You can probably guess that I don't live anywhere near Florida - and thank God for that! Frankly, watching coverage of hurricanes Bonnie, Charlie, Florence, and Ivan over the past few weeks has caused some flashbacks for me. My husband and I were living in Charleston when Hugo hit in September of 1989, and it was no fun at all.
I was 8 months pregnant at the time, and my husband was in the Navy. His duty during a hurricane warning was to go to work. Mine was to avoid giving birth during the storm in the next-door neighbor's bathtub. So, when I woke up on the morning of the 22nd (I think that's the day it hit) and heard that a school just down the road was to be our neighborhood's evacuation center, it occurred to me that it might make some sense to pack up the family pets and get out of Dodge. My husband thought so too - he preferred not to be distracted in the midst of dealing with all that weather by wondering if I were in labor somewhere.
The dog and cat and I took off for my brother-in-law's house just outside of Atlanta. Despite their lack of general amity, and despite the drive taking something like 7 hours, they sat side-by-side on the back seat of the car without making a sound the entire way. I suspect that they were extremely relieved to be leaving the area.
Well, we got a little rain out of Hugo in Atlanta, but not much else. I stayed up to watch what coverage I could find on TV, but it pretty much stopped when the power went out. From then until my husband found a working phone (late the next morning), I had no information at all. I heard later about the winds that basically broke the Charleston Port Services anemometer, and about the building being moved off its foundation by the wind (that was the event that caused my husband to grab a support pole so tightly that he bent his wedding ring into a 'D' shape), and all the other fun and games. I couldn't even go home for about 3 days, because I-26 was impassable.
A few pointers for those living in hurricane territory:
- Install your roof shingles with nails, not staples. Staples create a lovely line of weakened spots on the shingle, and act like the perforations in paper towels when the wind blows hard enough.
- Avoid ridge vents on your roof. They tear out in one single piece, leaving a rather large opening for the rain to come in.
- Blown-in insulation in the attic is infinitely more of a pain to clean up once it crashes through the ceiling of a bedroom than the kind in a roll would have been. We lost two bedroom ceilings after the rain came through the ridge vent opening and soaked the blown-in insulation.
- Sugar-sap pine trees have long tap roots, and in enough wind, just bend right over without being uprooted. This is of no use to a homeowner, because they can still poke holes in the roof without uprooting.
- You can cook nearly anything on a propane grill. As we emptied out the neighborhood freezers in the week and a half we were without power, we ate really well. Venison, red beans and rice, spaghetti, shrimp, all sorts of great stuff.
- A generator is not really intended to power anything that produces electric heat. Hair dryers and irons brought it to its knees every time.
- Cash comes in extremely handy in the first days after the storm. It's amazing how much is available for sale, but if there's no power or phones, they can't get approval for your credit card purchases, and the ATMs don't work.
To this day, our pantry is generally over-full of canned and dry goods. We just can't seem to shake that hurricane mentality.
For what it's worth, our daughter wasn't born for another month and a half - which allowed us to get the house back into livable condition just in time. The day we left for the hospital, I spent several hours taping and mudding one of those bedroom ceilings. It's amazing what you can do when you have to.
No comments:
Post a Comment