This most dreaded of all seasons begins June 1 and goes through December 1. Weeks ago, the National Hurricane Center or a department of the University of Colorado or someone came out with their forecasts for this year. The fact that their predictions for the past two years have been dramatic failures does not stop them from issuing a new sets of prognostications and the news programs and papers from reporting them. But no one I know pays much attention to them. There have to be better ways of predicting these storms.

As though they are finally getting the message, the hurricane “experts” are hard at work in search of more reliable indicators. We hear of attempts to measure the temperature of the ocean underneath tropical depressions and of robot airplanes which will be sent into the storms closer to the ground, something the weather service’s airplanes cannot do safely.

Such information would be no help in predicting the number and intensity of storms but could give us advance knowledge of what a storm already formed might do.

Are we safe? Is New Orleans protected from a storm? Has the relentless levee-building which the U. S. Corps of Engineers has been engaged in since Hurricane Katrina, nearly three years ago, produced stronger, more reliable levees?

Good question. The only sure answer is: we won’t know until a storm hits.

The Times-Picayune one day this week ran a front-page photo of water seeping through a levee into the dry side of the city. Not a very comforting image, but one the Corps said should not concern us. They’re running tests, they say, just to be sure.

Too many of us remember the story of the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike not to be unconcerned. Levees are not dikes, to be sure, but still….

Mayor C. Ray Nagin issued his “state of the city” report this week. To no one’s surprise, the population of the city is ballooning, the present administration is doing great work, and the city’s rebuilding is on schedule, headed in the right direction, and should encourage investors to get here quickly with their millions. Or at least, that’s what he said.

A staff member of one of our churches was in the audience for the speech. He told me, “At one point, the mayor looked up from the teleprompter and said, ‘Ten years from now, in the year 2012….'”

Then he caught his error and said something about how he needs to stick with his script.

Locals know that on the West Bank, you have two ways of crossing the Harvey Canal. You can drive over it on the West Bank Expressway, or you can take the Harvey Tunnel. Friday night, the tunnel was the wrong choice. A fellow driving a dump truck loaded with mud spilled the entire load, causing the cars entering the tunnel to lose control and slide forward into other cars and the walls. When the commotion ceased, 23 cars had crashed, 18 were sent to the hospital, and the truck driver was nowhere to be seen.

Police say motorists have provided leads as to the possible identity of the culprit. Incidentally, you know the call boxes stationed at regular intervals inside the tunnel? They weren’t working. Officials say the company that made those boxes no longer manufacturers parts for that model.

After the fiasco at Judge Seeber Bridge when an off-duty policeman was killed by driving off the raised drawbridge because nothing was working there, neither the lights nor the barrier, one wonders just what is working around here.

Do you like great obituaries? I have one.

Cornelius Washington, “wizard of the trash can,” died Monday of a heart attack and was buried today in Waterproof, Louisiana. Here’s his story.

At 16, Washington got into trouble and was sent to Angola for his role as a lookout in a shooting. Once he was released, he had trouble finding work until he signed on with a local garbage company. He became what is known as a “hopper,” the guy who rides on the back of the truck and hops off at each stop to toss the cans up. What Washington did, it seems, was turn that humble work into an art.

“With a full trash can in each arm, he would ‘pop’ both cans upside-down into the truck’s metal jaws, then set them back on the curb without losing his stride. From seemingly impossible distances, he would toss dozens of bags and boxes rapid-fire, landing them all in the back of the truck witout dropping a scrap of paper.”

Dorothy Taylor, who has driven garbage trucks in our city for 18 years said, “Cornelius was amazing. He could do things that I didn’t think people could do with garbage.” She added, “He would take one route and do it by himself. He was like two men in one. No machine could beat him.”

Then she said, “He was like a garbage sex symbol.”

Cornelius Washington once said of himself, “If they was to put a garbageman in the Guinness World Book of Records, I would be in there.”

The obituary says his legendary status is not based just on his showmanship. He knew where every handicapped and elderly resident lived and taught young hoppers to return the cans to the doors of those people. He taught them to warn the driver about street closings, children, drunks and careless bicycles.

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.” (Ecclesiastes 9:10)