During the last week as Hurricane Gustav approached, I fretted over its effects on one of my charges, an offshore compressor station on a platform out in the Gulf. While I was at Houma yesterday taking care of the onshore office for that facility, I inquired as to how the platform fared.

It did great. The crew left one of the generators running when they evacuated ahead of Gustav, and when they finally got a helicopter back out there, the generator was still running, the lights and air conditioning was still on, and if those two items survived, then the rest of the platform is in good shape.

That’s a big change from Hurricane Lili’s effects where we had to run for the first few days on the emergency backup generator while we dried out the main generators, and wind and rain and salt spray had gotten into control cabinets and such.