What Would You Do During A Hurricane?

Food, Water, Ice ... Get in Line

 

FEMA?

 

I spoke with some who decided to "ride it out" in Gulfport Mississippi during Katrina. They said and I quote' I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE". Many who rode it out there did die. The problem with riding these things out is that you never know how high the storm surge will go or where exactly they will make landfall or how strong they will be by the time they come ashore.

I followed a rescue worker from Homestead Florida in to Gulfport and we both got out of our cars in front of a small firehouse there and he looked around and said " Looks like Home!" Homestead was hit by Andrew the year before Katrina hit the gulf.

 

When we were on fire evac alert two summers ago, people got real organized in a hurry or real stupid. The fire turned about 3 miles from town so we didn’t have to go, but the number of people who thought they could stay and fight a garden house was incredible. The police just asked them for the name of their dentists because had the fire come through they would need dental records to I’d the bodies. Our vehicles were filled and loaded. We knew our destination and had plans in case our vehicles got separated. We have fine tuned the plan in retrospect, but our neighbour maintains he could have kept it at bay. Nice guy but not too bright

 

I was raised in Beaumont. I am up on lake Livingston now. Rita was a real witch even up here and we were flooded with people from both Houston and Beaumont that did the smart thing and left the low lying areas. We lost power for a week or longer in a lot of places but Beaumont lost EVERYTHING for a while didn't they even shut off the water and gas? We left Beaumont in 1988.

The drought year was awful. Every morning I got up and checked to see where all was on fire around me. Thousands and thousands of acres burned. I had never lived through anything like that. Fortunately, the Forrest service has regular controlled burns and that slowed the spread through the huge tracts of national forests up here. Many of the forests on private lands had thick underbrush and burned to the ground.

 

Katrina was felt over a wide area, but Waveland, Mississippi was ground zero. Scroll down the page at this link, and you will agree. Mostly nothing was left standing.

(most of the images are of Waveland, but a few are of other areas)

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1...jAhXCZc0KHXPyCBoQsAR6BAgDEAE&biw=1186&bih=585

I spent more than half of my life successfully evading hurricanes but 2005 was a bad year for me! In spite of best-laid plans (Plans A, B, and C be damned...they all failed). Murphy's Law went into overdrive that week.

As a result, I was trapped among not-so-nice strangers twelve miles north of Waveland. (Some of you know a little of what-all happened there.) It would fill a book, and I got an up close and way too personal look at a widespread SHTF.

I had left the safety of my BOL and went down south to take care of family business for a few months, and to visit family and friends...and got caught by Katrina. That was in 2005, and here it is fourteen years later... I am still very much impressed, and still have a touch of PTSD that will likely last the rest of my life.

My uncle who lives in California joked that my magnificent crap-magnetism drew Katrina into the Gulf, and to NOT visit him or else San Diego will slide into the ocean, lol.



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As I said

As I said I've only evacuated once. Like the song says, "you gotta know when to holdem, know when to foldem, know when to walk away and know when to run". My mother was in the 1928 storm that hit Fl. Thank God we didn't lose any family. They had mass graves afterward. Our neighbor lost his father and a brother and had to swim when their house went. My grandmother tried to get my grandfather to leave but he wouldn't. They should have run from that one. I've only had one hit my area that I had any doubts about.....and I ran. There have been some, if they had been headed in my direction, that I would have been on the road....like Irma for instance. As I said you have to be prepared and use common sense.

 

I've ridden out a number of these too. However you never really know where it is going or which way it will turn at the last minute. The problem is if you think it is going to miss you and it turns to run right over you at the last minute then it is too late to run. Fuel is shut down, roads are already swamped, traffic already backed up for miles.

 

Katrina was a cat5. You don't ride out a cat5. You get the hell out of the way, as far away as you possibly can. I like storms. I enjoy cat1 and cat2 hurricanes. I don't fuck with cat5's.