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Trying To Reason With Hurricane Season – Part the Third

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Today is the first anniversary of the final U.S. landfall of Hurricane Katrina. I thought this would be the ideal day to post the final installment of my hurricane “memoirs.”

Read “Part the Second” of
Trying to Reason With Hurricane Season.

The Busiest Season Ever

2005 Hurricane Season Map

After the craziness of 2004’s hurricane season, I was determined to be more prepared for the 2005 season. I thought I’d have plenty of time to prepare. The first storm of 2004 didn’t form until July 31st. By comparison, the first named storm of 2005, Tropical Storm Arlene, formed on the 8th of June, just five days after the start of hurricane season. It turned out to be nothing more than a big wet thunderstorm, but that early activity was a sign of things to come.

Hurricane Cindy (originally thought to be a tropical storm but upgraded post-season) flooded the Causeway between Mobile and Baldwin counties in Alabama, restricting traffic along my route to work. Generally, the response was “big deal” as Cindy made landfall far enough west of Mobile to minimize the effects. After dealing with Hurricane Ivan, we were feeling like pro’s. No thunderstorm on steroids was going to keep us from business as usual. Mainly, we were too busy worrying about Hurricane Dennis to care much about Cindy.

The first big storm of the season, Hurricane Dennis formed on the Fourth of July off the coast of South America. Early on, the tracks for Dennis had it making landfall in the Appalachicola/Panama City area of the Florida Gulf Coast. As the storm strengthened, breaking records for early storm formation, the track steadily moved West until it seemed that it would take the same path Ivan had the year before. Since the generator I used after Ivan was still on the fritz, I called around and found a replacement on Thursday the 7th. By that afternoon, the storm’s track had it making landfall at Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. My wife’s company, pro-active as ever, planned to fly her and the rest of their all-volunteer Business Continuity Team to St. Louis to wait out the storm. Since she was being “called into active duty” she spent half a day Friday working around the house. I spent the day at work, the highlight of my day being the “show up unless you’re dead” speech that we get before every major storm. She (my wife) brought the hurricane panels up to the house from the storage shed so I could put them up the next day. She then drove to West Mobile and spent the night at her parents’ house so she wouldn’t have to worry about evacuation traffic the next morning on her way to the airport.

The remaining low pressure system left behind by Cindy was drawing Dennis like a magnet, and the track kept moving farther west. I didn’t have the same bad feeling I had with Ivan, so I treated Dennis like I would most storms: cautiously. I kept an eye on the weather reports, but I like to say that anyone who says they can predict where a hurricane is going is trying to sell something. They are notoriously fickle, and the image of hurricanes as indecisive and unpredictable would be reinforced as Dennis approached the Gulf Coast. I spent Friday night preparing for the worst, all the while hoping for the best. I started washing dishes and laundry and moving things inside or into storage. I’d already bought my canned food and other hurricane supplies. I had six 5-gallon jugs of gasoline in my storage shed and a full bottle of propane, so my greatest fear was actually a lightning strike! I checked in with my neighbors and found that only one family had heeded the evacuation, which at that time was still a recommendation.

Battened and Hunkered Down

batten (bat’-en)
verb: Nautical To furnish, fasten, or secure with battens: used with down as in “battened down the hatch during the storm.”
Middle English batent, from Old French bataunt (wooden strip) from present participle of batre, to beat.
hunker (hung’-ker)
verb: 1. To squat close to the ground; crouch. 2. To take shelter, settle in, or hide out. Usually used with down i.e. hunker down. 3. To hold stubbornly to a position. Usually used with down i.e. hunker down.
Perhaps of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse hokra, to crouch.

