Hurricanes prove nature still rules supreme

Sunday, September 04, 2005

COLUMN: John Christie

Hurricanes prove nature still rules supreme

Hurricanes: another good reason to live in Maine, not the sun coast.

Hurricanes are the hat trick of natural disasters. Pre-disaster anxiety; live-time horror; post-disaster misery.

With a hurricane you get about a week of build up. Television weather reports let you know when a tropical depression is forming thousands of miles away off the African coast, but you know depressions turn to storms turn to 'canes, and there's only one way they travel: east to west.

And once they get big, the only thing that will slow them down are a few small islands, the Florida peninsula or the Carolina coast. And it might not slow them down much: Witness Hurricane Katrina, which hit south Florida and then gained strength over the gulf and wiped out Gulfport, Miss., and New Orleans this week.

You might think the week's warning is a good thing and gives you a chance to get out. But the path of a hurricane can and does change as it heads toward landfall, and you might evacuate early only to find the place you evacuated to has suddenly become dead center. Still, when they tell you to leave, you should leave. "Riding it out" has often been a shortcut to an early grave.

And if you try to evacuate, it will be in the worst traffic tie-up of your life. Imagine sitting in a car in the humid Southeast listening to a radio report about the killer storm headed your way.

If you stay put, you might get lucky and only get the fringes of the storm, maybe loose a few trees and be scared while you cower in a closet listening to the wind howl.

But if you get a direct hit, you might be sitting in that closet, hear what everyone always call the sound of a locomotives and then -- rip! -- off peels your roof and suddenly there Is nothing between you and the hurricane. If you have children, hold on to them as tightly as you can. By the way, the family cat is probably long gone by now.

When the storm passes, the disaster just takes on another look. You'll be without electricity, possibly for days or weeks. The city's water and sewer system might not work and you can figure out for yourself what that means. There's no refrigeration, so your food goes bad. If anyone can make ice, it will cost $10 or $20 a bag -- and you'll have to get into a brawl with a mob just to buy one bag.

I know a little bit about hurricanes because I lived through Hurricane Andrew in 1992, a Category 5 storm that is still considered one of the worst in history.

I had lived in south Florida for nearly seven years and hadn't worried about hurricanes. Almost no one did because every time one would form in the Atlantic and head our way, it would later turn away and land in the Carolinas or the Caribbean. People got used to hurricane warnings as false alarms.

Andrew changed all that. My house was mostly spared, but friends who lived closer to Miami lived through stories like we're hearing now from Louisiana. One was a reporter who wrote about her experience for the newspaper. She and her family lived in a large home in an expensive neighborhood.

As Andrew passed over, with it 150 mph-plus gusts, she recalled: "We grabbed our children -- ages 5 and 1 -- and took refuge in a bathroom. We crouched on the floor, holding the door against the wind. ... Andrew burst through our French doors and peeled away our roof. ... Benjamin was so overwhelmed that putting his head under a pillow with his hands on his ears was not enough; I had to put my hands over his or he would panic and scream."

Perhaps you're not too sympathetic; perhaps you think she could have just left well before the storm got there. But her area wasn't predicted to be badly effected; she was suppose to be well south of the worst damage. But Andrew turned south at the last minute.

Hurricanes like Andrew and Katrina are reminders that despite the technological advances of our times -- where we can take pictures with our phones and carry our music collection in our pocket -- nature still rules supreme.

I wonder: After watching the real stories of Katrina, will reality TV seem trivial, contrived and pitiful?

John Christie is publisher of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel. He can be reached at jchristie@centralmaine.com.