along now old man...