Saturday morning, the 9th of July, my dad came over and helped me board up the last unprotected window and a couple of doors. We also tied down several outbuildings with aircraft cable and stakes. When he left, I moved all of my freezer-safe food to our upright freezer and filled the refrigerator with water and Gatorade. I filled the washer with water and put a tarp in our spare bathtub so I could use it to store water. (Most people don’t think about the washing machine for storing water, but it’s easy to fill and when the power comes back on after the storm, you can turn it on and pump out any excess water.) People who are on city water systems take water for granted. Our only source of water is our electric well, and when the power goes off, so does the water. Only when the house is full of buckets, jugs and bottles of clean, fresh water do I feel truly prepared for a storm.

Next up was pet preparation. I like to go into a storm with clean cages and crates and clean litter boxes. When the power goes out, there’s little or no ventilation, so fresh air can be as important as fresh water.

Saturday afternoon, I was pulling my garden cart around the yard picking up stray limbs and anything else that might turn into a deadly missile at hurricane wind speeds. With little or no warning, an intense thunderstorm moving ahead of the storm hit our area and sent me running around the yard looking for cover while several tall trees in the neighborhood were hit repeatedly by lightning. Once I got back inside, and it started to get dark, there was nothing else left to do except sit and wait. With landfall scheduled for sometime Sunday afternoon, it would be a long wait. My “hurricane shelter,” the guest bathroom where I’d slept during Ivan, was outfitted with everything I thought I’d need in case of a direct hit: pillows, blankets, radio, miniature TV, Gameboy, books, snacks, cold drinks, hard hat, goggles, first aid kit, laptop computer, phone, tracking charts, antibacterial waterless hand soap, a cell phone, a camera, local phone books and a loaded .38 special (Looters beware!).

Rebel Without A Storm

I woke up at four in the morning to the phone ringing. It was a “reverse 911″ call from my county’s Emergency Management department. They were calling to let me know that I was going to die. Actually, what they said was that I was in an area which the governor had placed under a mandatory evacuation and that I should leave my home as soon as possible. As much as I like computers, I wasn’t going to listen to one at 4:00 A.M. I hung up and turned on the television to check the current track. They still had the storm hitting me, and they insisted that the storm would not make any last minute turns. Like I said, they’re selling something. The phone call had freaked me out a little. Since I was up, I walked the dogs for the first of six times that day. This is another lesson I learned from Ivan. Whenever the weather permits, the dogs go out whether they need to or not. You never know how long it will take for a hurricane to pass over, and cleaning dog crates is not something you want to be doing with no water and no power.

I got calls from several family members and friends, both the “boarded up and hunkered down” and the evacuees. We checked on each other throughout the day. Around noon, after making the last preparations and a couple of trips to our storage shed for supplies, I took what I thought would be my last hot shower for a while. I shut off the water supply to the house, for reasons only private well owners understand. Tired of the endless media coverage of the storm, I switched the television to my Playstation and played video games until the power went out at 12:30 PM and I ran around the house shutting down equipment and appliances.

I wasn’t the only one staying in violation of the evacuation order. My neighbors to the south had evacuated at the last minute for Ivan and the traffic problems scared them more than the storm did. The next-door neighbor raises horses for a living. In her words, she will evacuate “when a government truck pulls up to transport her horses.” As the morning progressed, the track moved more north and then east and away from my area. It seemed that as the hurricane moved north, it caused a low pressure system to develop inland that actually pulled it toward the coast faster than had been expected. Landfall was at 2:25 PM CDST around Navarre, Florida. The storm had weakened to a category 3 before it hit, so my brother-in-law’s house in Navarre was spared any serious damage. The wind died down around 4:00 and I ventured outside to survey the damage and to check out the engine noises at the end of my driveway. It was the local electrical co-op out fixing lines. I lost one tab off of one roofing shingle: the exact same amount of damage I had during hurricane Ivan. Some large limbs were down, but all in all it wasn’t anything I wasn’t prepared for. Power was only out for six hours and my wife flew back home Monday night.

