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A hurricane toothacheBy Susan Roesgen  Susan Roesgen is CNN's Gulf Coast correspondent and a long-time New Orleans resident. SPECIAL REPORT
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YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSNEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- For me, the start of hurricane season is like the start of a toothache. You're aware of it, but it hasn't really started to hurt. June is a lovely month in New Orleans. The azaleas and gardenias are still blooming, and it isn't unbearably hot, yet. I've never heard of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico in June, and it's also rare to get one in July. Last year was different. Hurricane Dennis hit Florida in July. That should have told us something. Normally, we don't start watching the TV weather in New Orleans until early August. We track hurricanes here, follow them when they're just a dust storm off the coast of Africa, watch them drift westward across our TV screens night after night, mesmerized, until they become spinning circles in the Gulf. Then, we play a new game. "Go to Florida. Go to Florida. Go to Florida," we say to the storm. "Stay east. Stay east." We all vacation in Florida, we all have friends in Florida. But every hurricane that forms in the Gulf we wish on Florida. Human nature, I guess. Let it go anywhere but here. This year I'm ready for anything. I don't have children or elderly parents, no one to worry about evacuating. My husband and I will board up our windows when a hurricane gets close, lock the door and head out with our rain gear. He's a photographer with The Associated Press. I'll tell him what I told him the day we went our separate ways to cover Katrina: See you on the other side. The day before Katrina, when I was still working for a local TV station, I persuaded my boss to let me stay behind when the rest of the newsroom evacuated to Baton Rouge, about 85 miles away. A cameraman let me borrow his gear and his SUV, and I set out to shoot video of the storm. I got help from two guys in the station's master control who bucked orders and stayed behind, driving around town with me and feeding out video until the station lost power. We slept on the station floor and ate peanut butter and crackers that had been left behind. I remember trying to drive home the day after the hurricane, desperate for a hot shower and a nap. I couldn't make it past the downed power lines and trees in my neighborhood. On the third day I couldn't drive anywhere because the station was surrounded by water. So I set out on foot for the Superdome, talking to people who were trapped there. Eventually, I joined the rest of my station's news crew in Baton Rouge, again sleeping on the floor of the station for a couple weeks before I was able to stay with a friend back in New Orleans whose home had power. My house didn't have power for a month, and I ran around like a lunatic, switching on every light the day the electricity finally came back on. Someone had kicked in the back door and ransacked the place but didn't empty the refrigerator, for which I would have been grateful. There were things in there that looked like an alien birth and smelled like one, too. But that was nothing compared to all the homes that were flooded. Clean up and keep working, that's all there is to do. This hurricane season I'll work from CNN's new Gulf Coast bureau in downtown New Orleans -- and this time I'll be better prepared and equipped. I think if New Orleans is hit again, squarely, and flooded again, the city will never recover. Less than half the people who lived here before Katrina have come back, and most of my friends say, "One more and we're gone, too." We'll see. Nothing we can do but wait. 
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