A Balcony View:

For the last few days, I had optimistically hoped the TV weather reports and Doppler radar were going to be wrong. I had turned a blind eye toward my leaky roof. I was even willing to pretend the mud sliding down the street wasn’t foreshadowing more ominous things on the horizon.

But on Tuesday morning, when Al Roker showed up to do the “Today Show” weather report from our neighborhood, I came to terms with reality.

Last week, he was covering the horrific events in Haiti. This morning, as I was getting ready to go to work, I saw Roker delivering the morning weather from just down the street. It seemed that even though I wanted to hope for the best, NBC had a different point of view.

The thought of Roker hanging around weighed on my mind. As I left for work, things weren’t yet catastrophic for me. Of course, many have already been affected, some worse than others. But to categorize our rain damage as anything near what is occurring simultaneously in Haiti would be a gross misrepresentation. I would hope that even those who have suffered most around here could agree.

As of this writing, I know the worst is yet to come — with another 7 inches of rain predicted in the next 48 hours and even more coming in the next few days. As my deadline to deliver this column approaches, it’s hard to think about, and harder still to write about, what could happen to our community in the coming days. Roker probably wishes he didn’t have to be covering it either.

It’s a strange feeling, knowing that something bad is on the horizon. That said, we ought to take some relative solace knowing that, unlike the victims in Haiti, we’ve had some time to prepare. We’ve been able to put up barricades and fill sand bags. We’ve been given a generous window of several hours to evacuate and find a place to literally ride out the storm.

That said, while all the preparation in the world won’t prevent some destruction and loss, it does make me wonder what the people of Haiti would have given to have even 20 minutes to prepare for the hand they were dealt.