Katrina and the Waves

We had a few weeks’ respite during which I cleaned up the debris and purchased more supplies. Like Dennis, the eleventh named storm of the season formed quickly and moved into the Gulf of Mexico where the warm waters fueled it and sent it spiraling North. Katrina had been a minimal hurricane when it crossed southern Florida on Thursday, the 25th of August, but when it moved into the Gulf of Mexico it rapidly strengthened. Once again I didn’t have that “bad feeling” that I had with Ivan. I’d started to trust that feeling, so I remained cautiously optimistic. A friend emailed me on the 26th to ask if I’d prepared for the storm. I told her I’m a member of that greatest nation – procrastination! I hadn’t gotten around to taking down my storm panels, and all of my hurricane supplies were still on the dining room table. I hadn’t even emptied my buckets of water.

While other people were scrambling for plywood to replace the plywood they’d thrown away after Ivan or Dennis, I topped off my gas containers and filled up all three of our vehicles. I had picked up a few sandbags, and I placed these against the front door to keep any rainwater out. My house is 170 feet above sea level and a half mile from the nearest river or creek, so I wasn’t worried about flood waters. I mainly wanted to keep the rainwater from running down the front yard and into the house. Darla’s company waited until Sunday to fly her team to St. Louis, so we had plenty of time to get ready. I even spent a few hours at work getting everything ready for the storm. For the first time in years, I was a spectator for a large but nearby hurricane, and it was a strange feeling. My home was on the outer edge of the storm, so the worst I got was tropical storm winds. My biggest problem was that both routes across Mobile Bay to where I work were flooded and closed. Since I couldn’t get to work, I spent the day watching the weather and trying to keep the animals calm. I had friends in New Orleans and family all along the Mississippi coast, and I hadn’t heard from many of them. I watched as the flood waters rose in downtown Mobile until it finally crested at 13.5 feet above sea level. The front door of my office building, by comparison, is just 15 feet above sea level.

Our power went off at 10 AM, but it was back on by 4:30 only to go out again at 6:40. Less than two hours later, crews were in my front yard turning the power back on. This was while the winds were still 30-40 knots. I took them snacks and sodas as a small gesture of thanks. The front yard was littered with leaves and pine straw, but I hadn’t lost any trees. Just a few limbs. As with Ivan and Dennis, I lost one tab off of a shingle. That was my only damage. Of course, everything west of me as far as the Texas/Louisiana line didn’t fare as well. I was shocked at the devastation along the Mississippi coast. I’d been to two of the casinos in Biloxi and Gulfport just two weeks earlier, and one of them was completely washed away. My brother-in-law was stationed at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, and I had heard through his wife that he was safe, but there wasn’t a single building on the base that wasn’t significantly damaged. Cars parked outside the bunker he’d slept in the night before had been damaged by flying rocks, bricks, lumber, etc. He told his wife that she shouldn’t even think of coming home for at least two weeks. Their house had escaped the flooding; it’s 28 feet above sea level, and the storm surge reached 27 feet. All of the waterfront houses downhill from his house were ruined. Some of them were washed completely off their foundations.On Tuesday, the 30th of August, the day after the storm made its fourth and final U.S. landfall, I was back to work. Of the two tunnels and one bridge crossing the Mobile River into Mobile, only the larger George Wallace tunnel was open. The older Bankhead Tunnel and the Cochran-Africatown bridge were closed; one because of flooding and the other due to damage caused by an oil rig that broke its moorings and drifted upstream with the storm surge and hit the bridge. The parking lot at work was thick with a horrible smelling black mud from the flood waters. There had been minimal damage, but the power was out. Our presses won’t run on our generators, and neither will the air conditioners, but nothing stops us from getting a newspaper out. We set up fans and worked by emergency lights and they provided us with some very fancy MRE’s. Two of our sister newspapers, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Gulfport’s Mississippi Press had been forced out of their offices by flooding. Our Tuesday paper was printed by the Birmingham News, and we resumed printing with our Wednesday edition, just two days after the storm. We had been printing the Mississippi Press for years, but after Katrina we started printing the Times-Picayune also. This meant that we were printing our own paper, the Baldwin County edition, the Mississippi Press and the Times-Picayune at the same time. Since the Mississippi Press team were displaced, every available room in our building was set up as temporary office. The power was back on by Tuesday night. Our biggest problem as a newspaper was that we had no carriers to deliver the papers we printed. Many had evacuated, and the ones who stayed found many of the roads impassable.

Will Work For Gasoline

The other major problem was gasoline. The closure of oil fields and refineries in Louisiana and Mississippi sent gasoline prices soaring and caused shortages all along the Gulf Coast and as far inland as Birmingham and Atlanta. I had three vehicles all with full tanks and several five gallon cans, so I decided to wait until there were no lines to buy gas. Rumors spread of hijackings of gas shipments. Some people were calling in and saying they couldn’t get to work, because they had run dry. When a local station got a shipment of gasoline, people would rush off to fill up, only to find that there was no gas. Two of our sales reps were threatened at gunpoint in line to buy gasoline, and locking gas caps were in high demand as old garden hoses were put to new use as “midnight credit cards.” When the shipments of gasoline finally did arrive, many gas stations started rationing gas, restricting purchases to no more than $50 per vehicle. One Atlanta station was selling Regular gasoline for $5.87 a gallon and here in the Mobile area, State Troopers and Sheriff’s deputies were overseeing the rationing of gas while lines stretched fifty to a hundred cars long. People started sleeping in their cars to avoid losing their place in line. I fenced off the front yard and let the horse out to eat the grass, rather than use the gasoline in the lawnmower.

For the first few days after the storm, we had brownouts at night. A representative of the power company was on the news saying that the saltwater blown in by the hurricane had deposited salt over the insulators on the power poles. At night, when the dew would settle on the insulators, the saltwater would cause the power to arc and short out the circuit until the water evaporated. This went on until all the salt had been washed away. As with Frederic, Elena, Erin, Opal and Ivan, the salt spray and the wind stripped the trees causing a kind of early autumn. Normally we don’t see the leaves fall in our area until much later, in October or November.

Because of the problems in Mobile, Darla ended up working in St. Louis for two weeks following Hurricane Katrina. When Hurricane Rita hit Louisiana and Texas later in September, she was spared another trip. Her company watched the storm carefully and decided not to activate her team.

The Bottom Line

Here along the Gulf Coast, you’re judged by which storm you’ve lived through. People who moved here after Frederic in 1979 were tourists as far as the rest of us were concerned. Now that we have Ivan and Katrina, another generation will grow up saying “I was here when…” and “You’ll never know until you’ve been through one like…” until the next major storm hits our area. In that sense, these storms really are like signposts along the roads of our lives. For people in the New Orleans area and along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, there is either pre-Katrina and after-Katrina or pre-Ivan and after-Ivan, just as there was for many years pre- and after-Camille and pre- and after-Frederic.

What’s changed in this new era of super storms? For one thing, nobody thinks I’m a nut for preparing the way I do. I get a nod of approval when I say that I have forty gallons of fresh water and forty gallons of gasoline stored away “just in case.” People don’t laugh when I say I have a closet full of hurricane supplies or a designated “safe room” in my home. If I say, “I planted a tree in my yard.” I’m more likely to be asked, “How tall will it get and will it fall on your house?” than “What kind?” From June until December, there’s always a part of my mind that’s keeping a running tally of what I’ve done and what I need to do for the next storm.

I still wouldn’t trade hurricanes for any other natural disaster. At least I have plenty of warning, unlike those in earthquake areas. I live on high ground, so I’m not likely to flood. We’ll never have to worry about being snowed in for weeks at a time. Tornadoes are a problem in our area, but they can hit almost anywhere. We don’t have wildfires or mudslides. All in all, most of us consider it the price we pay for living in a relative paradise. And who knows? It could be another twenty-five years before the bill comes due again. In the meantime, I’ll keep stocking the pantry with canned goods and bottled water and hoping for the best.

Click here to read more about the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season.

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